The perils of humor in creative
If you saw the Super Bowl, you probably saw the commercials.
My fave was the Betty White/Abe Vigoda spot for Snickers. Funny as hell but did the target audience get it, even know who Betty White and Abe Vigoda are? They could be any geezers and the spot would still be funny and memorable but then why bother with Betty and Abe?
Volkswagen’s Audi commercial was scary. I hope the client (and the agency) thought it was funny. The central conceit was that the Green Police will come to wherever you are at any time of day and night to arrest you, slapping on the cuffs, for flouting ecoNazi shibboleths.
The sound track is Cheap Trick’s Dream Police only now it’s Green Police and it’s just as annoying as it was in 1979.
One wise fellow drives an Audi Green car, a diesel, apparently. He is handsome and saintly and the Green Schutzstaffel, holding up traffic to check engines, wave him on with smiles.
Other guys get busted in a supermarket checkout line for preferring plastic to paper, at home for throwing out a battery that the Reinhard Heydrichs find in his garbage, at home again for not composting, at home for having real light bulbs, two dudes somewhere outside for plastic water bottles, a guy in his backyard for a too-hot hot tub, and a guy cop, in his cop car, for coffee in a Styrofoam cup.
All the bad guys but one, we don’t see the battery maldisposer, are white guys. No surprise; the enlightened elite long ago identified society’s troglodytes.
The commercial should be funny because the concept of rabid Green Police is so ridiculous. It’s not funny for three reasons: overkill, reality (just ask the farmers in California’s Central Valley about that San Francisco smelt), and Audi is a German car.
Most tag lines, especially on TV, are useless so nobody will remember the tag to this spot. It’s “Green never felt so right.” Hmmmm. So they were serious when they made this spot or they’re still trying to be funny and their real message is that Green doesn’t feel right at all.
In case they were serious, the operative word is “feel” as in logic has nothing to do with it, it’s all about feelings. Someone cue Morris Albert.
Interesting about a few of the ads directed at too narrow an audience. Good friends of mine are Chicagoans, avid Bears fans and able to name every single one of those old guys doing some kind of shuffle. They seemed to know the song, too. Chicago press on Monday morning were bemoaning the fact that a whole new generation of football fans, especially CHICAGO football fans, did not even have a clue what was going on.