Patti O'Shea's Blog

Not that long ago, it used to be that advertising was confined to predictable locations. You’d see it on TV, hear it on the radio, see it on billboards and on the sides of buses. Now advertising is everywhere, and with all the noise, the target audience doesn’t even see most ads let alone remember them or the product.

It used to be that only minor league baseball teams had advertising on their walls, now all the big league teams do. It used to be that if you saw a truck with writing on it, it was the name of the company that owned the vehicle, now it’s just as likely to have ads on the two sides and the rear. It used to be that you could put down your tray table on an airplane and just have a plain, beige surface, now there’s an airline that sells that as advertising space. It’s gotten so bad, there are even public restrooms with ads in the stalls.

The kick off for the football game is usually sponsored. The replays of home runs are sponsored. Driving down the freeway this summer while the PGA was in town, I saw a Mercedes that was discretely labeled as the official sponsor of the tour.

And the thing is as new and more places are used for advertising, it takes more and more views before the product registers. If it ever does.

It all becomes noise. It’s like walking into a crowd of people and since everyone is talking, you can’t hear anyone. I was an advertising major in college and I have an interest in it, but even I’m burnt out on the plethora of ads that surround me. It’s overload and I know I’m not alone. The sad thing is that they’re talking about putting advertising in even more places–like inside books, both electronic and print.

I just have a single comment on that. No.

I want one place where I can escape the noise.

The other day at work I was talking to one of the guys and he mentioned how annoying advertising is–both television and radio–which of course got me going since I was an advertising copywriting major in college. I love talking about advertising.

My fascination began in junior high. Every year my school would get reels of the Clio Award (advertising’s Oscars) winning television ads in and play them in the library. If we had a free period, we could go there and watch them, and I would spend as much time in there as possible. I loved watching the Clio Award winners. Seeing these ads after I left middle school was tough, but every now and then I managed it. I think my junior high fascination with good advertising is a large part of what had me switching majors from broadcast journalism to advertising.

You can imagine with my educational background that I dissect ads. You’d be right. The thing that disappoints me most is that the number of good ads on television has plummeted dramatically in the last 5-10 years. This is IMO, of course. Instead of being clever and entertaining, most of them are just annoying. I know some of it comes down to taste–I loathe the talking baby commercials for that online trading company for example–but others enjoy them.

And radio ads have been by and large terrible for a lot longer than this. Bad enough that I’ve threatened to dust off my portfolio and get into the business. I might be out of practice, but I couldn’t do worse than what’s on the air now. Seriously.

Where have all the creative and entertaining ads gone?

Sure, there were always annoying, hard-sell commercials out there, but there also used to be fabulous spots that people talked about at work. You don’t hear people talking about many now–unless it’s to complain about how horribly annoying they are. That’s not a positive even if there is a certain amount of name recognition there for the product.

Take the Geico commercials for example, the ones with the wad of money with the eyes atop it. All I’ve heard people say about those ads is that they’re “creepy” and “stalkerish.” Yes, everyone remembers it’s a Geico ad, but does the company really want to associate itself with those two words?

I could maybe understand the creative ads switching to the internet, but you know what? I haven’t seen anything particularly innovative and exciting online either. Where has all my good advertising gone? I can’t even count on the Super Bowl any longer to deliver a wealth of good advertising. The best stuff I’m seeing right now is coming out of Europe and that’s sad. America used to have some awesome campaigns and this current state saddens me.

I’m going to have to find out which ads were nominated for Clios recently and hop over to You Tube to watch them. I hope there’s better ones out there than I’m seeing when I have the television on.

Has anyone else noticed all the ads on the internet that mention “mom?” They’re everywhere and I don’t get it. Some of the ads I’ve seen have been: “Obama wants Minnesota moms to go back to school.” “Find out how a mom mixed two products and made a teeth whitener.” There are more, too, but those are the two I’ve seen enough to have nearly memorized

First of all, let’s forget about how spammy these ads are. Seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised to find these headlines in my spam folder if they’d been sent via email, but where does the mom thing come in? I have to tell you, if I’m putting something on my teeth to whiten them, that mom damn well better have a chemistry degree! Can you imagine putting something on that just eats away the surface enamel because some mom combined two products?

Then there’s the Obama wants moms to go back to school. (The ad promises all kinds of government money to pay for college.) Why only moms? Why not dads? Why not people without children?

I don’t understand when motherhood in this context became a selling point. Sure, Mom has always been featured prominiently in advertising. The products extolling “Doctor Mom” and such, but why wouldn’t the advertisers go with something like, “Combine two common household products to whiten your teeth.”

It just seems like a truly bizarre advertising strategy and to see so many internet ads use this approach at the same time makes me wonder what’s going on. I’ve started talking back to the ads. Sad, but true. At least the ads aren’t answering. Yet.