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.

Comments

But...

[Click 0 Nett]

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.

Re:But...

[gidds]

Yes, but what you see is only 2 of them. (There's one join in the middle; but there is no other camera trickery or effects; it's all physically happening as you see it. Quite an achievement.)

The solution to TV advertising

[Jonah Hex]

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

This is wrong

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:This is wrong

[edo-01]

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.

This and other posts I see all the time on Slashdot hit that most hit of nails sqaure on the head. The market (that'd be us) wants to be able to watch our shows when it suits us and skip the crappy commercials so we buy PVRs. The Industry responds by suing PVR manufacturers, putting the commercials IN the shows themselves and generally jamming it's fingers in it's ears and humming really loud. And yet these same people, so terrified of losing advertising viewers, when confronted with the evidence that there are many commercials that not only do consumers want to see, they actually want to download them and pass them around to each other - (ie, the same people who skip over crappy ads like the good ads so much they will happily spend their own time and resources to distibute them) - the industry responds by trying to shut down the websites that make this possible (remember what they did to the first incarnation of adcritic) and if they ever do decide to make them available online they do so in some crappy streaming format. It must be just me, but if I'd spent a million dollars to produce a spot so funny/compelling/whatever that ordinary people are going out of their way to see, I'd make damnned sure it was available on the net in every format possible, via webistes, bittorrent, kazaa and carrier pigeon.

Faced with their markets avalanching away from their beloved business models to third party on-demand digital alternatives the various industries (RIAA, networks, advertisers et al) have made the decision that it's the consumer who is wrong and therefore the only solution is to re-apply their failed methodology with even more vigour only now with DRM, region encoding, lawsuits and "re-education" campaigns.

Networks and advertisers should be partnering with PVR makers, not fighting them - every PVR should not only report back (anonymously) exactly how many people are watching what show, but what commercials they are skipping and which ones they are stopping to actually see. Let the advertiser's message live or die by the quality of that message; no-one watches your ad? Tough. Make a better one. (I'm talking to whoever made the current crappy "Intern" Dell commercials here)

The networks also like to bleat on about trying to fund their shows from dropping advertising revenues. I worked on a show for years, and I can tell you that not only was money pissed against the wall, it was more often than not fed into high pressure hoses and blasted directly into the furnace. There's no way these shows actually cost these huge amounts to make. It's just from inefficiancies on set, all the way up to the top-heavy upper echelon parasites, vast amounts of production money is either wasted or siphoned off as "fees". If networks really are worried about the cost of producing these shows versus the amount of money they can recoup from selling advertising they could probably start by firing a few VPs, (for christ's sake, these people are simply content aggregators - how many "development execs" do they need to just buy shows from production companies and put em on the air?) and actually putting some damnned oversight into how their production budgets get spent.

Re:What about ads you can only see here?

[Zarhan]

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 :)

Re:Shit nuggets taste better than testicles?!

[Basehart]

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?

Re:Clean coal burning

[SkArcher]

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.

Becks Beer Ad

[mge]

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

Re:What about ads you can only see here?

[pipingguy]

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):

Actually, I found it quite lame

[anti-NAT]

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 :

• Ads that imply women are stupid, as mostly they are not, and no more than men.
• Ads where if the gender roles were reversed, there would be huge outcry that the ad is sexist. Diet Coke ads in Australia have usually suffered from this in recent years. The "a group of men sexually objectifying an attractive woman" roles have been reversed, and Coke have seemed to get away with it. Reverse it "back to normal" and the ad would have been off the screen in no seconds flat.

if you like sexism...

[Scudsucker]

...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.

Doesn't matter

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.