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Last Modified: Oct 1, 1995 |
Friends |
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Hey kids, Skipster comin at ya!
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Ah yes, there it is - commercials. In particular, commercials
that attempt to speak to the X-generation (I just
dig that name). Have you noticed how wide awake and upbeat
these supposed slackers are? For instance, the weird chick in
the VW Golf ad.
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First off, I've seen her acting in other things.
Now I know that all of these people in commercials are actors
but they are shooting for the illusion of reality right? The
thing is, the advertisers really ought to know that
twentysomethings can pick out actors in commercials in
a heartbeat. Hell, for us it's like seeing old friends on the
street, our dividing line between illusion and reality is tenous
at best. So the least thay could do is get real unknowns to
play these slacker types in their ads.
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Second, where the hell did she get all that energy? I know, she
says at the end that she should cut back on the caffeine, but
how many Xers do you know with that much energy no matter how
much coffee they drink. For most of us, we need a gallon or
two a day just to begin dealing with life. I don't want to think
how much you would have to drink to be that damn peppy.
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Third and finally, when is VW going to realize that they make
cheap Volvos and stop trying to be hip? Sorry guys, but your
cars are hideous boxy contraptions that have just enough curves
to keep them from being distinctive. You want an ad campaign?
I'll give you an ad campaign!
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Have some middle-aged schmuck type stand in front of an array of all of
your cars. He will then say this: "We know that VW's are ugly and
boxy, we know that we haven't had a fresh design since the Beetle,
but our cars are reasonably cheap and probably won't fall apart
before they're paid off. What the heck more do you want from a
car than that anyway?" I'd buy one, that is if I could afford to
even think of a car with less than 50,000 miles on it, I'd buy one.
I don't mean to single out VW of course, all of the car commercials
are bad, I especially love the ones that show twentysomethings
getting all hot for dual airbags, yeah that's something my friends
and I worry about when looking at cars. "Well but gee Bob, that
Viper doesn't have dual airbags you know."
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I suppose you could make the argument that it is impossible to
market to a generation that just doesn't seem to give a shit, but
you would be wrong. This brings us back to Friends (you see, I
knew there was a point). This show is one of the greatest marketing
jobs I have ever seen. We watch Friends not because it is a great
show, we watch because they keep it just close enough to reality
for us to believe we could all have friends like that. I was having
coffee with a friend a while back and he said that Friends wasn't
even close to reality. I proceeded to list all of the problems that
the cast had gone through in the previous season. He finally admitted
that perhaps that aspect was somewhat real, but insisted life just
wasn't that witty. I told him it's simple really, if someone were
to follow any six friends around for a week and then edit out the
boring parts, they could probably come up with half an hour of
brilliantly funny stuff.
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I guess that you can look at it two ways.
Either we're all living a TV show or TV has gotten really boring.
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Skippy
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