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.

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.