What’s With All the Sarcastic Advertising?
I live in New York. That means I take the subway system quite a bit. It also means that I my eyes frequently wander past streams of ads, often without my conscious mind truly reading what they say. But recently, I actually paid attention to what I was reading. And there is a lot of sarcasm in advertising. It’s everywhere.
It seems like everyone is in on the fun. Banks, beer companies, storage facilities, basically any business you can think of. Even the MTA takes part. What ever happened to honest advertising that just tells me about a product. Did that ever even really exist?
I understand that I’m from New York, so the demographic reads clear. I must be liberal, “progressive,” cynical, and on the go, right? And hey, I pretty much am all of those things. But not everything in life has to be a quip or a turn of the phrase. Turns out I can understand full sentences and varying levels of complexity.
If I understand Mad Men correctly, one of the first in this chain was the famous “Lemon” ad from Volkswagen. Even reading over that ad now, it has a certain charm to it, and I can see why it was so popular. It’s funny and a bit witty, but there is an undercurrent to this ad that is completely lacking in the modern ads I am subjected to every day. It still infuses a sense of trust and even companionship with the viewer. It’s has a large body of copy right underneath the ad that, if you bother to read, expalins why the Volkswagen is the car to trust. Sure, it approaches the subject humorously, but at the end of the day, everything relates back to the car and what you can expect from the product.
I saw an ad for TD Bank recently. It read (I might be paraphrasing a bit):
New Yorkers use their fire escape as a balcony. Now that’s convenient.
You see, TD Bank’s slogan is “America’s most convieneint bank.” Get it? They are naming two things that are slightly convienient and juxtaposing one another.
How is that in the least bit helpful? I know absoultely nothing about the bank, what it does, or if I can trust it. But hey, they must be friendly because their pretty quick to turn a phrase. It has completely removed the part that is supposed to come after the quip: an actual explantion of the product. Can we have those back please?
All I’m saying is if an ad is simple and honest, I’ll be much more drawn to it. And yes, I do read them, so why not actually put some useful information up there, instead of adding to the chaotic stream I’m already forced to deal with on a daily basis.
