Belly of the Beast

Every commercial in the Super Bowl was better than any thirty or 60 seconds of the game or the halftime show.

And for that, the advertisers who bought time during the broadcast should be grateful. Because a whole slew of ads that in other years would have sent viewers off to get more guac or take a bathroom break became magically entertaining vs. the 3-and-outs on the field.

My own metric of “best” and “worst” spots is different than the USA Today polls and other audience polls. Because I grade on a curve: the shittier the brief, the more tolerant I am of bad execution.

Mercedes’ spot for voice-activated controls on its new C class, for example, had the kind of brief creatives dread: make a big deal about a feature that’s, well, not a big deal. So they came up with a time-worn trope: if only everything in the world worked like _________, the blank being your product feature goes here. But they get a pass (the escaping Orca helped), because the brief sucked.

But the team working on the Washington Post spot had the dream brief of all time: defend the importance of journalism in these perilous post-factual times. I mean, I’d kill for that brief. And what did they run? Essentially, a rip-o-matic. Yes, Tom Hanks did the VO but it’s not like they gave him a lot to work with. Disappointing.

Also on the wrong end of the grading curve is Olay’s fright-film homage with Sarah Michelle Gellar. Why? Because buried underneath a lot of superfluous dialogue and jumpy editing is an absolutely brilliant product-driven idea: Olay works so well, your phone’s face-recognition technology won’t unlock the phone so you can call 911. This is pure conceptual gold, and in more deft hands would have been a lock for a Cannes Lion. Over complicated and over-produced, it’s an enormous missed opportunity.

Amazon’s Alexa spot and the two Google spots are a study in contrast. Amazon, for reasons that elude me, decided to visualize everyone’s worst fears about AI-empowered personal tech, updating the Frankenstein/Golem trope with Alexa-equipped dog collars, hot tubs and space stations ruining our lives. Super-nerdy footnote: Harrison Ford, himself a self-aware robot in Blade Runner, being terrorized by his tech-enabled dog. Google, on the other hand, follows the winning playbook they used for their beautiful “Paris” Super Bowl spot of a few years back: tell a heartwarming human story and show how Google technology plays a helpful part. Clear idea, good craft, and Google’s role right-sized and authentic.

Pepsi/T-Mobile/Expensify/Sprint/Bud Light/…don’t ask me because I’m not the target and my grumpy-old-man opinion is irrelevant. But while I think the whole Dilly Dilly thing is stupid, I’m at least grateful to Bud Light, HBO and their agencies for truly and completely surprising me with the GOT ending. Way more exciting than watching the Rams punt.

I’ve done enough corporate we-really-are-nice-guys ads in my life to know a non-apology when I see one. 

This ad checks all the boxes of corporate humility except one. There’s the no-frills art direction. The modest little logo in the lower left. The snowy-white negative space. The “personal” flourish of Zuck’s signature. The plain-spoken, Riney-esque syntax. 

Everything a mea culpa ad should have, except for one thing: the magic words “I’m sorry.” Zuckerberg does say “…I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time.” That’s some lawyered-up bullshit. Anytime you hear someone in the public eye say something with the words “at that time” that’s a lawyer talking. “I’m sorry.” needs to be its own sentence, without qualifiers and without hedges. 

“I’m sorry.” The magic words that open ears and soften hearts. They’re not in this ad because Mark Zuckerberg is not sorry. What’s more, he’s not sorry that he’s not sorry because you and I are not his customers. We are the product. And products don’t get apologies.

They get sold.

I feel for the parents of kids with severe peanut allergies.  For reasons no one seems to understand, this once-rare condition is now pretty common. So common, even the saintliest package of locally sourced, cruelty -free kale wafers has to confess on its package that it was made in a plant that processes peanuts. A co-worker tells me peanuts are banned outright at her kids’ school.

Watching their product become the food world’s equivalent to arsenic can’t be much fun for America’s peanut farmers. Coming up with a new campaign to promote peanuts could not have been much fun for the creative team, either, since you can’t acknowledge the  800-lb. legume in the room.

Hence the weirdly context-free new Peanut Board campaign:

This is pretty innocuous, even with the word “Powerful” in the headline.

I saw this ad on a commuter train, so I had plenty of time to do what I do way too much: make up snarky, immature alternate headlines. I’m not proud that I do this–it just comes over me, like a sneeze. How about…

“Peanuts. There’s an Epi Pen in every bag!”

Or my favorite:

“Allergic to peanuts? More for us!”

Watching cable channels like Bravo and TBS means being treated to a crazy mishmash of expensive national spots and low-rent local ads in every commercial break pod.

Glossy effects-rich corporate anthems alternate with messages from local nail spas and rug stores shot on a Flip and edited on iMovie. Aspect ratios stretch and shrink like cheap suits: too wide, too narrow, not enough letterbox or too much.

It’s entertaining the way a good downtown street is entertaining: bodegas and chic restaurants, hardware stores and glam boutiques are all in the mix.

But this collision of high and low commerce also underscores the sad fact that budget doesn’t correlate to goodness. Let’s construct a suckage matrix:

The Suckage Matrix

The best place to be, of course, is in the upper-right quadrant: great advertising that costs virtually nothing to make. Google’s Parisian Love spot is a fine example.

The upper-left quadrant, bad advertising that was made on the cheap, isn’t fun to watch (or produce) but it’s not a surprise and—viewed strictly as a business decision– it’s not a disgrace. If it works, great; if not, no biggie.

Good advertising that costs a lot of money to make–the lower right quadrant– is simply what one would expect when you give a lot of creative talent the resources to realize their idea.  BBDO built a global agency almost entirely in this quadrant: making pretty good and occasionally terrific big-budget TV spots for Fedex, GE and Pepsi.

And then there’s the death quadrant: bad advertising that cost a fortune to make. You see less of it than you used to, partly because no one has any money and partly because of the internet. But occasionally you see something that just takes your breath away as you watch millions of dollars go up in sooty, stinky smoke.

Such is the new TransAmerica campaign. If you haven’t seen it, please, please do. I can’t really do justice to all its expensive, CGI suckage.  It includes humongous gears, a conveniently deceased husband, a yellow cottage and something about pyramids. Oh—and a girl who sings a treacly bit of “Tomorrow” from the musical “Annie.” Really.

To understand how something like this could get conceived, let alone presented, sold, produced and aired, it’s instructive to read the Adweek puff piece that ran the week the campaign debuted.

The underlying theme of the article is that life insurance is really fucking boring and so the agency creatives had to challenge themselves to find a way to make it less boring. Translation: “This shit doesn’t interest us because we’re 32 years old and we’re going to live forever. But really big gears could be cool.”

Exactly. But that still leaves the question of how on earth JWT sold this nonsense to the client. The answer lies in this bit of helpful reportage: “Each ad uses special effects to literally get under the roof of Transamerica’s iconic ‘Pyramid’ building in San Francisco…”

In other words, the agency convinced the client these ads “leveraged his brand equity.” Except for one thing:

You don’t know you’re in the “Pyramid” building because the pyramid doesn’t appear until the last 2 seconds.

 So this entire hellish life-as-a-giant-factory-assembly-line metaphor unfolds with zero context and zero explanation.  Makes the eyebrow-threading spot that followed it that night look pretty, pretty good.

The Thursday before Memorial Day weekend one set of doors closed and another set opened. Phone and internet carried over with nary a hiccup, no deadlines were missed, no clients inconvenienced.

Right now the new space still feels tingly and unexplored, more possibility than reality. I know familiarity and comfort will come. I hope they don’t come too soon.