Adiocracy

First, let me say that I hold no agenda against soft drinks. But I do have an agenda against mindless drivel. This fall, I came across these two outdoor ads in the space of a few blocks.

How the agency thought these to be clever communications, and how Coke approved them would make for an interesting study in advertising myopia.

But getting back on point, this is a solid example of the thoughtless communications that muck up our streets and our brains. My good guess is that these were not actually meant to be read — more half-absorbed as you scurry by a bus shelter or subway entrance. The strategy being that they might seem sort of logical sound when half acknowledged.

It’s my only interpretaton of the strategic discipline at misplay here. One of the first rules I give my ad students in Killer Work is ‘make a pun, go to jail’. But these are worse. I can’t construct a syllogism where ambition = drinking soda. And in what world (besides being stranded in the desert) would a Coke be your most valuable liquid asset?!

A refreshingly honest communication might be to mash up TARP with the prevailing wisdom on childhood obesity, substituting ‘toxic asset’ for ‘liquid asset’. But now I sound like I have an agenda. Which I don’t:

This one I shot with what looks like the negative filter effect on. Not intentional.

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Perhaps one of the most horribly hilarious direct TV ads EVER! Welltabs will make millions. We just hope this ad doesn’t scam too many of the desperate before it gets pulled by the FTC and indictments are handed out. Watch it now because my good guess is the Youtube link will not be available in a few months.

Could there be a more perfect sounding SNL parody name than Welltabs with ‘positive mood technology’?!  Brilliant! Welltabs work well whether you’re a paranoid schizophrenic or just feeling down because you were fired and your spouse left you. If you worry about money, health, if you don’t sleep well, if you’re scared, exhausted, or if life has simply turned against you, these little puppies are game changers. Take a bunch and you’ll feel more confident, more relaxed, stronger, healthier and happier. They’ll even help you look better.

The Welltabs miracle has trumped the entire pharma industry! (Not that we put much faith in them either — look what’s going on with cancer drugs shortage these days). The first time I saw this, I waited and waited  for the punchline, as it teased cliche after cliche like a disciplined comedian. This is an absolutely brilliantly, cringingly, awful gem. I’ll spare whoever was responsible by not drudging up credits (or should I say,  police lineup):

There were two disastrous problems with Chrysler’s saccharin ‘Imported From Detroit’ spot. The first is, it forgot what it was about. The second was Eminem.

Set aside the inflated self-importance and working class hyperbole. And set aside the grandiose, heroic tone of The Voice, which one would normally associate with a retelling of the grand ideals on which our nation was founded or the human toll of the invasion of Normandy.

The Voice begins with a fine enough question: ‘What does Detroit know about luxury?” We’d be interested to know about that. But then it spends the next two minutes struggling to answer, getting lost in random thoughts and babbling on about things like ‘hard work and know how’ and how ‘the hottest fires make the hottest steel’. Finally, like a confused, drunken Uncle who barely remembers what he’s been talking about, it just gives up with a… ‘Well, more than most.’  Huumph!

This is embarrassing enough. But then comes one last senseless statement: ‘When it comes to luxury, it’s as much about where it’s from as who it’s for.’ Forget whether we agree with that or not (which we don’t). These cars are made in a town that, to quote him, ‘has been to hell and back.’

Then comes the final nonsequitor. Eminem gets out of a car and, as if entering a different commercial, says, ‘This is the motor city and this is what we do’ — without telling tells us what that is. Eminem has loads of cred, but luxury cred isn’t one of them.

Take a good listen, and have a laugh. Then we’ll get to the real unfortunate disaster:

Unfortunately for Chrysler, Super Bowl viewers just saw an animated Eminen in a Brisk Ice Tea spot proclaiming, ‘I get asked to do commercials all the time… Once I try their product I always hate it!’

The real cred question isn’t about how many endorsements celebs can make simultaneously and still give the illusion that they give a damn. Eminem could have done a Brisk spot, a Doritos spot and a Bud spot in the same Super Bowl and it would’ve been fine. But there’s a huge difference between buying a celeb for entertainment and choosing an individual to represent a core value of a brand.

Chrysler made the critical mistake of thinking ‘beverage’ was a non-competing category. We imagine that if they hadn’t already seen it, this spot made a few Chrysler execs poop their shorts.

Agree or disagree? Let us know.

Adiocracy is cooked up for copywriters, art directors, advertising students everywhere and for those who just dig pop culture.

We don’t care what the hell USA Today’s bogus poll says, this year the Super Bowl Male Idiocy Award, otherwise known here as the Bud Light Award, goes to 3 advertisers that chose to connect their brands to dumb guys doing dumber things: Teleflora, Pepsi Max and Doritos.

An informal poll of Adiocratites felt the reason for this continued trend is that Super Bowl advertisers are working harder and harder to pander to the over 48 million female viewers (to put in perspective that’s more women than the entire Academy Award viewing audience).

We imagined advertisers and their agencies projecting women high-fiving at the bar across their hapless boyfriends and husbands who either could only sheepishly admit the truth or futiley object with a ‘but that’s not me!’

We’ll admit that until a guy’s testicles hang like curing sacks of mozzarella, sex is pretty much a driver for everything. But except for drunk-out-of-their-skulls-frat-guys, men have pretty much learned that there’s a smarter approach, especially with women we’re already dating or married to.

So here are the top ‘dumb guys doing dumber things’ ads meant to appeal to the unsophisticated women who think these communications really nail us to the wall and the few still-clueless ‘that’s soo true, dude’ male souls left in our gender polite culture.

1) In the Teleflora ad called ‘Help Me Faith’, the dumb guy needs to write a card to accompany the Valentine’s Day flowers he’s sending his girlfriend. When she tells him to write something from the heart, he comes up with ‘Dear Kim, your rack is unreal.’

2 & 3) All the Pepsi Max spots were truly Bud Light spots like from the 90′s. But two were particularly ‘dumb guy’ spots. The ‘First Date’ spot where all the guy is thinking about is ‘I wanna sleep with her, I wanna sleep with her…’ Now this part is pretty much right on and we’ll admit that the woman here is equally petty. So far, so cool. The really mindless part is when the waiter puts down the Pepsi Max and the guy’s Pavlovian response is ‘I want a Pepsi Max, I want a Pepsi Max’. Until that point, dumb, but realistic. Then totally dumber.

The other is the Pepsi Max spot called ‘Love Hurts’ which shows that men love to do all kinds of things that are bad for us like eat crap and look at sexy women, no matter how our smarter halves try to reform us (high fives across the bar, ladies!)

4) And, despite all the viewer-created-content cheering for Doritos, and fact that this spot was chosen as the USA Today poll favorite, nothing dumber than the guy taunting his girlfriend’s pug with Doritos from behind a glass door. Especially when she warns him not to hurt her dog. Even the most clueless guy knows that Lesson 101 is: Do not EVER do anything that makes fun of or taunts the animals the woman you dig loves. And then, that feisty little pug sure showed him!

Agree or disagree? Let us know.

Adiocracy is cooked up for copywriters, art directors, advertising students everywhere and for those who just dig pop culture.

McKinney put up this Twerrible Towel website as a Steeler’s Countdown to the Super Bowl. It’s a live feed consisting of a laptop which displays your tweet. Wires lead to a repurposed little fan motor with a model hand holding a yellow towel. As the site explains, the towel spins once every time you tweet the hashtag #steelersnation.

That’s all it does. It does it all! The apotheosis of digital technology!

For those torn between which solid working class citizens’ team to root for, the connection made here is as good a reason as any to root yellow and black, even with their quarterback.

Here’s the technology behind the feat:

We thank AgencySpy for bringing this to our attention.

For those of you freelance creatives and ad students looking to get in on a potential high profile pitch, see Victors and Spoils new open brief for WD-40. For those in my Killer Work class at SVA who worked on WD-40, here’s a chance to develop your ideas with an actual deadline and see what you can do. Good luck!

We weren’t going to comment on the LeBron James Nike stink-pile-of-an-ad because, well, it was just too frickin’ offensive.

But then we saw the South Park parody and rejoiced, and it motivated us to join in on the turd-throwing at the tone deaf thinking behind Nike’s LeBron screw-you ad.

But first we want to toast Matt Stone and Trey Parker for this brilliant mashup of LeBron and BP former CEO Tony Hayward.

…. ‘What should I do? Should I admit that I was wrong, ask for forgiveness and go back to my original team? No, screw that! I’m just gonna keep on being a dick!’

WHAM! Nailed it.

Exactly what are we meant to feel for LeBron in his Nike ad? He asks ‘What should I do?’ and our response is, ‘why the f*ck are you asking us? And what will you do if we tell you?’ We know the answer: Nothing. The insincerity is painful.

If that weren’t enough, LeBron proceeds to mock basketball fans (“Shoud I read you a soulful poem?”), and then he shows his contempt for them (“Should I be who you want me to be?”) We’re not going to include the creative team credits on this one, because we suspect they already have their tails between their legs. Somehow they managed to create a spot where each successive word out of LeBron’s mouth makes him more and more of a dick. LeBron even mocks Charles Barkley with his sarcastic, “I am not a role model”.

Whatever. LeBron wants it his way, and then he wants it to be ‘okay’,  just like any selfish child. We get his POV. But what’s Nike’s angle? We have no idea. Do they support his behavior (we’re not referring to the decision, but all the misguided hype around it)? Are they simply holding up a mirror to his solipsism? Or maybe Nike is so devilishly smart, that they actually got LeBron to admit he’s an asshole without even realizing it?! We don’t know. And we have no idea what they’re attempting to say to their consumers.

This is one of the most tone deaf ads we’ve seen in a loooong time. It made us cringe, for both of them. And we suspect it’ll be one of those things that’ll curl LeBron’s toes if he’s ever made to watch it years from now. Then again, maybe not.

Luckily, the minds behind South Park have given us some perspective on all this, by redirecting this narcissistic pile of crap toward the equally banal blundering of BP and Tony Hayward, who, for the record, has no regrets.

In case you’re one of the few who haven’t seen it, here’s the Nike/LeBron foul-smelling thing:

At first we loved these videos and the YouTube channel theme created by agency Cutwater SF about rebuilding trust with your friends who you’re gonna screw when you play Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood multiplayer vid game — we love Rob Corddry’s sanctimoniousness in everything he does (Children’s Hospital kills!) and these vids are under-played and very funny.

But hanging around the ACB channel and reading the threads, it’s clear that the humor here is lost on its gameplayer audience because:  1) They don’t get the connection between Roman assassins and fey friend therapy; and  2) They just don’t give a shit.

What they do give a shit about is game function. In fact, it looks like the Corddry videos are watched only a tiny fraction of the Q&A vids hosted by the games’ ComDev dude UbiGabe, because he’s talking about the stuff they DO care about: ‘How many assassins will I be able to recruit?’ ‘Will I be able to carry more than one concealed weapon?’ ‘Will ACB be released with an official game guide like AC2′?

In the comment thread, the only reference to the campaign was: “GET RID OF THE GAY THEME!” We asked gamers what they thought about the videos and were mostly ignored. Those who did respond said stuff like the therapy theme was making them lose their ‘jiz’ over AC.

We’re not the target, but we applaud this effort, because if you don’t try, ya never know. However, we suspect Ubisoft and agency are learning quickly and that this campaign theme won’t be around for long.

Writer: Derek Szynal. AD: Devin Gillespie. Chuck McBride is da boss. And we’re mentioning Chuck Willis from The Cutting Room as editor just cause we dig him.

We can see how, on paper, the idea of a show-between-the-show for its iconic brands might have gotten Unliver excited. The big risk is, it must be executed with genius. By this we mean, it must use its insider-ness to give viewers a funny or poignant insight by pulling back the curtain in a way that an ad agency can do — because they’re true insiders — that a show runner cannot.

Otherwise you run the risk of being a poorly written and painfully executed parody.

Unfortunately for both Unilever and Mindshare, this Dove ad was nothing more than an updated version of 2 c’s in a K. A dull slice of ‘Mad Men life’ missing any kind of brilliant insider wink, or freshly minted irony.

In fact, both agency and brand missed the big opportunity here, because they lost sight of the deliciously simple, larger picture. In the message breaks for a series that is a peephole into how advertising got such an awful reputation, there has also been an attempt to celebrate the creative side — the artistic, uhm, less manipulative side of the biz — by holding up a simple mirror to it, as BMW did in this season’s premier with the Martin Puris’s BMW interstitial. It gave viewers an authentic glimpse behind the curtain.

We couldn’t have said it any better than ‘Steve of Westmont, IL’ who commented in the Ad Age Madison and Vine article on the effort:

“The ad was obvious…and very poor. Why try to recreate a show that is already on the air? You cannot elevate ad actors to the level of the show actors in a 30 sec spot… trying to recreate an ad agency environment to sell a product during an award winning show on the same topic is ridiculous.”

Well said, Steve of Westmont.

This is a great on-the-ground effort by UNICEF for its Tap project. 2 billion people lack access to clean water. A staggering statistic that is, unfortunately, completely unemotional.

It’s not the vastness of the number that resonates. It’s the effect it has on each one of those individuals. UNICEF’s Dirty Water vending machine with its eight disease flavors is the difference between a gimmick and a bring-it-on-home illustration.

It’s also a great example of how a local live event — appears to have been launched with a single event in NYC’s Union Square (right across from a Whole Foods!) — can generate great earned PR and viral buzz while sidestepping traditional media. The final button on the promo video is a little too Sasha Baron Cohen in its fun-making of unsuspecting individuals, but we forgive, because both the idea and execution are smart as hell.