Madison Avenue and the Advertising Business - Does it even work at all?


Posted On: Tuesday - February 14th 2017 6:19PM MST
In Topics: 
  TV, aka Gov't Media  Salesmen  Curmudgeonry

This article, is about modern-day commercial making, and a parody of it on Saturday Night Live (still on TV, who knew?). In particular the parody was of the agenda-driven commercial with no information about the product being sold. Of course, all of the agendas would be left-wing, globalist garbage.

Now this is something I don’t understand very well regarding the real advertising business, but I’m sure the SNL skit is a pretty realistic parody of it. I’ve heard many times that it’s the “name recognition” that gets people to buy. They say it doesn’t matter whether the ad has anything to do with the product or service, they just want to get that product (or service) brand name in your head.

Someone tell me how do you think that really works? (My contention is that it doesn’t, and things sell or don’t sell, and Madison Avenue has squat-all to do with it these days.) You’ve got your Coke-cola and you’ve got your Pepsi – who has not heard of either one? Is the idea to associate this one, say Pepsi (which sucks, BTW) with this musical slut artist so people remember, “Hey, “Lady Madonna”/”Pepsi”, yeah whenever I see “Pepsi”, I think “Lady Madonna”. OK, so I’m at the store, and my mind goes “Here’s the Pepsi; “Lady Madonna likes this!” “but … it sucks, if I’m gonna drink caffeinated sugar water, I’ll take Coke-cola.” “I like Lady Madonna, but she can go buy whatever the hell she drinks, who cares?”

What about products/services that most people have NOT heard of yet? Yeah the idea of advertising is to let people know what you’re selling. “Here are some grimy amigos climbing over a fence, cleaning up all their trash on the way across the Colorado (river) desert, finding a new home, cutting down on Carbon (for the Carbophobics out there in TV land) when they get there and enriching the living s__t out of our lives” NOW “Dog Pile II Web Services – put your work on the Thunderstorm Cloud!” How does that help me as a consumer?

I found no problem with the old ads that would try to sell you on stuff based on WHAT IT DOES!. Yeah, there was a lot of bull involved some of the time, but at least it was informative.

A good comment back on the article page on unz.com by commenter Mr. WowJustWow was:
The point of a Coca-Cola commercial isn’t to convince you that Coca-Cola is great, it’s to convince you that other people have seen the commercial. Ever heard the phrase “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM?” Well, no party host ever got a dirty look for loading a cooler with Coca-Cola instead of RC Cola.


What about that lizard though? Even past my TV-watching daze (get it?) I still have seen that 6 in tall British lizard talking about auto insurance on friends’ or hotel TVs. He’s very entertaining and cute. However, it has not changed anything about my purchasing of auto insurance no matter what new hijinks that cold-blooded limey is up to. What would a lizard know about insurance, is what I wanna know.

What’s the point?

Possibly Madison Avenue Big-Advertising is the biggest scam since Global Climate DisruptionTM or even Social Security. We at PeakStupidity do not readily fall for scams and hoaxes. The last one was probably our deal with the alleged son of the deposed King of Nigeria. There was no way to see that coming, just as it went with this guy:


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