Okay guys, we've got a tough task. We're being asked to sell one of the most boring, functional, everyone-needs-it-but-no-one-thinks-about-it products on Planet Earth: dishwashing detergent. How are we gonna make it interesting, make it pop, jazz the message up a little?
Well... I guess that's one option.
Older Woman: "We do it every night!" Younger Woman: "Every night." Single Woman: "I live alone, but... I still do it every night."
Hoo hoo hoo! What could we be talking about??? Sex, I bet! See how that single woman smirked and leaned in conspiratorially when she said she still does it every night? I mean, what is something you do every night even though you live alone that would be surprising? Oh yeah, you know it. FUCKIN'.
Older Woman: "Right after dinner." Younger Man: "Definitely after meatloaf."
Well, this is sounding a bit less appealing. But come on. Clearly we know what's going on here. Right?
Older Man: "Like clockwork!"
Hell yeah, buddy! Get some.
*cut to an entirely different commercial*
Announcer: "Do it! Run your dishwasher with Cascade Platinum."
Wait, what?
Announcer: "And save water!"
Okay, so this is an ad about how if you run your dishwasher - using Cascade Platinum - every night, that still uses less water than washing dishes in the sink (as long as you have certain Energy Star-certified appliances, anyway). That is, admittedly, a very boring message to get across. But boy, I cannot think of a stupider way of trying to grab attention than with the absolute laziest one-note "am I talking about sex??? JK I'm not" jokes.
(It's probably also worth noting that the premise does not make sense. Running your dishwasher for a single plate and fork might use less water than hand-washing that plate and fork, but why would you need to run the dishwasher every night if you live alone and that's all you're using? Surely you could go at least two or three days without having to run it, which presumably would use even less water. But I digress.)
Even if this ad did turn out to be for Viagra or something, it would be boring. But it's so much worse because you know it's not gonna be for Viagra. The tone is unmistakably one of "just wait for the punchline where we turn out not to be talking about sex after all" and even by those standards they barely try to make it link up. "By 'do it' we meant running your dishwasher!" Yes, the generic expression "do it" could mean literally almost anything. Great point, detergent ad. I haven't posted a lot on here recently and there are multiple reasons for that, but a big part of it is that so many ads you see in day to day life are pretty much this kind of boring half-joke. There's only so much to say about that. I found this one particularly annoying and stupid, but it's all just variations on a theme: things that are phrased like and have the tonality of jokes, but aren't real jokes and definitely aren't funny. I'd say I'm looking forward to the Super Bowl so at least we get some variation, but even those have been pretty dull lately. I wonder how much of this work is even still being written by humans.
I've said this before, but back in the days when the Super Bowl was often a pretty lousy game, "I just watch for the ads" became a common joke. However, we've now gone from a time in the 80s and 90s when you had maybe only one or two really good games in a decade to a time when you really only have one or two BAD games in a decade. (To wit: between the 1983 and 1994 seasons, only two games were decided by less than two touchdowns. Between the 2010 season and this year, only three games were decided by more than 11 points, and at least as many - including this year's dramatic overtime finish - were fully in the balance right at the end of the fourth quarter.)
The 2024 Super Bowl started slow, but ultimately it was an incredibly exciting game in the fourth quarter and overtime, which is all I really demand of a football game. The ads, meanwhile, seem to get more boring every year. It's almost straight boilerplate now - grab a famous person, stick them in an office or in front of a green screen, have them make a few semi-jokes that are not in any way actually funny, and you're good to go. For as much as these ad slots cost, you'd think companies would want to put in a little more effort, but it seems like it's the exact opposite. If we're spending ten million dollars or whatever, there's no point in taking a risk on a clever idea. Just get someone recognizable so people will think, "Ah yes! I want a Michelob Ultra, as it is a beer beloved by Lionel Messi, Jason Sudeikis, and Dan Marino!"
With that said, let's hand out some awards.
The Apple 1984 Memorial Award for Least Shitty Ad
If you can do basic math, you will note that this is the 40th anniversary of the famous Apple ad and while it remains indelible, I think you'd have to acknowledge both that Apple's ascension to ubiquitous tech hegemon makes it at least mildly ironic in hindsight and that the extent to which it was the birth of the "big game ad" craze has turned out to be pretty annoying. Perhaps surprisingly, Apple itself did not appear least night. Neither did many even half-decent ads, making handing out this award something of a challenge. Ultimately, I think I liked this United ad the most:
"This is really an ad for something else" rug pulls can be annoying, but considering how seriously the NFL takes itself, it was amusing to see what looked like yet another up-its-own-ass NFL ad about the glory of fandom or whatever, only for the reveal to come that it was actually an ad about how United doesn't have change fees. Not the most original concept, but at least it wasn't hideously overdone.
Runner-Up: I ultimately couldn't pick the Dunkin' Donuts ad because building ads around celebrities is getting so tiresome, but it was easily the most effective of the "famous people trying to take the piss out of themselves" group. The BMW ad with the Christopher Walken impressions was kind of a funny idea, but it couldn't land the plane.
The Actual 1984 Award for Most Dystopian Ad
Congrats to UKG, a company I had never heard of before last night. Within seconds of their ad starting, I was already thinking of this award:
To be fair, it would have been way worse if this had been an ad specifically for Amazon or Walmart or something, which is what I was thinking when it first started. The version of the spot that actually appeared on the broadcast was only 30 seconds as I recall, but this ad is a failure at any length. For one thing, even after watching it I can't really tell you what UKG is or does. Something with timekeeping at work I guess. But also, the societal push to view work as a place where you have "the time of your life?" Oh yes, I owe it all to you, menial warehouse job! Fuck right off with that shit. To say nothing of how dystopian it is that you can have a corporation making enough money to advertise on the Super Bowl with the business model of "we make sure your employees adhere to a draconian punch-clock at all times."
Runner-Up: Microsoft, but we'll get to it.
Most Overproduced Ad
Frankly we might need to change this to Least Overproduced Ad just so there wouldn't be as many contenders to sift through every year. But there was a clear winner here: Bud Light.
If it were just this ad, with its inane concept and frenetic "just throw everything you can think of onscreen" execution, that would be bad enough. But what locked up the award here is the coordination with the actual broadcast - if you were watching the game, you saw that the end of this ad was followed by a return to the stadium, where the camera zoomed in on a suite featuring the characters from the ad. Jim Nantz even had to point them out. When you're so ingrained in the corporate bullshit of the NFL that you can coordinate a transition from your ad directly to the actual game, that is some serious overproduction. It's also just incredibly exhausting.
Runner-Up: I wrote down this Mountain Dew ad as soon as I saw it:
This actually has almost the exact same concept as the Mr. T Skechers ad, but at least "T is always in Skechers!" almost works as a joke. "I'm having a blast" is basically anti-comedy, and while the ad seems to be implicitly acknowledging that by casting the ultra-deadpan Aubrey Plaza, that doesn't make it funnier. The reason this falls under the Most Overproduced category instead of something like Worst Use of "Humor" is that they bothered to do so many different setups in service of a single joke that isn't even really a joke. Extra negative points for how bad the dragon part looks.
Cheapest Budget/Clumsiest Execution Award
I barely know what Temu is, but apparently it's some website that sells incredibly cheap crap:
I know animation isn't necessarily cheap, but this LOOKS cheap, and anyway the ad cannot possibly have cost much given how many times it ran during the game. Also I guess I know what they mean by "shop like a billionaire" but that's frankly just embarrassing given what has got to be the extremely low quality of anything you're buying for those kinds of prices.
Runner-Up: There were a few pretty cheap-looking ads but I guess I'll go with Snapchat here. This is actually a much more effective ad message-wise than the 30-second version that ran during the game (which I could only find on YouTube in the ever-unpopular someone-filming-their-TV format), so I'm more forgiving of its general aesthetic at this length, but the version that aired definitely deserves a mention for likely being pretty confusing to anyone who isn't already using Snapchat anyway.
Worst Use of "Humor" Award
In the Simpsons episode "Radioactive Man," there's an amusing gag where Rainier Wolfcastle - the show's Arnold Schwarzenegger stand-in - has difficulty parsing the character's punny catchphrase "Up and atom!" due to his stiltedly formal ESL status. Instead, he keeps saying "Up and at them!" despite the instructions of a frustrated dialect coach. This bit runs about ten seconds:
Now consider (a) the length of this State Farm ad and (b) that episode aired on September 24, 1995.
It's bad enough that this is the same joke - and once again, this is barely a joke - over and over for a solid minute. It also doesn't even really make sense. It's not like there's any confusion about what word Arnold is saying just because his accent doesn't hit the trailing R. So now it's just "tee-hee, foreign guy talk funny," which puts this ad squarely in the "Bood Light" camp of late 2000s xenophobia. I get that Arnold willingly participated, and if an A-list celebrity decides he wants to be in on the joke about his accent then fine, but that doesn't make it any funnier.
Runner-Up: Basically every other ad on the entire game could be tied for second here, but I'll do a special citation for the Drumstick ad because it's not 2008 and this would be stupid even if it were.
Flimsiest Pretense Award
I've noted in both of the last two years that this one has been getting increasingly difficult to hand out because "check out this hot babe" just isn't a hallmark of ads anymore. So I think we're going to have to discontinue it. As a replacement, since the downfall of "check out this hot babe" is a good trend, let's go with a bad trend:
The 84 Lumber Memorial Award for Most Political Bullshit
Remember in 2017 when 84 Lumber ran an ad that first seemed to be anti-border wall, and then turned out maybe to be pro-wall, and either way had fuck all to do with lumber? That's the namesake for this award, inspired by the problematic proliferation of religious and/or political ads during this game. (If you're thinking, "Hey, religion isn't political!" that's adorably naive.)
There's only one possible winner for this one: it's the RFK Jr. campaign ad, which I'm not going to embed or even link to here because fuck that guy. This would have been a terrible ad even if Kennedy himself weren't one of the worst assholes out there, but using an old 1960 John F. Kennedy jingle and trying to position yourself as the scion of the dynasty is especially dumb when virtually everyone else in the family has distanced themselves from his anti-vax bullshit. (Kennedy himself rather hilariously had to apologize to his family for this ad, which he claimed not to have any responsibility for, but you'll have to forgive me if I don't believe that a PAC endorsing Kennedy didn't even run the idea of a Super Bowl ad by his people in advance. Given that he has it pinned to his Twitter profile, I suspect he doesn't really feel that bad about it.)
If you didn't see it, the ad notably doesn't mention a single policy position or really anything at all beyond "Hey, someone named Kennedy seems to be running," and to be honest I'm not sure how old you would have to be for that to seem even remotely like an enticing proposition just on its face. 65 minimum? With the ludicrous conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would endorse Joe Biden from the championship podium after the game predictably failing to materialize, this was the only direct mention of presidential candidates during the game and I, for one, could very much have done without it.
Runner-Up: I just don't need Mark Wahlberg out there trying to push a Catholic prayer app and I really don't need him doing it with the corny-ass youth pastor line, "Stay prayed up." Stick to making Netflix movies no one is going to watch.
The Rick Dalton Award for the Most Egregious Use of B-List Celebrities
Once again this could go to nearly every ad, although there were even more candidates for the next award on the list than usual. At any rate, it's hard to look past CeraVe for this one:
I actually kind of enjoy this ad, which is executed amusingly. But the concept - hey, let's cash in on this actor's name being in our product name by having him pretend like he's trying to cash in on the fact that his name is in our product name - is just too much of a lock. It's especially egregious because when have you seen a CeraVe ad during a football game? This may have been aimed at the "watching for Taylor Swift" crowd but either way it feels like the only reason CeraVe even has a Super Bowl ad is that they thought of a justification for getting someone moderately famous to appear in it. At least things like Bud Light and Doritos would be running ads regardless.
Runner-Up:The Doritos ad with Jenna Ortega isn't incredibly terrible but just... why did it need to be Jenna Ortega when she barely even has anything to do? That's pretty much the definition of egregious.
The Jack Nicholson Award for the Most Egregious Use of A-List Celebrities
As I noted above, there were an awful lot of A-listers this year: Ben, Matt, and J-Lo; Arnold; Bradley Cooper; Christopher Walken; Beyonce. But when you really want to talk egregious, you need to enter the realm of the pointless cameo. And that gives us Scarlett Johansson:
There is simply no reason for ScarJo to be in this ad, especially as a still relatively young actress with exactly two Oscar nominations under her belt. She is miles away from being analogous to someone like Dan Marino or Bruce Smith, all-time great athletes whose careers were hampered by the lack of a championship. Was Charles Barkley not available? Was that too obvious? This is pure "we could get her and she's famous," nothing more. It's not like the jokes with her are even funny, although they're not any worse than the ad's bizarrely stupid concept in the first place.
Runner-Up:The Booking.com ad with Tina Fey might have skated except for the decision to toss Glenn Close in there for no apparent reason. (Is it some 30 Rock reference I don't get? Who cares?) Extra demerits for having Fey exclaim "Glenn Close??" This was an obnoxious trend this year - putting famous people in your ad and then not trusting the audience to know who they are. If I've said it once I've said it a hundred times: if the person is famous enough to be a key part of your ad, you shouldn't have to announce them. It's a hat on a hat, except that that term is usually used in relation to jokes and none of these things are actual jokes. (Also: if Glenn Close was willing to do a Super Bowl ad, shouldn't she have been in the ScarJo part? She actually is famous for having a very long career and repeatedly failing to win an Oscar! Maybe she wouldn't have wanted to do that, I guess, but it would have made so much more sense.)
The Bad Idea Jeans Award for Most Epic Miscalculation
This one doesn't go to a single ad, but rather to CBS itself for accepting an ad from the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism and then also letting Kanye West run an ad for himself (which I'm not linking). Nothing says "we are definitely taking antisemitism seriously as a concept and not just using it as a cudgel to suppress criticism of Israel's military actions in Gaza" like simultaneously giving a platform to one of America's most famous antisemites.
Runner-Up:Duolingo's ad was weird and needlessly gross, and it also caused most of their app to crash into a "maintenance break" within a minute of airing.
The SkyMall Championship Trophy for Weirdest Attempt to Sell a Product
Gotta go with CrowdStrike here because when you are a company that most of the audience has never heard of, you should probably do an ad that makes it very clear what it is that you do.
Or, you could do that. I guess I have a basic sense of what CrowdStrike does - they stop breaches! - but hearing a little more about their services might have been a more effective ad for their product than seeing some shitty CGI robot thing get poofed into its cartoon boxer shorts.
Runner-Up:The Nerds Gummy Clusters ad is just kind of gross. And what is the overlap between the market for a children's candy product, or people who recognize TikTok influencer Addison Rae on sight (as you had better believe I did not), and people who recognize a Flashdance reference anyway?
Worst Super Bowl Ad of 2024
The issue with the ad for Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant or whatever the fuck exactly, isn't that the ad itself is actually a total train wreck. It's the pitch. We spend forever going through "people say I can't do X, I'll never do Y." Gosh, what could this product be that is going to facilitate this triumph of the human spirit we're building towards?
Oh, it's some AI bullshit that is going to do all the work for me, based on work that someone else already did. Someone said I don't have the talent to make art? I'll show them - by typing a prompt into a system that scrapes and reconfigures the work of actual artists! That definitely makes me a real artist myself and not just a talentless hack and AI-assisted plagiarist!
The 2022 Super Bowl was bombarded with ads for cryptocurrency, right at what turned out to be the peak of the crypto bubble. Two years later, NFTs are all but forgotten, one of the companies that advertised on that game collapsed and saw its founder go to jail, and crypto is largely back to being the niche interest it was before a few bigwigs thought they could ride it to infinite wealth. I'm holding out hope that the AI push during this year's game represents a similar crest of the wave - most uses of AI as they've been demonstrated to date are things that almost nobody wants or needs, and yet they're being pushed on us anyway. At least Google's ad touted the use of AI as an accessibility tool - also a more niche use, but a legitimate one. Microsoft suggesting its product can help you succeed by just doing all your work for you? First of all, if you know anything about these AI tools you know that they can't be relied on at all - there are the stories of AI-prepared legal briefs featuring made-up cases, the struggle of AI art creators to properly generate text or human fingers, and the fact that these tools are somehow getting WORSE at providing even the most basic information. (I wouldn't trust an AI assistant to properly quiz me on organic chemistry, as shown in the ad, for even a microsecond.) But beyond that, I'm unclear on who the wider market is for a tool like this. Who is the person who proclaims that they're going to change the world by... using a chatbot to write all their video game code for them? Make a shitty-looking animated movie that almost definitely is ripping off someone else's animated movie?
It's been said, but the grotesque irony is that the promise of AI has always been that it could automate jobs that were boring or unsafe for humans - and instead, the second it goes mainstream you have the capitalist class pushing its use as a replacement for legitimate artisans. Art, a distinctly human creation, has been reduced by these losers to a commodity that can and should be churned out mechanically by an automaton that has no soul and no true ideas or talent of its own. All it can do is process the work of actual human artists, synthesize and at best iterate on that, with no serious understanding of what it's producing beyond the binary knowledge that its output basically fits a descriptive prompt it was given. This is a bullshit future and we don't have to live in it. The sooner AI follows crypto down the mainstream garbage chute, the better.
One thing that is incredibly irritating about pop culture right now - and really for most of the past decade, at least - is the complete dearth of willingness on the part of the people bankrolling projects to do absolutely anything new. Movies are constantly being remade or getting legacy sequels. Every TV show of the 1990s is currently getting a reboot featuring the original cast. Even on Broadway, it seems like 90% of new musicals are just adapted versions of popular movies. Hey! Is this a thing you're familiar with? Well guess what! We have more of it for you!
Commercials have long been at the vanguard of this sort of thing, of course - find a popular pitchman or spokescharacter and you can trot him out there for decades. (Just ask the Geico Gecko, who turns 25 this coming year, if you can believe that.) But there's a difference between having a consistent spokesman and just... completely redoing an old ad.
This is a very famous commercial, of course. "Who are the Chefs?" "Great googly moogly." This ad is 26 years old and I would bet that most people who were at least ten years old in 1997 would recognize those lines even with zero context. Now, suppose you had the idea to update this ad. How would you do it? Hmm, maybe you could get a famous person to appear in it. That would be good. And what if you otherwise... made it unambiguously worse in every way?
Why is this worse? Well, let's start here: it simply adds nothing to the equation. Sure, they cast actual Chiefs coach Andy Reid instead of having that part played by an anonymous actor. But they completely undermine what that adds by making the groundskeeper into a totally anonymous actor. He doesn't even get a line??? Let me guess: you could pay him less that way. On the bright side, that means the famous line "great googly moogly" can be delivered by non-actor Andy Reid, who is utterly incapable of selling it. (The groundskeeper changes facial expression zero times in 30 seconds, so I don't know that he could have either, but maybe let him try.)
Then, we have Snickers taking this ad we all know, which also used their famous "Not going anywhere for a while? Grab a Snickers" tagline, and not including that part of it. "Rookie mistake? Maybe you just need a Snickers." What? This barely even makes sense. I assume it's just an extension of the "you're not you when you're hungry" slogan they used for years, and sure, if I can remember an ad that's old enough to rent a car without paying for supplemental liability insurance I can probably also remember ads that aired in the last 15 years. But out of context it's pretty clunky.
As long as we're getting actual Chiefs employees in this ad, it seems like it would have been a slam dunk to get someone else pretty famous, like Patrick Mahomes or Travis Kelce, to play the role of "second football player" from the original ad. But having already given "great googly moogly" to Andy Reid, and having cast a groundskeeper with no personality, we don't really have the option of ending with that same tag. So instead we get a new scene in which Andy Reid gets yet ANOTHER line, the knee-slapper "Eh, maybe no one'll notice." Even by usual commercial standards of "This is phrased like a joke and placed where you would put a joke, but it's not written like a joke and definitely isn't funny," this is pretty dire. (Granted, the original ad's closer wasn't much to write home about either. But if you're going to change it, maybe put any effort into improving it.)
In some respects, this almost annoys me even more than most of the shitty movie remakes out there. Maybe you get a lazy script with cheap callbacks, but writing a whole two-hour movie is hard. This is a 30-second ad. How difficult could it really have been to at least make it AS good as the original? Surely Andy Reid didn't tell you he would only appear in the ad if he could deliver the "great googly moogly" line. Get a funny actor and have someone sell that line the way it's supposed to fucking sound. Really, what was even the point here? It's one thing to try to get people to buy movie tickets with the promise of characters they already know they like. Are you really trying to sell Snickers to the same people you were trying to sell it to a quarter-century ago? Would a younger person who doesn't know the original ad think this was funny, especially when Reid delivers the one laugh line so flatly? Are you still allowed to call yourself a "creative" if your best idea is taking someone else's idea from decades ago and making it worse?
I keep saying this. But I guess I have to keep saying it.
WHAT is the point of making commercials that shit on people for LIKING YOUR PRODUCT?
Kathryn: "When you see Wendy's square hamburger, you know you're getting the best."
Do I know that? Of the big three hamburger-based fast food chains I suppose I would rate the Wendy's hamburger first, but fortunately there are more than three places in this country that sell hamburgers.
Kathryn: [sounding exasperated] "Guess who else knows that? Reggie Miller."
I know Reggie Miller is still in broadcasting but it is very of a piece with the commercial tendency to focus on 25-year-old references to have your big pitchman be a guy who retired in 2005. Was this actress even born when Reggie Miller was drafted in 1987? (Google does not seem to have the answer but it looks unlikely.)
I appreciate Reggie Miller being game to embarrass himself like this. He's not exactly an actor, but he commits about as hard as I imagine he's capable of, especially in his late 50s. So then one of the Wendy's employees is inspired to dance along with Reggie and gets immediately shouted down by his co-worker.
Voiceover: "When you want a hamburger worth celebrating..." Reggie: "Square's the beef!"
This is actually a pretty good tagline which I can't believe they only just seem to have thought of. But is this hamburger worth celebrating or not? Reggie Miller is shown celebrating it, but our lead Wendy's employee seems to find this pretty irritating. Other Wendy's employees are seemingly not allowed to celebrate it. This burger is worth celebrating! But just realize that if you do, you're an annoying asshole!
This is more or less in line with what I believe were the original Wendy's ads with Reggie Miller from a few years ago, where Reggie moves into the Wendy's during March Madness so he can wake up and immediately get their breakfast items, or whatever. This same Kathryn (the actress's real name, actually) was shown being extremely annoyed by his presence then, too. The message: if you're a Wendy's superfan, that's annoying as fuck! I mean, don't get me wrong: it would be very annoying if a loud 6'7" guy was suddenly in your workplace 24/7, sleeping in a large bed in the middle of the work area. But you're making a choice to depict "Wendy's superfan Reggie Miller" in this fashion. You didn't have to make your biggest fan such a pain in the ass! Why? Clearly the answer is "because it would be funny" but I think you can guess what my response to that is gonna be.
There's actually another ad in this series where the employees do get on board with Reggie's celebrating, and then for some reason they all find it overly weird that Kathryn does a "rock the baby" and the whole thing falls apart. That's still not very funny, but it's a better concept for an ad because at least it doesn't run with the premise that liking Wendy's to a degree of mild comic exaggeration makes you a fucking jerkoff.
Once upon a time, Old Spice ads were aimed at men. And just like most ads aimed directly at men, they focused on implying that using their product would attract hot women to you. Like this one. Models want to fuck a dude who smells like Old Spice, bro! Get you some! But thanks to a pioneering 2010 campaign, all that changed. I know you all remember this ad:
We never talked about this one on the old blog, and it's obvious why: everyone liked this ad, including us. It was huge! Very few brands keep 13-year-old commercials active on their official YouTube channels, but with 61 million views and counting, Old Spice knows this one has to be up there, even now. Looking back, you could argue that there's still some sexism at play here, particularly in the idea that a real man shouldn't "smell like a lady." I think this ad can mostly get away with it because of the overall archness of the tone, and anyway it was 2010; ads could have a little sexism, as a treat.
In any event, there's a gulf of difference between this ad and, let's just say, the Dr. Pepper Ten ad that clearly tried to ape this general aesthetic but just ended up playing the Goofus to Isaiah Mustafa's Gallant. This ad is pitched at women. It's right there in the copy: Hello, ladies! Are you unsatisfied that your man doesn't have a "manly smell" after bathing? Well, we have a product that will solve that! Frankly, by acknowledging women as purchasers of products other than, like, tampons and kitchen supplies, this campaign was way ahead of a lot of its competitors. Who is more likely to make the body wash purchasing decision for the household? And who is more likely to care what "their man" smells like? Yes, there's a whiff of sexism, but I think it can be forgiven in context. (By comparison, Dr. Pepper Ten told women to fuck right off and was rightly rewarded with low sales and eventual discontinuation just seven years after its launch, and if you think I'm not gonna take a lap on that one after getting flambéed in the comments of that post you've got another think coming.)
Interestingly, this modern Old Spice ad I saw recently seems to be continuing the pitch to women. But I feel like it's gotten a little jumbled:
Deon: "Admit it: you used my Old Spice body wash." Gabrielle: "Of course... I'm not letting hotel soap near my skin." La La: "Pray." Deon: "Now I'm gonna be ashy." La La: "It's the lavender and mint for me." Savannah: "Get that-" Deon: "Savannah, if you don't get your moisturized hands off my body wash..."
I think I've made it clear enough that I have no particular use for gender stereotypes, but this is still Old Spice we're talking about. Lavender, really? I mean, name me a LESS stereotypically male scent. The pitch has apparently shifted from "get our product so your man doesn't smell like a lady" to "actually you're gonna want your man to smell like a lady in case you need to steal his shit."
This series of ads has actually been running since 2019, I found out while researching this post, and the plot of basically all of them is the same: Gabrielle keeps using all of Deon's Old Spice products because they just smell so good and are also extremely effective moisturizers. This feels like the real signal that this campaign is targeting women, because it doesn't seem that appealing to tell a man "buy our product and your wife/girlfriend will keep using it all up." Ads where one person keeps getting their favorite product stolen from them are usually selling children's breakfast cereal, but it's not like Lucky Charms is trying to market itself to actual leprechauns.
The tagline, "Men have skin too," implies a probably overdue shift in thinking - it's okay for a man to have softer, healthier skin, rather than hands that could double as their own exfoliating gloves. To the extent that this ad is still aimed more at women, I guess the point is "this product will help your man have better skin and hey, it's so good even you could use it in a pinch!" Sort of reminds me of the old Secret deodorant "strong enough for a man, but made for a woman" tagline, only in reverse. "Moist enough for a woman, but made for a man!" To be fair, I can see why they didn't go with that one.
I do have to call bullshit on the entire setup of that ad, though. The premise is that Gabrielle Dennis' skin looks like that and you're telling me she doesn't travel with an entire trunk full of every possible moisturizing product? Okay.
For what it's worth, I don't think I've ever liked a Red Bull ad, not least because roughly 95% of them suggest that Red Bull will either make you into a genius or a sexual superhero. But this one might take the cake for sheer idiocy.
Parrot #2: "It's not like the good old days." Parrot #4: "It's not like the good old days!" Parrot #1: "It's not like the good old days." Parrots: [in unison] "It's not like the good old days!" Parrot #6: "Stop parroting everything!"
It's funny, you see, because they're parrots.
Parrot #6: "Instead, drink a Red Bull, and think for yourselves!"
Red Bull - a global brand that sold more than 11.5 billion cans last year alone - has the single biggest share of the energy drink market and is apparently the third-most valuable soft drink brand behind only Coke and Pepsi. There is nothing more grating than massive multinational corporations running ads claiming that true individuals use their products, just like hundreds of millions of other people.
[The parrots drink out of cans of Red Bull] Parrot #4: "Since when do you dictate what we do?" Parrot #2: "Exactly! You're not the boss of us!" Parrot #1: "Power to the people!" [Parrots #1-5 fly away]
Wow, that Red Bull sure inspired those parrots to stop saying the most generic conformist things and to start saying... the most generic nonconformist things. Thank goodness you were here, skinny cans of battery acid!
Parrot #6: "Ah, well... individuality often complicates things."
...what exactly is the message of this ad? Is Red Bull supposed to be a positive thing in this scenario? I've talked before about ads in which the people using the product are seen within the world of the ad to be unpleasant, and I've also talked before about ads which show the use of the product to be unpleasant, but somehow this one manages to do both. The parrots are annoying before they drink Red Bull, and they're annoying after they drink Red Bull. They also don't particularly seem to enjoy it or have any interest in thanking Parrot #6 for bringing it to them or helping to "vitalize their body and mind" (fuck off, by the way). I guess being forced to drink Red Bull is the only way you can truly have your eyes opened to the fact that you have no interest in drinking Red Bull. (The alternate explanation is simply that the Red Bull did not work, which in some ways would be a welcome turn from the brand's usual gross overstatement but is also a pretty weird choice for an ad for Red Bull.)
But then, ads have always been like this, right? Who can forget that famous Coke ad:
Kid: "Mr. Greene? You need any help?" Mean Joe Greene: "Uh-uh." Kid: "Want my Coke?" Mean Joe Greene: "No, no." Kid: "Really, you can have it." [Mean Joe drinks Coke] Kid: "Well, see you around." Mean Joe Greene: "Hey kid..." [Kid turns around] Mean Joe Green: "That fucking sucked. I'm gonna be dehydrated! Who the fuck do you think you are anyway? This is the players' tunnel, you little shithead. How did you even get back here? Go back to your shitty parents before I have security drag you out of here." [Kid bursts into tears] [Mean Joe gives the camera a grin and a thumbs-up; freeze frame] Peppy singers: "Have a Coke and a smiiiiiile!"
Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature based on the idea that song lyrics are a form of poetry. But I don't think Gioachino Rossini is getting that award anytime soon.
If you don't know the reference, the slogan that ends the ad is - at least I would assume! - taken from an old joke, namely:
Q: Where does the Lone Ranger take his trash? A: To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump!
The key to this joke, however, is that the punchline is sung as onomatopoeia for the snippet of Rossini's William Tell Overture, famously used as the Lone Ranger's theme song. In print, it doesn't work so well. And spoken out loud, bereft of context, it sounds completely ridiculous!
Other than that, this ad is fine for a local (or local-style, since technically it runs in various markets) commercial. It certainly communicates what The Dump is and what they sell, and gives clear reasons why you might want to shop there. I had always assumed the name was no more than a gag along the lines of naming your college town bar The Library - "Oh, where'd I get this couch? Picked it up at The Dump! Haw haw haw!" But this commercial reveals that's not why! Or at least, not exclusively why. I'm sure they thought of it, but apparently it's not that cheesily simple. So overall, high marks for the actual messaging.
But man, there's low-budget and then there's NO-budget. Rossini died in 1868 - his works are definitely in the public domain. You couldn't even find someone to toot this out on a recorder so you wouldn't have to awkwardly recite it?
