I am very rarely persuaded to buy something by an advertisement - my cheapskate approach to life means that I buy mainly supermarket own brands - but I have occasionally been persuaded NOT to buy something by advertisements. There are a couple of such self-defeating campaigns running at the moment. One is for a web based price comparison site. The advertisements in this campaign feature a number of characters (real actors) in poorly drawn cartoon sets using cartoon props (for example an oversize cardboard cut-out of a TV remote control). The trouble with the adverts is that the characters featured all come over as congenital half-wits, the kind of people for whom the Jeremy Kyle or Trisha* shows would be too intellectual. The kind of people who think that those appearing on Jeremy Kyle or Trisha are the creme-de-la-creme of the intelligentsia. The overwhelming impression that the ads leave is only someone with the IQ of a tapeworm would consider using the product.
The other spectacularly backfiring ad misses the mark for entirely different reasons. There is a campaign running trying to persuade us of the benefits of switching to high-definition TV. Now leaving aside my well-known technophobe objections to being sold a "better" system that isn't actually any better, there is something rather remarkable about the ads. They take bits of popular films and digitally process them to give a sharper image and a bit of a 3D effect and then show this to persuade me that I should buy an HD set. When I've looked at them my first though has been, "That looks pretty neat" and my second thought has been, "Hang on, it looks neat on my old non-HD set so why exactly am I supposed to buy a new HD set?" Clearly a bit of a waste of money.
As an aside, and not my story at all, I made the observation about HD to someone I was drinking with the other night. He told me that a shop he had been in was running, side by side, the same item in HD and in non-HD as a marketing ploy. The HD did indeed, he said look better than his own TV at home (although possible because it was a bigger brighter screen). The non-HD was where they failed to sell him though. According to him it was fuzzy, in poor focus and generally of about the quality of a tenth generation video tape copy and hence nowhere near the normal standard of a normal TV. If there was any real advantage to buying HD, he concluded, they wouldn't have to doctor the non-HD version so blatantly to sell it. My inner technophobe rejoiced to find a kindred spirit.
*For Americans who may not be familiar with Jeremy Kyle or Trisha, think Jerry Springer but dumbed down. They both run programs with titles like "My boyfriend's transsexual uncle molested my poodle" or "My mother's secret lovechild stole my husband". And sadly those examples are nowhere near as bizarrely outrageous as real ones would have been but I couldn't bring myself to Google for them.
The other spectacularly backfiring ad misses the mark for entirely different reasons. There is a campaign running trying to persuade us of the benefits of switching to high-definition TV. Now leaving aside my well-known technophobe objections to being sold a "better" system that isn't actually any better, there is something rather remarkable about the ads. They take bits of popular films and digitally process them to give a sharper image and a bit of a 3D effect and then show this to persuade me that I should buy an HD set. When I've looked at them my first though has been, "That looks pretty neat" and my second thought has been, "Hang on, it looks neat on my old non-HD set so why exactly am I supposed to buy a new HD set?" Clearly a bit of a waste of money.
As an aside, and not my story at all, I made the observation about HD to someone I was drinking with the other night. He told me that a shop he had been in was running, side by side, the same item in HD and in non-HD as a marketing ploy. The HD did indeed, he said look better than his own TV at home (although possible because it was a bigger brighter screen). The non-HD was where they failed to sell him though. According to him it was fuzzy, in poor focus and generally of about the quality of a tenth generation video tape copy and hence nowhere near the normal standard of a normal TV. If there was any real advantage to buying HD, he concluded, they wouldn't have to doctor the non-HD version so blatantly to sell it. My inner technophobe rejoiced to find a kindred spirit.
*For Americans who may not be familiar with Jeremy Kyle or Trisha, think Jerry Springer but dumbed down. They both run programs with titles like "My boyfriend's transsexual uncle molested my poodle" or "My mother's secret lovechild stole my husband". And sadly those examples are nowhere near as bizarrely outrageous as real ones would have been but I couldn't bring myself to Google for them.
2 comments:
Seriously? Dumber than Jerry Springer? The mind boggles.
Have you guys gotten/seen the Mac/PC commercials? http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/
The Wikipedia article on the subject quotes Judge Alan Berg who described The Jeremy Kyle Show as trash which existed to "titillate bored members of the public with nothing better to do" and said "the purpose of this show is to affect a morbid and depressing display of dysfunctional people whose lives are in turmoil"
Actually quite similar to Jerry Springer, but with a lower budget.
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