Ads

I absolutely love this ad but suspect that unless you’ve stood in a LOT of cab lines in strange cities you won’t get it:

It’s from Norway, on veryfunnyads.com, a great way to waste an hour or so if you’re a connoisseur of fine advertising.

Which I am. In fact, for a lot of TV shows, especially prime time, the ads are better than the show. If you think about it for a sec, for an ad to really sell it MUST be better than the content it interrupts:

• You have 60 seconds or less to get your entire message across
• Your audience is strongly inclined to do something else (eat, talk, eliminate, snog) until the content comes back on
• Many countries prohibit you from screwing around with the volume (getting LOTS louder was a common attention-getting ploy in the old days)
• There’s a built-in antipathy, almost a shame, to admitting you watch commercials, and technology (such as Tivo) now allows you to eliminate them
• Unless your product/pitch is incredibly generic (or beer), the percentage of audience who would be interested is relatively small and catching them at the right moment is somewhat akin to shooting flies with a BB gun

I would submit, in fact, that the guys making ads and commercials are probably better storytellers than the real storytellers. They have to be. The only thing a story needs to do is get people to listen, and the storyline is whatever the storyteller can imagine. Advertising must sell, and what it’s selling often makes for a lousy story.

Could Hemingway write copy that would make you WANT an upset stomach, just so you could try Alka Seltzer? I doubt it.

So here’s to great advertising and a big thank you to some of the companies that have paid (and approved) some great ads: Volkswagen. Apple. Enzyte. Alka-Seltzer. Guinness. Pepsi (and Coke). Nike. Visa. Canal Plus. FedEx. Annheiser-Busch (although they’ve gone downhill lately).

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program.

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