The Beatles, rock-and-roll combo. (L to R: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison. Not pictured: Ringo Starr)
A qualification for the February post about the year’s best advertising campaign so far. The campaign’s effectiveness masks a minor but aggravating flaw – the unnecessary graphic that tells us who the celebrity pitchman is.
Though Guy Fieri isn’t as famous as Michael Jackson or Jackie Chan, the idea that an advertiser must introduce its pitchman to the audience insults that audience.
Presumably, the point of hiring a celebrity to hawk a product is that viewers would want to emulate the celebrity and his choice of restaurant, athletic shoe or auto insurance.
Subway recently used Lisa Leslie in its TV spots. In industry parlance, she was “matted” on the screen as follows:
Lisa Leslie
Basketball superstar
By virtue of being a world-class athlete with one of the most gorgeous bodies ever to grace a court (he said at his lecherous best), Lisa Leslie ostensibly has adopted a nutrition regimen that uncommitted sandwich shoppers would want to copy. Okay, fine.
Then why tell people who she is? The only reason to mat Ms. Leslie is because – and this is eminently reasonable – not everyone watching the spot can identify her.
But the viewers who don’t know who she is aren’t going to let an unfamiliar face tell them what to buy. Humans might be rash and impulsive, but not so much that they’re prepared to go from complete ignorance of a celebrity to devotees of her diet in 30 seconds. Lisa Leslie couldn’t persuade consumers that quickly were she selling 6-inch Veggie Delites® door-to-door and letting people sniff the goods.
So why does almost every advertiser do this? The first possibility is that agencies do so reflexively, because that’s how it was done 60 years ago and only Nike and a few others have bothered questioning the necessity of pitchman identification.
Either that, or the client insists upon it. So it shall be written, so it shall be done.
If it’s the latter, the agency needs to know that the axiom “the customer is always right” has practical limits that stop far short of saying something woeful in an ad. The customer is often if not usually wrong in other businesses, and that’s hardly a negative. Say you buy an airline ticket. Yes, technically the captain becomes the passengers’ employee for a few hours. But that doesn’t entitle them to tell him how to fly the plane. Passengers aren’t paying for the captain’s time so much as they’re paying for his expertise, just as an advertising client isn’t paying for square inches of newsprint or raw seconds of radio: she’s paying for a hopefully skillful execution.
It never stops. “Alice Cooper, Rock Star”. “Kelly Preston, Actress”. “Ed McMahon, television personality”. The most egregious example that comes to mind is that of Icy Hot, who use “Shaquille O’Neal, basketball superstar” to sell the Pro-Therapy brand of support braces.
So that’s who that is! You mean that isn’t some other 7-foot-tall, 350-pound charismatic black man smiling at me from inside the magic box and talking in his trademark subterranean basso profundo? One of the six most recognizable people on the planet*, but Icy Hot needs to remind us whom he is. Thanks for clarifying, because I thought that maybe Charlie Villanueva had put on a few pounds between stints at the tanning salon.
*The others, of course, are Queen Elizabeth, Abigail Hensel, Britney Hensel and these two guys.
