Sunday, October 3, 2010
HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE UNIVERSE WITHOUT A CONSPIRACY THEORY?: Are Tivo and Burger King property of the same corporate parent? Does some highly placed party in the BK marketing department have their entire retirement portfolio in companies that hold or exploit patents covering DVR technology? What dark secret, what network of cynical calculation explains this on-going effort to make live television unwatchable, and why it has taken the form of saturation advertising for this particular fast-food franchise's breakfast menu?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Burger King's ads have been pretty horrible for a while -- I'd say that they haven't had a good commercial since "Where's the Beef," except that "Where's the Beef" was a Wendy's commercial.
ReplyDeleteHey, remember when the "Have it Your Way" campaign's background song was "It's Your Thing?" That gets gross if we keep talking about it.
I just saw one that featured tentacles emerging from scrambled eggs. That's their strategy for making people want to eat their breakfast food?
ReplyDeleteMy favorite one is the hulu spot where they try to get you to personalize it by putting your name in.... but if you just wait out the time, then as the ad starts you can click "return to video." That's my favorite one.
ReplyDeleteHootie singing about the Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch, that was awesome. Flute solo? Not so much.
ReplyDeleteI don't have anything to say regarding the ads, but Zesty Sauce for my onion rings? That's a gamechanger.
ReplyDeleteThese spots have the sort of jingles -- JPSousa meets Barney the Dinosaur -- that insure I will never again willingly watch a commercial. Not since Subway's "Clay Henry" have I hated an ad this much. Maybe not even then.
ReplyDeleteIt's like the ad men ran a million focus groups (we need a mailman! a hippy with a flute! laughter with an eastern european accent! a parachutist! parkour! have we spent our budget yet? HOT PANTS AND A STRAWWWWYEAH!! FFS, convene another focus group!...) without thinking for a second about messaging. Then, at the last minute, broke and hung over, they picked up the client's outline of the "information" to be delivered and added carriage returns here and there until it fit the meter of a march composition that they'd previously licensed. No doubt they justified this to their client by pointing to research that shows the repetitive, driving cadence of a march reliably gets the attention or 80% of the fast food industry's most elastic demand demographic (morons). But what about the rest of us?
It's insulting that I'm supposed to sit through this, painful that I'm supposed to accept it as an interruption of the Jets game. (Have not seen the egg tentacles. If they devour a mime or crush a passing tour bus, might be I'd have the beginnings of a change of heart. Seems unlikely.)
In order to say something nice about BK, a giant of the American food service industry, allow me to point out that on the rare occassions that I eat like this I like their burgers better than McD's. Too bad their insipid ads put me off the brand by denting my enjoyment of football every Sunday. Stain. On. The. Brand.
These spots have the sort of jingles -- JPSousa meets Barney the Dinosaur -- that insure I will never again willingly watch a commercial. Not since Subway's "Clay Henry" have I hated an ad this much. Maybe not even then.
ReplyDeleteIt's like the ad men ran a million focus groups (we need a mailman! a hippy with a flute! laughter with an eastern european accent! a parachutist! parkour! have we spent our budget yet? HOT PANTS AND A STRAWWWWYEAH!! FFS, convene another focus group!...) without thinking for a second about messaging. Then, at the last minute, broke and hung over, they picked up the client's outline of the "information" to be delivered and added carriage returns here and there until it fit the meter of a march composition that they'd previously licensed. No doubt they justified this to their client by pointing to research that shows the repetitive, driving cadence of a march reliably gets the attention or 80% of the fast food industry's most elastic demand demographic (morons). But what about the rest of us?
It's insulting that I'm supposed to sit through this, painful that I'm supposed to accept it as an interruption of the Jets game. (Have not seen the egg tentacles. If they devour a mime or crush a passing tour bus, might be I'd have the beginnings of a change of heart. Seems unlikely.)
In order to say something nice about BK, a giant of the American food service industry, allow me to point out that on the rare occassions that I eat like this I like their burgers better than McD's. Too bad their insipid ads put me off the brand by denting my enjoyment of football every Sunday. Stain. On. The. Brand.