I was watching a TV commercial the other day, and I can't for the life of me remember the brand being promoted. That's often the way it goes with advertising for me: the message somehow becomes disassociated from the product. After all, what does a gecko or a caveman have to do with auto insurance, for example...
But at least with this commercial, I was able to retain an association with the general product, although that really wouldn't help out the company shelling out the big bucks, thinking that their fancy advertising was actually bringing in customers. The commercial was about a car that was so high-quality that it minimized...no, completely blotted out outside noise. Examples of noises being excluded from the happy driver's privileged ears were shown, with the last one being a loud jack-hammer being used right outside the car window, in a heavily urban traffic setting. The driver smiled (was it a smug smile? I can't remember) as he heard NOTHING but saw the worker jack-hammering away. A virtual sound-proof driving experience. And he blissfully drove off, with the last sound heard in the commercial being the wailing siren of an emergency vehicle. The implication here was clear: with this car, you can even ignore ambulances, fire engines, and the police! Well, let's add warning horn blasts from other drivers as well!
I didn't know that emergency vehicle sirens were sounded just to annoy drivers in "inferior" vehicles. Apparently, though, if you're the proud owner of the special automobile being advertised, you have entered a different class of humanity, one that is entitled to total insulation from unwelcome sounds...as well as unwelcome civic responsibilities...
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Yeah, two things here:
ReplyDeleteOne is the metaphor that your symbol creates... you can hit or miss with it. What does a gecko or a caveman have to do with insurance? Well, the gecko is a verbal thing: "gecko" and "Geico" sound similar, so the "Geico gecko" works at that level. For the caveman, well, what does Tony the Tiger have to do with Frosted Flakes? What does a rancher on horseback have to do with Marlboro cigarettes? Sometimes there's no related metaphor, but the connection works anyway. Sometimes no.
I'm with you on the caveman thing: I think it's one of the dumbest ad campaigns around.
The second thing is the "unintended consequences" thing. The way you describe the ad makes me think that it's (1) obvious hyperbole (no one will really believe that the jackhammer noise would be completely eliminated like that) and, thus, (2) meant to be building up a joke (the "you can't even hear the sirens" part is the punch line, after setting up the hyperbole with the jackhammer).
In the game "Propaganda", this technique is called "passing from the acceptable to the dubious." In some cases, it's a fallacy in argument, but as a persuasion technique it's usually used to try to link the dubious situation to the acceptable ones. For example, there was an old ad for Bayer aspirin in which people listed false statements, such as "If man were meant to fly, he'd have wings." The list consisted of old standards that everyone would recognize as commonly quoted false statements (the acceptable), and finished with "all aspirins are alike" (the dubious). The point was to say that this was as obviously false as the others.
But in the case of the car ad, it seems clear to me that they're just making a joke. A bad joke, maybe, but, well, it's an ad.
I find car ads to be mostly bad anyway, in the sense that I never remember which car they want me to buy. I might see 4 or 5 car ads, and when I'm done I just remember that I saw a bunch of car ads. Lexus? Mercedes? Chevy? Whatever. «shrug»
The auto insurance commercial that really grabs me, both with its relevance and its humor, is the Allstate "Mayhem" character. Whoever dreamed up that one deserves an award at the Advertisers Academy presentations (or something like that, if it really exists).
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