How Not to Advertise

Being a person with a 37 hour work week, I have a lot of free time. This tends to lead to a lot of television watching, video gaming and reading. The particular joys of reading and gaming are the distinct lack of commercials. Thank goodness nobody’s figured out some way to "interrupt a video game for these messages" yet or I might be forced into hermitage.

Don’t get me wrong, I like television. I even enjoy some ads. There are plenty of clever, amusing and just plain awesome commercials out there. Obviously, the recent Old Spice commercials fall into all three categories. Unfortunately, some places just don’t seem to understand, if you’re annoying the crap out of your viewers, that’s not a very effective advertising strategy.

Example the first: Using small children to sell adult products. There’s a fantastic commercial from France for condoms. It’s thirty seconds of a little kid screaming and having a temper tantrum in the middle of a grocery store. It ends with a message on the screen warning viewers about the consequences of unprotected sex, and recommends these condoms. It’s brilliant, funny, and just off the wall enough to be interesting without being stupid. This is one of the only situations in which a child can be used to sell adult products.

Things that shouldn’t be shilled by kids? Cars. Children cannot drive. They have no money, no care for safety, no real power over adults, and obviously many have no taste (see: Justin Beiber, Zhuzhu Pets and the children’s menus at most restaurants.) Why, then, has there suddenly been a string of commercials with annoying little smart-ass kids talking about how awesome this car or that car is? Little nerdy children in sweater vest and bowties, talking about being on time for work and loving the cargo space make me want to do the opposite of buying a car, whatever that may be. (Crashing a car? Burning a car? Crashing a burning car?) Smarmy little jerks talking about how dumb their parents are and how they finally listened to their little brat and bought such-and-such car does not seem to me to be the best system for getting customers. I can imagine the board meeting now, "Hey, I have an idea how to get people to buy our gas-guzzling, too-big-to-fit-in-the-garage nightmare of an SUV! Let’s get some rotten little kid to insult our entire customer base and suggest they’re dumber than a 5^th grader!" "That’s a great idea Jim! Now let’s go shoot heroin into our eyeballs!"

So, to any advertisers reading this: Cut that shit out. If I wanted to be told what to do by a rotten little kid I’d be working as a nanny.

Till next time, this is me, signing out.