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10 Ads The US Won't See
prostoalex writes "Some ads made by world's leading advertising agencies for well-known brands will never be seen in the United States. The Gucci G-Spot turned out to be too risque, video for Drug-Free America was deemed too disgusting, Internet's favorite Honda "Cog" commercial won't air due to the high prices for a 2-minute spot, and Japanese commercials with American actors have contracts preventing the companies to run the same ads in the US. AdAge provides a link to the pictures and video (Windows Media .ASF format, alas) of the 10 best unaired commercials." I can get the ASFs working under VLC.
I was under the impression that the Honda "Cog" commercial wasn't released in the US was because the car which was being advertised was a UK-only model! Anyway, I've seen it, and it's very impressive if you can stand the low-quality file from the Honda site.
Like eagles on pogo-sticks! -- Glottis
Sick of seeing the same old ads on TV? Seems like every hockey game I see involves 5 minutes of ads, 3 minutes of which are repeats! Well I've got the solution!
All advertising must be done live. No pre-taped commercials, ever. Even if it's the same script read by the same person there will be some difference. Now if a company spends a mil or two on a commercial it'll really mean something.
Of course it'll never happen, but if it did I'd be alot happier with advertising.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Why not break up a block of late-night "paid programming," and broadcast some of the more enticing ads within that time so TiVo can pick them up separately.
Stick a line on the Now Showing screen labelled "Check out the ads THEY don't want you to see!" or something like that.
If the ads are compelling enough to straddle the advertisement/entertainment line, people will watch. I watched those BMW commercials that ran in the same slot a while back-- didn't make me run out and buy one, but they were entertaining.
~Philly
Some ads made by world's leading advertising agencies for well-known brands will never be seen in the United States.
So basically, the good ads aren't broadcast, and I have to Tivo-triple-fast-forward all the ones I *do* get on TV because they're such a tripe.
Here's a suggestion for TV networks : instead of trying to sue DVR manufacturers because it lets customers skip your crap, why don't you replace the crap with good ads (and no, I'm not talking about Budweiser or Taco Bell ads)? Of course, you may have to leave good taste behind once in a while, but I bet good ads would being better brand recognition with less airtime, meaning less ads for viewers overall and less DVR zapping.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Well... you're wrong
Take anything that has to do with WWII and the nazis, look at how France and Germany react to things like that. They're way more restrictive than we are. And Germany has serious limits on the realistic depiction of violence in video games, so that will certainly affect what can be advertised there.
We're pretty serious prudes, but we dont have the market totally cornered.
I made my first trip to States in September. I didn't have too much time to watch TV, but I kept it on when I was in my hotel room, and I noticed a few things about the commercials compared to Finnish ones.
:)
- Commercials every 5-7 minutes (and they lasted 5-7 minutes, too!)
- LOTS of car commercials. And the arguments were not about fuel economy, environment, or safety, but how fast and impressive they were.
The most absurd commercial I saw were clips advocating coal energy. The tagline was like "Electricity from coal: Cleaner, more
affordable and abudantly better.".
Also, regarding the article: I remember watching some sort of short documentary by Playboy a few years back, and they also covered commercials in Europe. I was quite fascinated when the narrator and commentaries were like "How can you even remember what they are advertising, this is hot stuff" - In a Rexona ad, two women get sweaty at the gym and afterwards go take a shower and use Rexona's soap. I don't think anyone in here would have considered that erotic or arousing, but apparently to American eyes it was like hard-core porn
I saw a woman get kicked out of shopping mall once for breast-feeding her baby. I was sat close by with my wife and we didn't even notice. She was just sat quietly next to her stroller feeding her kid.
With that kind of brute insensitivity to the naked body you really expect the U.S. to show ads that just might disgust an audience that thinks breast feeding in public is perverted?
...is just about the most intelligence-insulting thing I've ever seen. I mean, really... the truth of the matter is that the majority of widely used drugs don't cause considerable brain damage, or at least brain damage on the level that is wreaked by say, alcohol abuse.
I think it should be banned for sheer stupidity rather than for any sort of inappropriateness.
In America, you see many ads saying brand A (ours) is better than brand B (our competitor's), and I think there's nothing wrong with that. FWIW, in Japan, you aren't alowed to mention your competitor by name and trash them, because doing so is considered undignified.
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The main problem with coal (and Oil, for that matter) is that they both involve releasing large quantities of Carbon from geo-lock. Because Fossil fuels have been sealed away from the environment for so long the chemical balance of the atmosphere and the ecosystems in general have evolved to deal with less carbon abundance. The rate of release of the fosil fuel carbon is astounding in terms of evolutionary and environmental studies, and could have a number of long term bad effects (lower atmospheric oxygen levels on a global scale) too soon in the near future for a solution to have been devised. It is better (cleaner, cheaper, more affordable) to burn trees: modern oxidation methods can reduce carbon particulate polution to almost nil, and trees get their carbon from the air - making growing a tree and burning it again a zero delta for carbon levels.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
one for the poms...
Any truth to the story I've heard about a new Becks beer ad ? tagline (supposedly) goes
you don't need to be Posh to swallow Becks
I hear and read so many people bagging on television advertisements: too many, too long, poor quality, what's the deal with tampon ads during sport, etc.
I have a radical solution to television advertising. It has worked for me for almost 18 months now - and I think you know what's coming next...
Throw out your television.
Yeah, yeah - I get flamed by people irl about this too. The lady at the cigarette counter at my local supermarket told me just last night that for someone to lack a television in this modern day was "just tragic!"
I see less shit ads though...
"It is the prerogative of fools (or noobs) to utter truths that no one else will speak."
I hate to break it to you: you're not the majority. How many non-football fans watch the SuperBowl each year because of the commericials?
Along similar lines, I hate to break it to you but Superbowl ads do not reflect peoples' opinions of ads in general. I would tend to agree with Zangief, that most people consider most ads (excluding those rare ones such as Superbowl ads or Honda's "Cog") at best ignorable, and if possible would completely eliminate them altogether.
I think as technologies like TiVo start to take off there is going to be more and more pressure placed on adverising companies to come up with innovative ads that people won't mind sitting through.
I agree, and would welcome that. We even have a precedent for that, where daytime soaps (which, although I personally consider them not much more entertaining than ads, they do seem popular) started out as serial soap commercials.
The "Friends of Canadian Broadcasting" has a current TV ad campaign promoting home-grown drama television production. The spots are pretty funny and feed off the cliched ignorant-aboot-Canada American stereotype (in all four, a US director is in the great white north working on set on TV productions about Canada).
Sir John A. Macdonald (QuickTime 4.4MB):
Richard the Rocket(QuickTime 4.2MB):
Snow Gangsta (QuickTime 4.2MB):
Bobby Orr (QuickTime 2.8MB):
Although the idea itself was a bit novel, and hadn't been done before that I could remember, here is where it falls over
"take your top off for a chance to win $10000!"
Most people, obviously including this girl, would take that statement as referring to their "clothing" top. She was silly enough to take it literally - which is the lameness in the ad.
OTOH, if he had given her the drink and said "take the top off for a chance to win $100000!", it would have worked better because the "top" became ambiguous. Still, it then becomes insulting to either that beautiful woman specifically, implying the dumb "beautiful" woman stereotype (she was brunette, if she was blonde there would have been a huge outcry), or all woman in general, as it implies they all would be silly enough abandon their dignity in a restaurant for money (and only $10 000 - I'd suggest for most people the "abandon dignity" threshold is $1 000 000).
Now, I don't think I'm a prude, but there are two things in TV ads that I find offensive, as a (male) child of the 70s, brought up in the post feminist era :
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
...look no farther than how American ads portray men and fathers. You mentioned role reversals, but the issue warrants more of a mention than that. Men and fathers are portrayed as helpless idiots, inferior parents and "humorously" subjected to violence.
There's the add where the woman takes pictures of items so her brainless husband can find the items in the store, the Dodge minivan ad with the caption "gets more work done than most husbands", the candy bar ad where a squirrel chomps on a guys nuts, the (insurance?) ad where the guy doesn't care that he's spilled hot coffee on his crotch, and worst of all, the Progressive Insurance ad where a vindictive woman tortures her ex with a voodoo doll site - including taking a pair of wire cutters to his testicles.
If women in this country were subjected to as much humiliation, or female genital mutilation was treated as a joke in a commercial, there would be blood in the streets and NOW would be storming these advertizing agencies with tanks.
Man, where was this? I was in Canada when I was 16 and I scoured the tube looking for any nudity. The only stuff I ever found was some late night (scrambled) movies. From what I could tell, they were even more conservative than the US. Maybe it was the region I was in (Calgary--Canada's version of Houston, TX) or something. The only really notable thing was that some really odd stuff got on TV just because it was made in Canada since the Canadian equivelent of the FCC requires some percentage of the TV air time to be filled with Canadian stuff (to avoid becoming Americans I guess).
I read the internet for the articles.
We have a live tonight type show in Australia called "The Panel" it's done by the same people behind the movies "The Dish" and "The Castle". It consists of a group of 5 or so people sitting around a desk talking about current events.
One of the female hosts recently had her first child, and one night after coming back from an ad break, she was sitting in her usual spot breast feeding her baby.
Quite possibly the first time on live national television.
Its amazing to read who people think are responsible for bad ad's. Its always the ad companies fault. I would for an Ad company (global, multinational, yada yada) and while we may be responsible for some bad ads, there are always 2 facts that prevent the making of brilliant, intelligent and funny ad's. Money and Clients. If the client doesn't screw you down on cost, they appear both during the shooting (and suggest their non-creative ideas) and then at post production (and again suggest their non-creative, fucked up ideas) which you try to argue with, but of course seeing they are paying for it, you have to sit there and watch your masterpiece being turned to shit. Until the day that clients hand over the cash and shutup, bad ads are always going to exist.
Its a fact of life. Clients want to be creative and will ignore the advice of a 15yr creative veteran with 40 different global awards and push their fucked up changes. It sucks, but thats the job. Don't like it, then quit. There's always an endless supply of 18yr old creative wannabe's with award school certs wanting to get in. (and if your a really penny punching Ad agency, their free as in beer)
According to another article at AdAge.com (the same periodical as the main story comes from):
CINCINNATI (AdAge.com) -- Recent internal research by Procter & Gamble Co. indicates that consumers who fast-forward through ads with digital personal video recorders such as TiVo still recall those ads at roughly the same rates as people who see them at normal speed in real time.
Source: March 17, 2003
Can't link/copy the whole article, because they charge a few $$ for it.
In the land of the free press most of the free press (bar CNN) wont accept advertising thats unpatriotic or critical of corporate greed. They use bogus excuses about it being too discursive and issue orientated - crap like that.
Fact is corporate America gets its butt kissed by the press it gives advertising money to; not surprising but certainly hypocritical.
And the press doesnt want to piss off an unelected thug like Bush, well OK, elected by the Supreme Court if not the people.