Oft evil will shall evil mar
Speaking as a recovered marketing type, there's only one thing I don't understand about the latest Belvedere Vodka outrage. Which is, why is it unexpected?
Advertising is an industry heavily populated by frat boys: adolescents past their prime. One is expected to get into the business right out of college. By the time one has reached an age at which common sense should predominate over hormones, one is either president of an agency or forced out of the business. This is age bigotry at its most refined.
Another thing that's just like frat boys: apparently, Nobody created the ad.
You know, one of the evil spirits from The Family Circus: Ida Know, Notme, and Nobody. It's understandable when little kids won't take responsibility for their actions, but not so much for theoretical adults in their 20s and early 30s.
If this were a single aberration, perhaps we could buy it, but Belvedere advertising has been in a death spiral for months, nearly a year. One hopes that with sick rape humour they've hit bottom, but of course there's still rape and murder to explore.
It strikes me there's a conflict here. On the one hand there's a mammalian response, the idea that anything that gets attention must be good. This runs the gamut of species: cat behaviourists explain why your kitties keep scratching the sofa by saying that if you yell at them, you're rewarding them. On the human end, there's the publicists' trope that "there's no such thing as bad publicity."
There is, however, such a thing as bad advertising. As I recall it was Jerry Della Femina who said that the sole purpose of advertising was to get consumers to try a product once. Advertising that gets caught up in its own jejeune cleverness and forgets to sell is by definition bad advertising. Every goddam thing done for Belvedere Vodka in the past year has been bad advertising. This is what you get when you let the children run the nursery.
I'm not much of a hard liquor drinker, I admit, but at this moment, I would sooner drink cat piss than Belvedere Vodka. If a product is trying so desperately to get my attention, I'd conclude there isn't much difference.
Advertising is an industry heavily populated by frat boys: adolescents past their prime. One is expected to get into the business right out of college. By the time one has reached an age at which common sense should predominate over hormones, one is either president of an agency or forced out of the business. This is age bigotry at its most refined.
Another thing that's just like frat boys: apparently, Nobody created the ad.
You know, one of the evil spirits from The Family Circus: Ida Know, Notme, and Nobody. It's understandable when little kids won't take responsibility for their actions, but not so much for theoretical adults in their 20s and early 30s.
If this were a single aberration, perhaps we could buy it, but Belvedere advertising has been in a death spiral for months, nearly a year. One hopes that with sick rape humour they've hit bottom, but of course there's still rape and murder to explore.
It strikes me there's a conflict here. On the one hand there's a mammalian response, the idea that anything that gets attention must be good. This runs the gamut of species: cat behaviourists explain why your kitties keep scratching the sofa by saying that if you yell at them, you're rewarding them. On the human end, there's the publicists' trope that "there's no such thing as bad publicity."
There is, however, such a thing as bad advertising. As I recall it was Jerry Della Femina who said that the sole purpose of advertising was to get consumers to try a product once. Advertising that gets caught up in its own jejeune cleverness and forgets to sell is by definition bad advertising. Every goddam thing done for Belvedere Vodka in the past year has been bad advertising. This is what you get when you let the children run the nursery.
I'm not much of a hard liquor drinker, I admit, but at this moment, I would sooner drink cat piss than Belvedere Vodka. If a product is trying so desperately to get my attention, I'd conclude there isn't much difference.
Labels: advertising, age bias, age bigotry, Belvedere Vodka
posted by Uncle | 23:33
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home