Our Glory beats Mourning Madison’s Messages

I do a bit of advertising copywriting, though I’m certainly no legacy; Dad was an accomplished ad-man and I grew up around the business.

Though I’m unencumbered by formal schooling in the field, but it seems logical that when you advertise something, your audience should know what it is you’re selling. We’ve got that pretty well nailed down here in Saipan; I’ve never seen an ad or commercial that left me wondering, “what the heck are they talking about?” Some ads, in fact, are pretty creative. My personal favorite is the Morning Glory television ad, which is obviously shot on a very low budget but is effectively designed; it features a pretty model who radiates charm and manages to make the mundane world of office supplies look appealing.

The big budget boys on Madison Avenue, however, are getting esoteric and downright confusing. The MTV-esque spots on CNBC–ads aimed at executives and business types–leave me scratching my head.

One ad (for General Electric airplane engines) features Welsh folks reciting poems about the magic of, er, General Electric airplane engines. Views are shown of the countryside and of an engine repair facility. I can’t figure out the point of the ad. Is it that I should put off buying a new refrigerator, and instead buy a high-bypass turbofan jet engine because nice people in Wales will send me poems? Well, the poems in the ad stink. How on earth lousy poems are supposed to sell million dollar engines to civilians like me is a mystery; wouldn’t GE be better off targeting legitimate sales information to airline executives?

Not to be outdone, another blue chip, Big Blue itself, is out to confuse me. One ad features a sock (yes, sock) store manager whose shipper messed up and shipped clocks (Oh! Rhymes with “socks,” I get it!) instead. We’re then told–at the end of the spot–that IBM can prevent such problems. In the first place, the ad is so utterly inane, I doubt that three percent of the viewers stick with it to the sales pitch at the end. Those that do are obviously retards. And, retard that I am, I still can’t figure out how IBM is going to prevent some moron in a warehouse from shipping out the wrong stuff. Are you supposed to take his brain out and install a
P-266 processor in his head? Are you supposed to buy some kind of software? Hire an IBM consultant? I’ve got no idea.

Near the top of advertising black list has to come sports utility vehicle (SUV) ads. They never tell me anything about the vehicle. The entire theme is “hey, I’m a boring yuppie with a boring office job, my life sucks, my wife is a troll, but my credit rating is good, so I’ll buy this four wheel drive and I’ll become Indiana Jones.” No, slick, you won’t become Indiana Jones. Life will still suck. Your wife will still be a shrew. And you’ll just be a pathetic yuppie in new truck. And here’s the rub: The trucks may, indeed, have their merits, but they never bother to describe them in legitimate terms. From the crime of omission to the crime of commission: The sickening pitch to yuppies is so repulsive that the ads have conditioned me to hate those darned SUV’s.

Believe me, Saipan’s Morning Glory lady and a local video crew on a two hundred dollar budget could deliver better ads for GE, IBM, and Ford then the dingbats on Madison Avenue are producing.