Probably should've found a photo with a couple of adult women in it, but still.
This week, welcome to its counterpoint.
Sometimes, Thursday creeps up on McFarlane Media with no viable, topical advertising issue that serves as an interesting departure point for a blog post.
And other times, Quizno’s steps up to the plate with a campaign so devoid of nuance, originality, or cleverness that the Thursday post can write itself. Witness the sandwich maker’s latest contribution to American culture, “2 Girls 1 Sub”. (Don’t let the “NSFW” in the URL throw you. It’s only NSFW if you work in a kindergarten classroom or a church rectory.)
For those of you who don’t trudge the internet’s shady recesses, “2 Girls 1 Sub” pays homage to “2 Girls 1 Cup”, a notoriously graphic meme. You don’t need to know every detail of the backstory, but “2 Girls 1 Cup” is a minute-long clip that starts off as standard lesbian porn, then takes an abrupt scatological turn around the :10 mark. And another one at the :19 mark. And another one, involving a different orifice that even a seasoned porn viewer would never have predicted, at the :38 mark.
“2 Girls 1 Cup” inspired a secondary meme that ended up outshining its parent, as hundreds of people posted G-rated videos of the horrified reactions of unsuspecting viewers watching “2 Girls 1 Cup” for the first time. Typical comments included “I can never have sex again”, “My eyes, my eyes!” and “That’s got to be chocolate soft-serve ice cream, right?”
Quizno has pilfered adopted the concept and produced a video with directorial help from Playboy, an entity that was apparently iconoclastic and hip during the Eisenhower administration. (They published a magazine that had nekkid wimmens in it!) Between them, Quizno’s and Playboy extracted all the excretory parts, found a couple of better-looking chicks, located “Toasty Torpedo” on the call sheet and rolled tape.
“2 Girls 1 Cup” was recorded 2 years ago and went viral last year, making it prehistoric by the measure of modern attention spans. Which is harder – staying classy, or staying current? Here’s an idea, gratis from a real copywriting firm: how about putting dancing hamsters in the next spot? Or incorporating Sean Connery saying, “You’re the man now, dog”?
Ad agencies call the conceptual side of the business the “creative” department, not the “rehashing” department. Regardless of its artistic merit, the very existence (and popularity) of “2 Girls 1 Cup” renders it unusable as a basis for any legitimate ad campaign.
See John Barr’s repackaging of Austin Powers, two posts below. Or Palace Station’s tired TV spot featuring 4 homely women who think they’re attractive and cosmopolitan, sitting around a table and talking about shoes and singlehood. Like the above, “2 Girls 1 Sub” is not parody but plagiarism.
Quizno’s might fix a tastier sandwich than Subway does, but you’d never know it from the ads. The product is only the 3rd-most noteworthy feature in this particular spot. Perhaps Quizno’s should have run to the patent office after developing the groundbreaking technology of putting sandwiches in a toaster. You know, before their competitors had a chance to rip off an original idea.
Lest anyone think “2 Girls 1 Sub” is an aberration in an otherwise stellar history of ad campaigns, Quizno’s previous work includes:
–two hideously malformed, disjointed and possibly stoned rats singing a song that the copywriter might have spent less time “composing” than the 30 seconds the spot runs;
-homoeroticism between a talking oven and an impressionable young employee.
“Put it in me!”
Let the professional ad people break it down for you: the oven is likening the sandwich to a penis, or possibly a finger or dildo. Isn’t that clever? Go back and watch it again if the message remains unclear.
Apparently, Quizno’s has found value in drawing parallels between its sandwiches and not only vermin, but also fecal matter and maybe sex toys.
Quizno’s only redeeming feature as an advertiser is that the company was once responsible for indirectly forcing Al Michaels, the second-greatest play-by-play man in the history of sports*, to read the following billboard:
“Monday Night Football is brought to you by Pennzoil. Not just oil, Pennzoil. Budweiser, the King of Beers. And Quizno’s. Mm mm mm mm…toasty.”
“2 Girls 1 Cup” might be of dubious societal value, but at least it was original. There’s no question that it illustrated the benefit of the product (a full-length porn film with the unambiguous title Hungry Bitches).
Again, this criticism is not coming from a position of prudeness. McFarlane Media advocates both lesbianism and the wearing of bikinis, in all possible social settings and ideally with impractical high heels.
But is it too much to ask for even a little self-awareness? If an advertiser is going to commit to using something so detached from its product to sell said product, how about having one of the spokesmodels acknowledging the absurdity of using female pulchritude to sell oven-baked meat and cheese? No, much better to lift an existing concept and not even do it in a timely fashion.
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*A close second to this remarkable human, of course. Michaels remains the greatest play-by-play man in the never-arrested-for-dentally-assaulting-a-woman-while-wearing-a-negligee category.
