Marketing Drones

Full Disclosure: Being trained as an Engineer, I must legally despise all marketing departments everywhere.

Aside from my training, I feel the need to rant.

Ad #1: Radio ad for some car company (Pontiac I believe, which I only remember if I think through the whole stupid ad and remember the punchline). It starts with "are you tired of being asked for the square root of an isosceles triangle?" NO!!! No I am NOT! Why? Because anyone with a grade 7 education can tell you that you can't take the square root of a SHAPE! It's like asking for the perimeter of blue or the area of 5. It makes NO SENSE.

Granted, the commercial is supposed to be narrated by a mathematical moron, since it ends with "The G6, so you only have to worry about 2 letters... and uh.. 6 is a number." Fine, I get the HILARITY of that ad. Except that starting off with a statement that makes NO SENSE AT ALL doesn't work. You need to set the tone of the ad first, by pointing out that the narrator is clueless, not having it sound like you're actually appealing to people who are sick of crunching numbers. It causes anyone with the slightest bit of mathematical interest to stop listening.

Ad #2: Viagra on CNBC constantly. Viagra's had some good ads. Tongue-in-cheek spots where women are smiling and laughing as they head home to their middle-aged-or-older husbands. Men running through the streets in a direct ripoff of Simpsons episodes. Even this "language of Viagra" ads where people spout gibberish with hand gestures and intonation that suggests they're going into graphic detail about the "angry pirate" they pulled last night were amusing. But this latest one has a bunch of older down-home country-style musicians sitting in a dimly-lit recording studio singing a cover of Viva Las Vegas as Viva Viagra. At first glimpse, this seems fine, if somewhat disturbing to any Vegas junkie. But then I made the cardinal sin of thinking about it. Who the hell would record a song lauding Viagra? You and your 4 band buddies rent some studio time and decide to jam to a cover of an Elvis song subbing in Viagra-related lyrics? The best part is the engineers (small "e") at the board nodding their heads along as everyone has that "awww yeah" look on their face.

Most ads get me picturing a pitch meeting where some dumbass hotshot suggest an ad and everyone high-fives one another with how awesomely creative they are, while some guy with a half a brain sits in the corner shaking his head and wondering how he can escape from the marketing hell he is in. I feel for that guy. I kinda wish the rest of them would high-five each other so hard they get knocked out the 30th floor window.