Tipping the Scale at…?
Our consumerism-driven economy (bless its acquisitive heart) is much reviled in some quarters for what the old Esquire Magazine termed “wretched excess”. (Esquire even dispensed tongue-in-cheek awards to the most “Wretchedly Excessive” pop-cultural phenomenon each year.)
Naturally, being an ad man, I say the more excess the better …up to a point. In creating tv ads, however, I think consideration is due to the issue of scale. In the 1953 jazz classic “Satin Doll”, we hear the line “She won’t go to Harlem in ermines and pearls.” Back then, of course, the allusion was to inappropriate ostentation (ermines and pearls would have presumably been acceptable at President Eisenhower’s Inaugural Ball the year before the song came out.)
Today, if an ad agency is tasked with, let’s say, influencing young people to volunteer to defend their country, it seems to me that taking a U.S. Marine Drill Team from midtown Manhattan to Monument Valley (as in the Corps’ latest recruitment spot) is fully justified. Almost irrespective of the scale of the production (and granted these are tax dollars), it’s hard to call it “excessive”, if the result boosts USMC enlistments. Conversely, spending a bazillion bucks on DGI animation to follow a bottle of Coke (and granted, now we’re talking stockholder dollars) through a Baron Munchausen/Willy Wonka dream-world vending machine …while I readily concede the brilliance of the execution… strikes me as, well, somewhat excessive in an aesthetic sense.
But I should stick to business here, and from a business standpoint, I also feel that a little sensitivity to appropriate proportionality between a creative idea and an advertised product can score at least subliminal points with consumers. And if I were smart, talented and lucky enough to have Coke or Budweiser as a client, I hope I’d resist the temptation to automatically pursue whatever creative vision promised to let me spend the most money, and/or deploy the most exotic digital tools.
Instead, I might try to emulate a black & white, 60-sec spot for Johnson’s Wax that won ad biz awards more than 30 years ago. In a single-camera wide shot that would have pleased Jean Renoir, we see a woman leaving a living room in which she’s just applied a coat of floor wax… presumably the old fashioned type that needed at least an hour to dry before being walked on. At that moment, she hears the phone (no custom ring tones in those days), and begins a frantic scramble back across the room to answer the call. As she clamors over sofas, stacked-up chairs and rolled-up rugs, a voiceover describes the fast-drying features of Johnson’s new product (which she’s used but apparently didn’t read the label). Finally reaching the phone just as it stops ringing, she slips and accidentally steps on what she assumes is the still-wet floor. Reflexively pulling back her foot, she tries the surface again and is startled to realize …it’s already dry!
Now, if you’re too young to remember a world without voice-mail, answering machines, Caller ID and Last Call Return Service, take my word for it that this simple, minute-long TV movie depicting the frustration of arriving too late at a ringing phone (and having no way of knowing who called) provided a totally compelling dramatic premise that held the attention of the target audience of (dare I say “housewives”?) through to the very last word of the advertiser’s message.
To be sure, many great commercials are made using state-of-the-art DGI (see samples from around the world at firebrand.com.) And for the record, I love the Geico lizard, and during the Super Bowl, I, too, rooted for the “I think I can” Clydesdale who, coached by the Budweiser Dalmatian, finally makes the team. And yet, at the end of that spot, I felt vaguely discomfited by the disproportion of spending millions on animal trainers, locations, DGI effects … plus lord knows how much for usage rights to the music and theme from “Rocky”… to sell bottles of beer.
On the other hand, at the telecast of the last Summer Olympics, I was among the millions moved by the image of Muhammad Ali lighting the Torch at the opening ceremonies. And yet, I wonder what my emotions might have been had I seen that same “concept” used in a commercial for “BBQ Buddy’s Instant Fire-Starter”? Again, I suspect the difference has to do with proportion.
I respect the axiom that “in matters of taste there can be no judgment”; and I don’t mean to imply the remotest affinity between my attitude on this subject, and private eye Sam Spade’s comment in The Maltese Falcon: “It never fails …the cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter”.
In the end, maybe I’m just jealous of creative people who enjoy access to virtually unlimited production budgets with which to indulge their most extravagant creative visions …and I might do the same if given the opportunity. Fortunately or unfortunately, however, it’s a moot point: my clients don’t have that kind of money.
Tags: media, TV commercials