Patrick Somerville, writing in The Simon, is not too happy with Ameriprise's TV advertising.
It is worth reading his article and looking at the ads.
I had to smile reading Mr Somerville’s comments. His basic premise is that it is wrong/tacky/obscene to use the imagery and memories of the radical ideologies of the ‘60s to sell, mutual funds. I not sure what he thought it would be OK for it to sell, iPODS maybe or membership of the Greens, but nothing so revolting as financial products.
In my view the ads are the ‘play safe’ type that have been carefully created to have the right ethnic mix, multigenerational links, images of the 60s icons etc etc. They get 0 out of 10 for creativity and 9 out of 10 for ticking all of the boxes that your average 30 year old thinks the 60s were all about. Including the writer of the article (aged 26).
The writer then came out with a few classics: “There are no shots of aged volunteers excitedly clothing the homeless or aged environmentalists gleefully protesting the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because it’s not fun”. Yep, strange that isn’t it. I guess the creatives producing the ads must have at least attended class 101 about advertising.
The real killer was his comments about one of the ads using fear (in this case of becoming infirmed and immobile). Just below this comment was an advertisement on The Simon web site trying to get me to buy virus software since all sorts of nasties could be crawling around inside my computer? Thank God fear is still alive!
We have the crazy situation of young creatives producing ads about an era they didn’t experience and people criticising the ads who are equally devoid of knowledge. Now here is the difference that comes with age. In the 1960s that would have annoyed me today it makes me laugh.Dick Stroud www.20plus30.com
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