Adiocracy

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.

We’re not saying ‘The Man Who Walked Around The World’ is not a great piece of video by BBH/London. And we’re not saying it’s not a smooth piece of choreography. And we’re not saying Robert Carlyle isn’t a natural born story-teller. And we’re not saying we didn’t stay and listen to the entire history of Johnny Walker. We’re just wondering why it won ‘Best of Show’ at this year’s One Show?

Perhaps we’re wondering this because the history of JW and their Walking Guy character is just not that interesting. And perhaps we’re wondering because knowing the history of JW doesn’t really do anything for us to reframe either the scotch or the company. Not that it wasn’t a sweet piece of logistics, but from what we understand, Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ (Wieden+Kennedy) was just as much of a production miracle to make (with most transitions happening in-camera). First time we saw that, we wanted to see it again and again. And that spot only won Best TV :30. Maybe it should have taken ‘Best Of’ as well.

The Superbowl got awfully confusing there at the end of the 1st quarter and into the 2nd with a flurry of ads that seemed so similar we wondered whether it was a zeitgeist or dumb coincidence. Adiocracy kept guessing Dockers (DraftFCB) on ads that turned out to be for Dodge (Weiden & Kennedy) and Dove body wash for guys (Ogilvy) and had to do shots as punishment.

All three ads showed men trying to claim, reclaim or deal with their subjugated man-ness.

Check these ads out again and tell us if you think they reflect a new era of same-ness not unlike where beer found itself a few years back when every brand was competing to own the ‘stupid man’ territory (which now Bud LIght claims alone).

And then, just when we thought we’d figured out who was wearing the pants, CareerBuilder.com threw this one at us, and we switched from beer to whiskey.

It’s an ongoing nightmare in the ad biz. Agency and client work hard to find a position and an expression of that position that will set them apart. The campaign goes out and… low and behold, another campaign is out there looking just like yours. It happens more often than you might think.

Here’s an example of two companies — one a mobile phone manufacturer, one a web portal (advertising its mobile phone app) — who both came to ‘You’ at the same time. Of course, ‘You’ is not that unique (ie, Time mag cover, etc.) and neither is the position that something has been designed with you in mind (ie, every car company). But it’s a little deflating to a brand and agency when their campaign shows up on backlit kiosks next to each other claiming the exact same territory.

We love a good repositioning. And we’re always rooting for a brand attempting to wrestle a challenged image. But this campaign for Dockers feels like a humorless cross between Canadian Club’s 70′s dad campaign (commented here in Nov 08) and the oddly anachronistic choice of (Dockers parent) Levi’s ‘Go Forth’ campaign which employs the now naively earnest-sounding turn of the (last) century gems of Walt Whitman.

But at least the CC campaign applies an ironic wink. And at least the Levi’s campaign goes for an over-the-top mock heroic quality (we say ‘mock’ because we’re pretty sure not even Levi’s or agency Weiden & Kennedy truly believe it mirrors the qualities of their next generation consumer).

The Dockers campaign, however, is so embarassingly over-processed and overly earnest in asserting its manifesto of old-fashioned assumptions. And, amazingly, it is done without even a shred of humor, which would certainly have helped it along. Sadly, it gives off a vibe of being written by a bunch of ‘Men of A Certain Age’, trying hard to reimagine a new youth.

But what if the brand commits to sticking with the position over the long haul, has the sensitivity to fine-tune it into something authentic, and the discipline to develop it at every interesting touch point? We don’t think Dockers will ever launder away its ‘dad’s Saturday evening casual pant’ image (nor should it). But maybe it can become the casual party pant for the guy who goes for the bourbon instead of the light beer.

End note: ‘Pant’ which we used twice in the above sentence has been deemed by Esquire as a word no man should use. But, this is coming from an institution that features articles on how to purchase the perfect third pair of dress shoes.

We’ve held off logging in on this, because everybody’s been having their fun with The Shack. But also out of respect. We’ve been going to Radio Shack since forever, not that we ever end up buying anything, but it’s a great place to waste time — especially those strange back aisles filled with connectors and coaxil cables and oddball customers always trying to share how they’ve been able to jigger free cable upgrades.

Also, we appreciated how in their last campaign Radio Shack showed us how to get close-ups of Bambi by frankensteining a bunch of different stuff together.

But, we keep getting bombarded with this buddy buddy name thing, and its really starting to bug us. Every damn Sunday, more and more cutesy slogans from The Shack fall out of our paper.

So we started asking around. And despite what agency Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners claim, we can’t find any DNA reason to support going all colloquial and familiar on us. We haven’t found a single person who ever called it ‘The Shack’. And though the agency maintains it’s an employee inner circle term, none of the employees at our local Radio Shack, ever use it. Or at least, the don’t admit to using it.

So now, The Shack is supposed to be more like a friend. Problem is, no matter how un-adlike and casual Butler Shine makes the commercials, Radio Shack is just not important enough in most peoples’ lives to earn the familiar. (We could see, however, calling The Shake Shack ‘The Shack’.)

You’d have thought agency and client would have learned a lesson from Pizza Hut when it tried to become The Hut, as in the cool place where everyone comes to hang.

But so goes the myopia of most brands. It’s hard for them not to see themselves as the center of their universe.

We only have your best interests at heart, Radio Shack. We say, embrace who you are and stop pretending to be our pal. It just feels way too Anthony Michael Hall-ish.

In this long copy ad for IBM’s business analytics systems, IBM claims that our planet is getting smarter. This assumption is based on observing the sheer glut of data we generate  everyday. 43,000 gigs of it. Yes technically, ‘Waiting in line at pharmacy and am sooo bored’ tweets and ‘Kittens Inspired by Kittens’ parody videos are data. But there’s a huge difference between the rasher of digital effluvia we produce every day and real information.

Not that there isn’t vast amounts of data out there to be analyzed, patterns to be recognized, trends to be identified. (And our overwhelming love for kittens probably does say something meaningful about us.)

But more information doesn’t = more smarts. It’s a little more complicated than that. And, there are those who maintain that the time we expend creating and consuming all this digi-garbage actually makes us less smart, because it leaves us less time to do the kinds of thinking that makes smart things happen. A company working in the precise field of anayltics ought to offer up something more compelling than this sort of Simpleton Equation.

Back in February, we were appalled by the Cattlemen’s Beef and Board and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’beef as land-mass’ campaign. But we recently came across this sweet meat scene which caught the eye of our salivary glands (yes, they have eyes).

It reminds us of places in the Pacific Northwest where mountains drop off to delicious licks of white sands, and chunky off-shore islands appear tantalizingly close enough to swim to. And we found ourselves being aroused by this ad — both its geography as well as its ‘mouth feel’. So, assuming agency and client have learned enough to stay away from the glumps of thickener and rivers of bubbing fat in the future, we withdraw our original objections.

Copenhagen makes an odd visual choice here for their smokeless tobacco. If the idea is supposed to be that smokeless tobacco delivers the nicotine where cigs can’t, than firefighters certainly make for a more heroic illustration than guys at a carwash.

But if chaw’s main reason for being is you get the nicotine buzz without the smoke, then why would you feature a profession where a primary on-the-job hazard is smoke inhalation? Seems like an ironic choice to us.

That’s our take. What’s yours?