The net is home to all sorts of strange people. People like "Fairy Child", who lives and breathes for art and poetry. Of course, like many creative people, she has her vices, too.
Cocaine?
No, speed. But not of the illicit narcotic variety. You see, Fairy Child is into fast cars, Formula One. Wow! That's a pretty evil vice. You can, according to the TV commercial, find Fairy (Faerie?) Child at Polka.co.za.
Clearly Polka is struggling to get people to sign up. How can we know this? Simple - this is the second or third ad style they've gone through in just a couple of years.
First off we had the vignettes of colourful local characters explaining to friends about their new Polka internet connections. They were hilarious. Everybody was talking about them. If they didn't win creative awards they should have. If they didn't sign up customers in droves, it's not surprising. Would anyone looking for an Internet connection really want to associated with these amusing societal misfits? Ah well, at least they made us smile.
Next up was a straight hard sell. Get a Polka connection from R79 per month and some goodies thrown in with it. Trouble is, R79 per month is hardly an earth-shattering offer. The competition easily match, or beat it. So maybe the customers stayed away.
Now we have Fairy Child. Unconvincing and pedestrian. We don't really care about her or her obviously bland existence. Still no reason to sign up.
Polka's real problem doesn't lie with the advertising (although it's not helping). They are a Johnny-come-lately in what is a highly competitive and, possibly, highly over-traded market. If they want customers to switch, they'd better offer some compelling reasons to do so.
Maybe Fairy Child could ask Mikey to set her up with a blog.
Monday, 17 March 2008
Friday, 29 February 2008
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?
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?
Monday, 18 June 2007
Screaming Hits New High-Pitched Level
We're all used to high-pitched...well...pitches in the world of retail advertising. But the new Checkers Golden something or other promotion takes the art to new highs, or should that be lows.
A screeching female voice screams at us with no holds barred as she informs us of the latest bargains and the great prizes we can win. But, as we really don't enjoy this kind rapid-fire delivery abusing our ear drums from the radio our first reaction is to hit the volume control and turn her off!
Do the people who produce and buy this kind of advertising really think we'll listen? Do THEY listen?
I can just imagine the exchange in the studio:
Agency: Is that irritating enough? Or should we go for more screaming?
Client: Yeah, could we make it a bit louder? I don't think we've pushed the envelope far enough as far as the screeching is concerned. I'm really worried that people will not be irritated enough to turn off their radios.
Sheesh. PLEASE tone these ads down to a listenable level. And try using fewer words.
A screeching female voice screams at us with no holds barred as she informs us of the latest bargains and the great prizes we can win. But, as we really don't enjoy this kind rapid-fire delivery abusing our ear drums from the radio our first reaction is to hit the volume control and turn her off!
Do the people who produce and buy this kind of advertising really think we'll listen? Do THEY listen?
I can just imagine the exchange in the studio:
Agency: Is that irritating enough? Or should we go for more screaming?
Client: Yeah, could we make it a bit louder? I don't think we've pushed the envelope far enough as far as the screeching is concerned. I'm really worried that people will not be irritated enough to turn off their radios.
Sheesh. PLEASE tone these ads down to a listenable level. And try using fewer words.
Friday, 8 June 2007
There's a thing in my TV...
And it speaks with a really irritating, gravelly, rasping voice that slurs as though it's spent too much time at the booze cabinet. It's supposed to be quite risqué when it says "There's a thing in my pocket..." but it doesn't keep the game going beyond that because then it goes straight into wanky, new age mumbo jumbo about how it communicates with the whole world and we can all touch it. Yes, there's a thing in my TV, but I wish there wasn't. It's the new Nokia commercial, this thing in my TV.
Thursday, 10 May 2007
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!
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!
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