Adiocracy

Try to find the Navy Seals in this ad:

Good luck. Cause you won’t. We had an art director blow this up digitally down to the dot and she couldn’t find a single Navy Seal or Navy Seal part. Bad move by the Navy on a number of counts.

For this ad to be effective for, say, a guy flipping through a mag waiting for a haircut, its gotta capture his imagination. This guy, say he’s pretty smart, but he’s been laid off twice in the last five months. Had the economy been going okay, he’d never in a million years consider the armed forces, not with what its been stuck doing these past six years. But now he’s a bit more predisposed. Maybe. So, he bites and plays the ‘Where’s Waldo’ thing, seeing how long it’ll take to make out a camouflaged limb or a mud-covered forehead. And as he does, he’s thinking that maybe if he had the skills to hang out here barely noticed, while not being skeezed out by the snakes, maybe that could be cool. Certainly a helluva lot more impressive on his resume than Assistant Dept. Manager at Office Depot, which just shut down and is the reason he’s even bothering to look at the ad in the first place.

But wait. He can’t find ANY faces or bodies. Looks like they just took a photo of a swamp. No Seals at all. Not cool.

The idea isn’t bad, but the execution was a strategic mistake and a plain dumb decision. Even if technically there are Navy Seals in this photo hidden behind a tree or completely submerged underwater, so what?! We could get the same shot with a bunch of fifth graders. ‘Okay kids, on three everyone hide like we practiced. Johnny behind the tree, Amie and Tom go under the water and hold your breath and count to 20.’

In our opinion, the U.S. Navy loses out on authenticity and honesty and a chance to actually get their ad passed around. ‘Hey, try to find the five Navy Seals in this ad. They’re there, I promise.’ If that was the case their audience would be ready for the next ad, maybe in the dessert this time. They’d take time with the ad and search for the dudes. And they’d probably even remember Navy Seals. Cool.

That’s our take. What’s yours?

This goes out to the husbands. You may think you’re that one self-actualized rube who would never end up in the marital doghouse. If so, you’re probably the kind of guy that surely will. The truth of it all is condensed down into this brilliantly funny web video by Saatchi & Saatchi, NY which gets it so painfully right. It’s the equivalent of absorbing every marriage self-help book for husbands ever created. In under 5 minutes. And even though it sags in a few places, it never loses its way. Husbands take notes. Wives, take solace.

These slightly vintage ads from Pioneer and TBWA/Chiat/Day for a line of TV’s called Kuro, are so visually freaky and so filled with confusing (and ominous) promises, one of us swears they gave her the nightsweats.

Leading with the line ‘seeing and hearing like never before’ they take a mash-up of the senses approach, collaging human body parts onto places where they don’t belong. The result is as disturbing as can be.

Our guess is that this ‘unexpected visual approach’ is supposed to make us re-think the old ways we watch and listen to TV. But the problem is immediately apparent in the lack of thought that went into the cliché’d promise in the copy: ‘Go beyond sight. Go beyond sound.’ That’s a tough premise to back up, for sure. What the hell is beyond sight? X-ray sight? No sight? And what’s beyond sound? The vacuum of space? The copy continues with, ‘Enter a world where you look with fresh eyes and listen with new ears.’ How does that work? Are they offering a trade-in on the eyes and ears I’ve already got? The copy completes with, ‘A world where you don’t just see, you feel. You don’t just hear. You touch. You don’t just watch, you truly and fully experience.’

Years ago, the industry toyed with Smell-evision which never worked out. Today, Disney invests millions in 3-D sensory theaters at their theme parks that spray audiences with mists of water when the character on screen sneezes and emit an odor into the room when the dog on screen farts. This is impressive and it’s what comes to mind most when we’re promised a viewing experience that goes beyond hearing and watching.

But, even the aliens-among-us images don’t begin to help us understand how the Kuro might enable us to touch and feel television. If that was possible, we’d love it! And it’d probably be just the shot in the arm that the weary after-hours porn on cable biz could use.

Dudes and their bikes, bein’ real. You know, showers are for pussies and so is oral hygiene, that kinda thing. The ad says this product is ‘perfectly engineered’ for guys, especially for dudes like these doin’ a no-women-allowed-cept-the-ones-we-pick up-on-the-road-road trip somewhere thru the great myth of the American West. Guess this product and you’re either brilliantly counter-intuitive or you (or your agency) did it.  Go ahead, post your best shot.

Product revealed on Thursday or as soon as someone guesses right!