posted by lee on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 7:00am
Here at Overthinking It, we’ve been talking about a disturbing trend in advertising for several years. We saw several (nine, to be exact) instances of this in last Saturday’s Super Bowl. Here’s an example:
Advertiser: Doritos
Message: “Eating Doritos will get you shocked by a dog.”
Huh? Why is this a good thing? How is this supposed to sell Doritos? Well, we’re not really sure, but we’ve coined a phrase that aptly describes this perplexing phenomenon:
“Bad Things Happen To You When You Use Our Product.”
Let’s explore this trend further with some more examples.
posted by sheely on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 10:08pm
One of the videos that made it into our Super Bowl ad roundup was the Conan O’Brien ad for Bud Light, in which his agent/manager/ambiguous guy in a suit convinces him to make an embarrassing Bud Light Ad by assuring him that it will “only be seen in Sweden”.
The message of this spot seems to be “Drink Bud Light because it is a beer for awesome-non-Eurotrash-American Dudes!” In the world of the commercial, the only way that the effete Swedes could be convinced to drink Bud Light is with fire, mesh tops, and cheesy techno. But does anyone really still hold this view of Europeans?