Proof That The Ad Community Really Is Backwards. Or Are They Just Physical Jerks?

If you're going to use a technique in a TV ad you should have a good reason for it. It strengthens the concept, it is the concept, it makes the commercial more understandable...

Two commercials (or one TV campaign and one stand-alone commercial) demonstrate what happens when technique-for-the-sake-of-technique is foisted on a public saturated with irrelevant advertising puffery. Worse, the commercials, which I'll name in a moment, don't even use a modern, fresh technique. They trot out a tired old cliché from the 1950s or earlier.

The campaign is the series of ads which flight every holiday season from Engen. It features a basic plot line of tracing events back to a visit to an Engen garage. All the action is reversed. Why the backwards travelling people and objects, you might ask?

A very good question. And one you won't be able to answer by watching any of the boring commercials. We are left wondering, but ultimately, we don't wonder for long. We just remove our attention and ignore the message. Perhaps the creative people responsible had a really good reason to use this technique. But my guess is that after reviewing the ad in normal, forward motion, everyone realised they had some completely dull commercials on their hands. Then some bright young thing at the production house said, somewhat tongue in cheek, "What if we run them backwards?"

Voilà! All that's left to do is explain it to client which, obviously they did quite well. Or maybe the client just didn't feel like wasting the money they'd already spent. Too late. The money was wasted the day they bought the concept in the first place - dull commercials can't be rescued by video trickery.

The stand alone commercial, currently getting its second or third airing is for Virgin Active. Actually there are two techniques used here: the first is the use of quirky music from the "olden days". An odd choice considering Virgin's modern, progressive ethos, and the edgy, daring persona of the founder of the global conglomerate.

We are never given any clue as what this music represents as an attractive blonde runs through the woods encountering groups of people engaged in various forms of what we used to call "physical jerks"?

It's never explained and, in my opinion, it's a waste of a piece of music which could, with the right concept, be quite effective. But here's the kicker...as said blonde runs through the landscape we see that some of the jerkists are actually doing it backwards. Why? I dunno.

Who thinks of this stuff?

Oh yes...this is ME!

This blog takes it's name from an awful TV commercial that's been running for several months now on South African TV channels. The commercial features a pretty housewife extolling the virtues of Internet blogging. The woman, while pretty, has been given a pathetic script to work with so I can't blame her.

What she tells, while dropping margarine (from a dizzy height) into a mixing bowl is that she has just discovered the wonders of blogging. Even though she was "intimidated by the internet", "Mikey (presumably her son) set it up for me."

Now she's free to explore, create, play, and, when she sits back and looks at her words on the screen "it's like hey, that's ME!" The question that must be asked is: Has this woman never heard of pen and paper, or a typewriter, or a word processor, or anything else one can use to put one's thoughts "out there"?

Now what do you think this commercial could be advertising? Web hosting? Broadband? E-commerce?

Actually, it's none of those things. It's Stork products - margarine, cooking oil and stuff like that.

So irritating is this commercial that it actually inspired me to start "Mikey didn't do it". Uh-huh. I set this up myself. And my mission is to highlight the absolute WORST of South African advertising.

I want to celebrate the stupidity, banality, crassness, the sheer effrontery of those who inflict this rubbish on us, whether they be art directors or copywriters, client service dullards, or the clients who should be ashamed of themselves for buying the advertising they do and then actually paying good money to interrupt our programmes, clutter newspapers and magazines.

So stay tuned and pray that one your efforts doesn't show up here. I'm sure it won't because you're smarter than that, but at least we can all have a good laugh at the rest of the idiots!