by Christopher Kendalls

Created on: October 14, 2007

When advertising is a creative art form people can respect it for what it is, will talk about it to their peers, and it will create a viral buzz that leads to interest in the company and the advertising agency. For one ads aren't so much false as they are poorly executed. As far as being jaded you have to appeal to people's intelligence and offer a compelling argument, the times have changed, people are not as innocent as they once were, and you have to come at them correctly. There is nothing jaded about that whatsoever. There are creative ads, such as those with Geico, particularly the Cavemen ads. Now I do think that developing a television show out of the commercial, or any commercial for that reason is overkill. It is one thing when television personalities bleed over into advertise coincidentally, a whole different thing when one personally makes a point of taking advantage of the platform they have.

No one really has a problem with advertising when it is done in the right way. What people do not like, is to see ads plastered everywhere for no reason out of context. It is like the social commentary we see in movies like "Josie and the Pussycats", advertising that has run amuck and is more of a nuisance than it is a help. That is the real problem with advertising; why do we have to see ads on the side of buses, on mailboxes, trash cans, lockers in high school, cafeterias and so on and so forth? Creative advertising can convey a message without being cheap or sleazy about it; you can hit below the belt if you are going about it the right way.

Take the Cola ads of the last two decades, for example, both are offering the same thing essentially, the only difference being the taste. Yet ads would associate cola from everything from partying and having a good time to being part of a revolution or a "new generation". You simply cannot make those empty arguments these days though; people are rather firm in their loyalty to either Coke or Pepsi and there isn't much that can be done to dissuade anyone anymore. Computer commercials would make empty arguments about one Operating System over the other. Those arguments held some relevance back in the eighties, but the new Macintosh ads annoy me. They conveniently omit and overlook some of the limitations of what the Macintosh offers; for example it isn't the best enterprise system out there and it's productivity offerings are limited.

It was better when advertisements simply sold the merits of the computer itself, than

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