Last week I saw an ad.
If the folks at Big Data are correct, last week I saw 9,837 ads. This one caught my attention. Mostly because it's a return to Old School Advertising.
It's based on a human truth. An insightful acknowledgement of how people experience Coca Cola.
It doesn't spoon-feed. It doesn't lay everything out there as if it were a catalog. In fact, it hinges on something that isn't there. It trusts the consumer will put the pieces of the puzzle together.
And it targets everybody. Well, everybody who has ever enjoyed a ridged bottle of Coca Cola the old fashioned way, ripped from an oversized red cooler box and still dripping from the frigid waters.
This ad so effectively stirs the emotions it makes me want to pop the cap off of an icy Coke and set it beside my breakfast bowl of unsweetened steel-cut oatmeal.
The irony of all this is that I didn't see this ad, or the other two in the campaign, on a billboard. Or the back page of magazine. I saw it on LinkedIn. In a post about advertising.
If that doesn't sum up the sorry state of our industry, I don't know what does.
Instead of doing big, bold, intelligent advertising, we're "creating content." Useless blather that doesn't get read, doesn't get used, doesn't make an impact and doesn't make a donkey dick dent in the universe.
Instead of making magnificent mass communications, we're micro-targeting. Even micro-microtargeting.
"This next campaign is aimed at half African-American/half Asian American women, aged 27 & 1/2 to 28 & 1/4, who work in the architectural field, drive underpowered crossover SUVs, work out 3 times a week and self identify as non-religious, but spiritual."
And instead of finding and creating new ways to tease, cajole and persuade the public, the way Coca Cola has masterfully done, American marketers have sliced their budgets in half, slashed agency fees, undermined the AOR model, embraced banality and made a mockery of modern marketing with the ridiculous reductive philosophy of....
"Let's just put something up on Instagram."
Great words, Rich. Much better than mine...https://bit.ly/2vsAzxc
ReplyDeleteFWIW, that's a fine ad.
ReplyDeleteGreat piece which conjured up a positive memory for me. My father was an editor for our local Midwestern newspaper. He would take me to work with him now and then. I remember the newsroom, a big open area where old men sat hunched over their typewriters, with mountains of cut up newsprint on which they would type their stories. On their desks, the cigarette butts were piled high in their ashtrays and the room was always clouded with smoke. To give me something to do while he attended to business, he would give me a nickel and allow me to go two flights down to the red metal box, full of little bottles of Coke. I remember being fascinated by the metal lever that allowed you to pull the bottle up to freedom... and I can still feel the icy cold water. One of the few good memories I have of my dad who was, in every way, a complete asshole.
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