Everything Wrong with Advertising and Society is Evident in This Miami Herald Article

FERGUS THE JUSTIFIER

7 years ago

So today as I was sharpening my favourite broadsword and reading Flipboard, this interesting article flipped into my feed. By “interesting” I mean “annoying.” The story is all about the 15th anniversary of a semi-famous and half-remembered advertisement for Coors Light beer.

So I thought this was the perfect opportunity to launch a new feature here on WOT:

One of the interesting side effects of fighting Terrible across time and space is experiencing many different historical periods and assuming many different identities. One of my recent identities worked at an advertising agency. For over ten years I actively helped create some truly Terrible broadcast commercials.

Of course, there were a few decent commercials here and there, a few I was actually proud to work on and one or two legitimately creative and outstanding spots that were actually brilliant and entertaining – even moving.

Those kinds of ads were few and far between, however. Very few and extremely far between.

This article by the Miami Herald dredged up a huge case of PTSD as I recalled douchebag creative directors, horrid agency “creatives” and incompetent account people. What’s funny is that while the article is ostensibly celebrating this monumental achievement in advertising, reading between the lines reveals (almost) everything that is disgusting, wrong and pathetic with the advertising industry.

Please read on after clicking this ad!

66% of Advertising “Creatives” are Creatively Bankrupt, Desperate Thieves

The article describes the heroic and inspiring creative process of two ad agency guys – Aaron Evanson and John Godsey – who in the fall of 2001 came up with a “beer and boobs” concept for Coors Light that would – unsurprisingly – go on to be an incredibly successful campaign. How did they come up with this great success? What incredible artistic revelations and creative mental gymnastics led to this “golden egg” concept? They ripped off an old song and changed the lyrics.

I am right now throwing up in my own mouth. There is no lower form of “creativity” than just ripping off some song and changing the lyrics to suit a brand or product. A five year old can do this. “Jingle bells/Batman Smells.”

I don’t know how many spots I had to work on that pulled this sh*t. Pathetic, insulting and just gobsmacking. I would imagine the person who first pitched this type of “idea” never for a second thought it would fly. He or she was undoubtably pissing their pants fully expecting to be laughed out of the boardroom. They were no doubt under the gun and bereft of any decent ideas that week. I’m sure these two guys in the article were equally desperate.

The sad truth is that when it comes to advertising, it’s rarely the most creative people that rise to the top – it’s the people who come up with the quickest ideas that are just passable enough to work. Which is sort of disgraceful, given the amounts of money clients fork over to ad agencies. The fact that this campaign was successful doesn’t change how lame and uncreative the idea is. I would argue that any campaign that featured football fans and boobies would be a raging success.

In the end, the client doesn’t care, nor do the fans. But I do. I think it sucks. If they’re not lazily changing the lyrics of songs then they’re just ripping off scenes from TV shows or movies.

“I got this idea from American Pie!” Genius.

“I got this idea from Jerry Maguire!” Stupendous!

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but nah, when an ad blatantly steals some movie or pop culture reference, it’s not an “homage” or a loving “tribute” – it’s just flagrantly ripping sh*t off because they have no other ideas.

I’ve seen “creatives” so desperate for ideas that they literally just type up whatever happens to be popular on the internet at the time (y’know, unicorn rainbow memes etc). Ad people are constantly rifling through the internet on a daily basis looking for sh*t to steal. There have been many articles lately detailing some of the more egregious examples.

Here’s a good one.

Whenever I would think “Wow, this is actually a really cool idea for a commercial,” nine times out of ten I would discover later that the idea was just blatantly stolen. This was rare, though. Most of the time I would be hip enough to recognize the thievery straight away and just be disgusted from the get go.

Gah! They don’t even try to hide it. Nay, they are proud of their plagiarism because they know it will work for their client and that’s all that matters to them. Segue to:

They Are Also Shameless and Ridiculously Self-Deluded

What’s truly astounding is that these two hacks exhibit no shame whatsoever at having simply ripped off an old song. They both see nothing wrong with their “concept.” No, on the contrary, they see their creative bankruptcy as a stroke of genius. The ad was a frenzied stroke of something, alright.

Unfortunately, the ad was a stroke of success, but not of creativity and not of quality and certainly not of genius. Probably because they know that the stupid song is just a pretence for flashing some hot chicks on the screen for thirty seconds.

Time and time again I witnessed this particular form of witless self-delusion – “creatives” so in love with themselves and their “genius” that shame just isn’t something that ever enters their minds. No matter how lame and derivative their idea, the concept gets produced anyway because the clients are clueless and nothing better is ever brought to the table.

The biggest douchebags I have ever encountered in my life all happened to be agency “creatives.” Nasty, vile and completely unworthy of respect, these troll-people end up becoming the wretched and arrogant gollums of the business. Not all creatives are douche bags – I ain’t sayin’ that. As a general rule, the less talent they have, the nastier they are. And due to the massive amounts of money being spent, they get to act like real filmmakers and strut around like pampered rock stars. Sad!

People Who Work in Advertising are of Two Types

Work in advertising long enough and you realize there are basically two types of people who enter the industry: those that get funnelled into it reluctantly or accidentally as a way of paying the bills while they work towards some other ambition – and those that gleefully flock to get in as soon as they possibly can. Of course there are many shades of grey in between, but these “greys” are a minority.

The article describes how the dudes freaked when SNL ended up parodying the ad (although SNL actually chose to come up with a real idea, unlike the ad guys) and quotes Evanson with the following illuminating reflection about his life goals:

“I just started shaking,” Evanson said. “I was freaking out. I was like, ‘Woah, woah, woah. What’s happening?’ I was trying to wake my wife up without waking our baby up, and I was like, ‘You’ve got to get up and watch this.’ I’ve really only ever had two life goals. SNL or ‘The Simpsons.'”

You’ll notice he didn’t say “advertising executive.” Not many people who work in advertising actually want to work in advertising. I worked with many ad people who were completely self-aware and cognizant of how immoral and soulless advertising can be. Behind the scenes, these people were usually working on short films, a novel or trying to fill up a demo reel to audition for the Daily Show – anything to free them from the soul-crushing hell of working on toilet-bowl cleaner ads.

The ad industry is largely populated with failed filmmakers – which just makes things ever more depressing. The money’s good, though, and that’s the trap. I was warned at film school – working in the commercial ad world is basically like surrendering to the dark side: once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

I sometimes felt like I was in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. When you found someone who also secretly found advertising cronies repulsive, you clung to them like a life preserver. They’d help keep you sane. One female producer friend of mine actually kept me from murdering a vile and obnoxious account guy at four am once.

Even self-aware people can still be total dicks, but I would say the ratio is like three in ten. Unlike the other type, which is more like nine point five in ten.

This “other type” of agency person is well and truly terrifying. These are the people who f**king LOVE advertising and embrace every obscene perk, slimy douchebag sales tactic and empty accolade with unbridled enthusiasm and joy. These pod-people literally have no souls and would market cigarettes to kittens if it would make money and get them ahead. They LOVE selling and hawking shit and see absolutely no difference between genuine art and what they do. These idiots live their lives believing they are celebrity rock stars and only discover this is self-delusion when they crash and flame out on drugs and/or alcoholism. Maybe not even then.

You really have to watch these people closely and be ready for them to turn on you. DO NOT forget their spicy tuna roll in their free sushi lunch order or you will suffer their indignant wrath. DO NOT comment on their frequent “sniffing” during a session. NEVER suggest or imply their ideas are anything less than God-given genius. They are like Trump in that they are easily threatened and toddler-like in their anger management skills. These “people” have zero humility and are arrogant as f**k. Total douche-bags.

Advertising People are Usually Ignorant of Anything Other Than Advertising

In my experience, most advertising types are ignorant and ambivalent about the outside world, afflicted with the worst sort of tunnel-vision when it comes to how they live their lives. They only like hanging out with other ad people and love nothing else but advertising.

I knew one guy who went to Cannes on the company’s dime and aside from an awards ceremony or two, basically stayed in his hotel room the entire time watching tv. Just zero interest in anything that didn’t directly relate to his getting ahead in the ad game.

So these people may read lots of books about art direction, fonts and marketing – and they probably watch Mad Men over and over again while dipping their toes into pop culture just long enough to look for ideas to steal – but that’s about the extent of their worldly knowledge. Look no farther than this quote for proof:

“They had these two women who named it the most misogynistic ad of the year,” Godsey said. “I was like, ‘Really?’ I had to look up what misogynistic meant.”

No surprise there. An adult American male whose career involves manipulating people and who works in one of the last bastions of “old-boy” culture doesn’t know what a word critical of sexist male behaviour means. Huh. Crazy.

“It’s a man cave of a love song,” Godsey said. “So that’s kind of how it was. It was in no way meant to be misogynistic. That was the furthest thing from mind. It was just, ‘What would be funny?’

Um. You just said you didn’t even know what being “misogynistic” means. So obviously that was far from your mind.

“We had so many wives and girlfriends, when they found out we did it, almost thank us for it because we made fun of their spouse and boyfriend.”

Ahahahah! “Almost.” Jes*s. Yeah, that’s a great line, except you’ve admitted that the ad wasn’t meant to be ironic, just “funny.” In other words, what you two cretins thought was genuinely funny. Some women “almost” thanked you for it? By “almost” you mean some women probably feigned a bit of “trying desperately to be complimentary” small talk at a party in order to avoid social awkwardness.

You ever see that scene in Seinfeld where he tries to impress two women by telling them he works on a sitcom? Their reactions would be even worse if he had said “I wrote that ‘Twins’ ad.” What an oblivious twit.

It was if a guy loved these things and he sang about them and he was kind of a meathead, you know?”

All I can say is “wow.” Just…wow. Hind-sight rationalization and self-delusion are just such amazing things to behold. Look, don’t try to retro-actively take credit for championing some sort of ironic feminist statement. That’s another thing that really sucks about advertising – the default stereotype that all “guys are just dumb ‘meathead’ simpletons.” I mean, it is largely true of a huge swath of the American population, but it’s not 100% true. Which leads us to:

People are Morons

People will forever love, champion and celebrate lowest common denominator advertising and mediocrity, no matter how limp and wilted the idea

“Men are simple creatures. All we did was tap into that,” Evanson said.

Well, he ain’t wrong. Like I said, this is unfortunately true for a large chunk of the North American population. Clearly. And this is who advertisers target, forcing the rest of us to suffer.

Most ads are so lame and so obnoxious and so opportunistically crass that having to sit through them over and over should be classified as a war crime. This is how they torture terrorists! All we ask of an ad is that it not piss us off. That’s it. Is that so much to ask? Apparently it is.

The majority of advertising will always, always be atrocious crap. Because of deadlines. Because of volume. Because of needing to fill huge media buys. Because of un-creative people who are given free reign to produce abhorrent dreck by a dazed and half-asleep populace.

The ad industry gets away with their f**king crimes against humanity because most people are undiscerning assh*les who have been trained to laugh at anything that features a tit. Utter shyte like this f**king Coors Light ad is not ridiculed and berated in this society; it is championed and beloved by millions.

Because people are morons.

I really should just end this here, but I gotta say, the perfect example of our “sheeple” society just blindly accepting bullsh*t advertising enemas is the state of the “pre-show” experience in movie theatres. We now have to sit through endless amounts of advertising – which is pure profit for theatre chains – before we get to a watch a movie that we have already paid a ridiculous admission price to see. We are paying to be advertised to. I have witnessed – with my own eyes – people in movie theatres laughing and cheering for ads that made me wanna puke for being so brutally idiotic and/or derivatively unfunny. They think it’s part of the experience! Sad!

I remember when they first introduced ads before trailers. It started with just one ad. There was certainly a bit of vocal outrage…at first. Then people just sort of got beaten down and herded into silence. Then ads got placed into the “pre-show.” The pre-show is like nicotine and cigarettes – just a delivery device for ads in disguise. Those stupid trivia games they use work, though. Millennials love anything to do with a smart phone.

Millennials just f**king love ads before movies! So those twenty to thirty minutes of ads you have to sit through now? That’s on us. God, how I wish I could be one of those people who actually sit there munching on their popcorn with a big silly grin on their faces as those ads unspool one after the other forever.

I save my popcorn for when the movie actually begins and sit there with my eyes shut praying for the ability to fast forward time.

Anyway, the intent of this new feature is to rate advertisements. So here ya go.

Coors Light – “Here’s to Football” (“Twins”)

USA

2001-2002

Length: :30

Grade: BARF

As always, WOT refuses to end on a negative! Please enjoy the following examples of truly amazing and inspiring ad creative…and dream of a better world.