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.

If you want to cringe, and we mean curl-your-toes cringe, watch this ad for ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’ by Mindshare media’s Mindshare Entertainment, if you haven’t already seen it. This is jaw-droppingly awful. It actually makes Brett Ratner’s recent spot for Atlantis resort seem sophisticated.

Somehow the agency and client approved this horrific thing, then convinced Mullally’s agent that her career could handle singing the butter substitute’s strategy to ‘Turn The Beat Around’. These are some of the actual lyrics (seriously):

Fresh butter taste (…something garbled that rhymes with ‘no transfats here’),
No hydrogentated oils, so there’s not transfats here,
Turn the tub around, talkin’ ’bout nutrition,
Turn come see what we found, it’s what you’ve been wishin’!

Somewhere right now, Megan is probably burying her head under a pillow. We certainly hope that she used some of this ‘dance with the devil’ money to do something nice for the world.

Watch for yourself. But we warn you, this is not for the sqeamish…