Every Tuesday morning someone comes by and throws a plastic bag of Food-Day into our yard. That is the weekly lifestyle/advertising supplement to our city's major newspaper. It consists of a few pages of newspaper containing recipes too complicated or unhealthy for me to want to cook, gardening tips which rarely have anything to do with getting edible radishes to grow, a few unfunny comics and a crossword puzzle my wife regards with disdain. The part I like is the ads. I usually ignore the ads for stores I never go to or don't even know where one is, but avidly search the pack of general product ads for the Stupidest Ad of Them All. Like this recent treasure:
I thought the Black Football Grandma with Photoshopped-On Sombrero was going to be the worst ad of the day until I saw this. I don't know what a normal person would say to that but what I say is oh my god why would anyone want that crap in their house. Little dog shaped boxes just big enough to put one or two tiny useless pieces of crap in. Crap in crap. A whole shelf full. Then I look closely and see this:
I don't know what a normal person would say to that either but what I say is oh my god that is not even a picture of the product, it is a picture of an actual dog all photoshopped up to make it look like a crappy useless miniature box. And then I think about the person whose job it is to take a picture of a dog and make it look like a crappy useless miniature box that is being held open by fingers that look like they are picking up one of those little paper discs from a paper punch if they still even have those, and which certainly do not look like they are opening a miniature dog box. I think about that person putting those sparkle gleams on that collar and sticking that ball in there and wonder if they ever think about what they are doing the way I think about it. It is not fake miniature dog boxes which are the stupidest ad this week, but Lizard Walker.
I thrust this at my wife and watched with delight as she tried to figure out what the hell this is an ad for. I will tell you now this is an ad for paper cups. A room full of people all agreed that this Lizard Walker was their best idea and it would really make people want to buy their paper cups. It would lend a tone of daring eccentricity and strange competence to their paper cups. I admit it's a good picture - the yellow-green-beige color scheme is beautiful. She is really striding along there to keep up with her blatantly immobile iguanas, which are scrambling along at the ends of their taut pink leashes, without actually moving, and the leashes merely touch her perfect fashion model hand and magically vanish. She is in control of her lizards and her life and she brings her own coffee in a stylish paper cup. Make a note of it on your shopping list please - paper cups (lizard walking kind).
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St. Carlin once said, "If you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you."
What happened at the paper cup meeting is the same thing that happens at every advertising meeting. They all boil down to one thing. "Why do we have to be so creative? Why don't we just tell the truth about the product? Because the truth is not good for sales."
From a profile of George Meyer in the New Yorker in 2000:
He hates advertising, which he views as a global force of destruction. ("I hate it because it irresponsibly induces discontent in people for one myopic goal, and then it leaves the debris of that process out there in the culture. An advertiser will happily make you feel bad about yourself if that will make you buy, say, a Bic pen.") This antipathy has made Meyer a connoisseur of brazen marketing; he is especially interested in examples of ad copy in which the word-to-falsehood ratio approaches one. He once showed me a magazine advertisement for a butter substitute called Country Crock. "It's not from the country; there is no crock," he said. "Two words, two lies."
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