It was quite a while ago when I broke down and wrote about ads that annoyed me, just because they annoyed me. I'm back again.
Exhibit A: Nike Presto. These ads make a sleazy pop-culture appeal to what we used to call Japanese-style animation. Is there a connection to the Pokemon phenomenon? Eh. Who cares? The ads are transparently pandering. Nike is cool. Nike is so cool Nike doesn't care how uncool Nike is. Cool.
On the other hand, some of the spots are downright creepy, or at least confusing. "Brutal Honey" threatens to sting viewers. The naughty "Unholy Cumulus" is illicitly peeing. It's a shoe, people. A shoe. Nike is cool. (Hehhehhehhehheh.)
Exhibit B: Bad Andy. The music and setting of this ad make an even sleazier pop-culture appeal, to blaxploitation pictures (making a minor comeback with the new "Shaft" and Tarantino's homage a year ago). It's subtle, largely because the presentation itself is so terrible. The ads have the half-baked feel of Saturday Night Live skits. Just like SNL, they have a single notion - in this case, that a pizzeria is unaccountably menaced by the impish misbehavior of a stuffed animal - and no actual jokes. The gag, the whole gag, is to show the stuffed animal. (By the way, what is it? A monkey, a bear, what? What is that ugly damn thing that haunts my dreams?!)
These are "branding" ads, of course: they tell us nothing whatsoever about the products. Either that or Domino's has a stuffed bear-monkey monster thing making pizza and Nike has a shoe that urinates. When ads aren't about the products, they're usually about the brands - giving meaning to meaningless products or building a reputation or connecting the brand's self-concept to the subconscious desires, hopes and fears of an audience.
But I neither desire, hope, nor realistically fear the peeing shoe or menaced pizza. Nor do I understand what I'm supposed to make of Nike or Domino's now. (I have to admit that sometimes the ads get crossed in my mind and Bad Andy is peeing on my double-cheese & pepperoni - which really is a terrifying image.)
Exhibit C: Dodge - Different. Obviously this makes no real sense, but what makes even less sense is the repeated assertion "Not a perfect world!" If you're watching these as carefully as I am (i.e., WAAAAY too carefully), you've caught on that Dodge Viper is not included in their big sale. That's why it's "Not a perfect world!" But the TV ads don't clarify this - perhaps in hopes that someone will unsuspectingly buy a Viper and pay full price. (If you recall Lee Iacocca's 10 years as CEO of Chrysler, this makes revelatory sense to you.)
Without that piece of information, the insistence that this isn't a perfect world suggests that there's something terribly wrong with Dodge vehicles. If you've driven a Dodge, you may agree. Moreover, for me, the word different is automatically associated with "differently abled." That, and the moronoic repetition of the ad (I suppose it's an attempt to ape techno music, and if so, if you'll excuse the expression, Egad!) call to my mind autism. I'm not kidding, that's what I get from all this: autism.
Which explains why I bang my head on the floor for 20 minutes whenever I see these ads, but lordy, it doesn't explain what made these otherwise putatively sane corporations agree to these campaigns.
Diffre- Diffre- Diffre- Diffre- Diffre- !!
Ow!