Well, I’ve just gotten back from the Olympics.
Four days actually in Atlanta, and the entire two-plus weeks on u.s. soil, with no television choice except nbc (Nobody Buys Canadians.)
I can therefore fully understand why this was called the most commercial Olympics ever.
The hype was indeed incredible. I doubt if the ancient Greeks ever foresaw an Olympiad with its own official onion sauce.
But it wasn’t the quantity of the hype that bothered me. (After all, some of my best friends are commercialists.) It was the quality. The stuff just wasn’t very good.
When you’ve got a quarter billion people glued to their tv sets, and six years to plan your message, you really ought to be able to come up with something a little more innovative than people singin’ and dancin’ around Atlanta (Diet Coke) or wistful tributes to athletic excellence (McDonald’s and just about everybody else).
Unlike the athletes themselves, the u.s. ad guys seemed totally unwilling to take any chances. ‘Hey, instead of going for a new idea, let’s throw money at the screen and see what happens.’
Again and again, bigger seemed to be confused with better. My personal Gold Excessie went to Frito-Lay, for Rold Gold pretzels.
It had to have cost seven figures, in u.s. bucks.
They started with Jason Alexander, from Seinfeld, who had been pretty good for them in an earlier spot, coming out of the stands to stop hockey pucks.
Then they added John Cleese, as some kind of an Olympic judge. Then they threw in Scottie Pippen, because it seemed mandatory that he be in everybody’s commercial. (Chicago Bulls are big, but Jordan’s too expensive and Rodman’s too controversial.)
Then they staged some kind of mass protest about ‘Pretzel Boy’ (Alexander), and then he wound up in a gym with a bunch of toddlers sinking miraculous half-court jump shots. (The special effects on that scene alone must have gone $100K.)
It was big. It was impressive. It was brand-unrelated. It was incomprehensible.
Also, the advertising barrage suffered from the great disease of the ’90s: Why bother to think, let the computer do it.
The Atlanta Games’ own mascot symbolized this little trend.
He/she/it was introduced way back in Barcelona, proudly proclaimed to be a pure computer creation. He/her/its name was Whatizzit. This was very hip, very nineties, very Generation X, you see.
Whatizzit was a futuristic being, created by machines, rejecting all traces of humanity. Guess what. Humanity, in return, rejected all traces of Whatizzit.
They finally had to get actual people to redesign Whatizzit, turning him/her/it into something resembling Murphy the Molar from the dentist’s office.
They also renamed him Izzy, which is warm and vaguely ethnic. They even had Izzy write a column in the Atlanta paper. Izzy still sucked.
Similarly, dozens of tv commercials used computerized graphics, in lieu of concepts.
One particularly horrible one turned an ordinary man into something out of a Sally Struthers starving-Africa message. I think he was supposed to be thirsty and in need of Coke.
I think he also made me change the channel.
The good stuff that I did see in Atlanta wasn’t complicated, generally wasn’t expensive, but had an idea.
Coca-Cola must has scored huge points with the public by setting up stations that sprayed a fine cold mist on your sweating body.
A bus went by, painted to look 75 years old, with ‘passengers’ dressed as if in another era.
The line: ‘We’ve been selling real estate since buses looked like this.’ The signature: Harry Taylor: Atlanta’s Original Home-Boy.’ Nice.
And Budweiser was everywhere with a simple, three-word theme that captured the moment and made people feel good: Bud World Party.
(Right under such a sign, I watched a bunch of American college kids leap a barrier to invite their German counterparts, who had been cheering them, onto the dance floor. It was warm, it was real, it was human.)
One of the tv campaigns I did like was for at&t and it did use computerized effects.
Its theme was, ‘Imagine a world without limits.’ There were three different versions.
In one, an athlete long-jumped the Grand Canyon; another pole-vaulted the World Trade Center; a third did a gorgeous twisting dive over Niagara Falls.
They stretched themselves, they fulfilled themselves, they pleased themselves.
Do you know why those commercials worked, in this man’s humble opinion?
Because the computer was used to enhance human emotionnot to substitute for it.
And last time I checked, humans are still the audience we’re selling to.
John Burghardt, formerly president of a national advertising agency, now heads his own communications firm in Toronto. He can be reached at (416) 693-5072; fax (416) 693-5100.
