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Die Die Die: Hall of Fame and AIG

Die Die Die will be a new regular feature here at Scratchbomb. It could also be entitled Ads I Wanna Jumpkick In The Face.

More than anything else, an ad is supposed to be likeable. You want to increase your product's profile, of course. You want to "grow the brand", as they say in marketing speak. But you can't do any of these things if the ad infuriates your audience. That's why it amazes me that ad agencies--staffed by people educated and trained in the science of appealing to consumers--consistently produce commercials that make me want to hunt down their creator(s) and beat them to death with a rusty shovel.

If this violent reaction was mine and mine alone, then I could chalk up my reaction to being the cranky bastard that I am. But the commercials I will highlight here are ones that elicit similar reactions in 99.9% of the people I talk to; i.e., "Yeah, I wanna find the son of a bitch who made that ad and beat him with a tire iron!"

Before I kick off this spot, I would be remiss if I didn't spare a few words for the most hated ad of recent years, one so vile that it breezes straight past the selection committee and right into the Die Die Die Hall of Fame. Of course, I speak of the John Mellencamp "This Is Our Country" Chevy ads, which premiered right around the beginning of last year's baseball playoffs and continues unabated to this very day.

Early in the ad campaign's life, Chevy showed their desire to get as much mileage as possible out of it when they had Mellencamp sing "This Is Our Country," in its entirety, at game 2 of the 2006 World Series--before the National Anthem. But few of us dared imagine that we'd be plagued with it, and its endless permutations, for well over a year.

Other than its inescapability, why is this ad so hateful? Ubiquity alone could be reason enough. But the ultimate blame has to go to the song it features, which is so musically and lyrically uninventive it makes "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" look like "The Rite of Spring".

The song is completely and utterly gutless, and was quite obviously written so that it wouldn't offend anyone, other than people galled by shitty, unimaginative songwriting. It has a whiff of patriotism without making any spiritual or intellectual demands on the listener. It collects a grocery list of broad, vague concepts that no one could possibly object to and piles them on top of one another.

It's not a crime for a song to say nothing--there are plenty of great songs that are utterly meaningless--but it is a crime to write a song that says nothing while working really hard to sound like it says something very, very profound. You could substitute the following words for every verse in "This Is Our Country," and it would mean exactly the same thing.

Chocolate cake is good
And puppies are good
I like stuff that's good
I don't like stuff that's bad
I do believe that good stuff
Is stuff that's good
This is ourrrrrrrr country...

So congrats, John Mellencamp and Chevy. As first-ballot Hall of Fame inductees, you have reached the pantheon of hateful, moronic ads. Excelsior.

* * *

Now, on today's object of hatred: the AIG ads. I have a mental list of things that I will outlaw as soon as I gain total control over all sentient beings. Ads with cutesy kids are on that list (it's a very long list). For the purposes of this blog, Cutesy Kids are defined as being within the ages of 4 and 8, possessing adorably unkempt hair (usually red, curly, or frizzy) and hysterical speech impediments. They are usually seen in ads talking about what their daddy or mommy is or should be doing about their car/diet/wardrobe.

There's a difference between Cute and Cutesy. A child can't consciously act cute; he/she can only look cute to adult eyes while doing kid stuff. Cutesy, on the other hand, is calculated by adults, a false means to tug at your heartstrings.

Cutesy is having a little kid recite legal boilerplate, because you want to hear him/her trip over the really hard words. Cutesy is dressing up a kid in a three piece suit or an evening gown because oh my god, a little kid would never wear that! I see a Cutesy kid, and I imagine some creepy adult lurking in the shadows, whispering things for him to say, sort of like Chris Hansen's nightmare version of Cyrano de Bergerac .

There are a series of ads for AIG that violate these dictums. They disgust me because they feature Cutesy Kids discussing retirement plans and health insurance for small businesses. They're talking about shit that most adults don't even understand, let alone children. All under the premise that children discussing adult stuff is inherently funny.

The initial ads in this campaign were overly precious. In one, a girl asks her father how he can think about butterflies when the business world is going to hell in a handbasket. The father reassures her that the protection of AIG will take care of all, so he can contemplate insect life in full Buddhist simplicity.

In another ad, a boy who talks and acts like an emaciated Jackie Mason tells his parents he can't sleep because of the machinations of the insurance world. Once again, the eternal eye of AIG has enabled his parents to slumber peacefully.

These were annoying enough, but AIG's latest series of commercials make me wanna slap their maker. One takes place in a lunch room, the other on a school bus. Both of them feature gaggles of little kids discussing the unsure state of their parents' finances and insurance situations. And since the kids in the ads clearly don't understand one word of what they're saying, the lines come out stilted and weird.

Kinda like certain Peanuts cartoons, where the dialogue is all choppy because the kids doing the voice work were too young to know how to employ diction and inflection. ("All I want...is what is coming to me! All I want...is my fair share!") But instead of taking a whimsical look at childhood hopes and fears, they're trying to get you to sign up for their...whatever the fuck it is AIG does, I'm not sure. And if I don't know what your product does, your ad has failed.

I don't buy kids talking about this crap. There's plenty of unbelievable ads out there, but there's something inherently gross about creating this fake world where children yammer on about workmen's comp. It has the dirty handprints of adulthood all over it, and it is suffused with a sense of its own cleverness. As if to say, how dare you not laugh at kids talking about insurance!

For a short while, I made some extra dough via freelance copyediting for a mass market fiction publisher. The bulk of their output was romance novels. If you've never read them, trust me, they're about as stupid as your worst nightmares. But what amazed me more than anything was how many of these novels ended in the same exact, bizarre way.

Once the lovers had conquered all of their obstacles and fears, and nothing lay in the way of their future happiness, there would be a chapter with the two of them basking in the glow of their loving lovely loving love. And then, inevitably, one of them would get into a car accident.

After many head-scratching months of wondering why so many authors independently chose to have their beloved characters go through windshields--other than peer pressure, since everybody else was doing it--it hit me: With no more conflict in the book, they had no idea how to make the reader care about what happened next. So they put them in immediate, life-threatening danger.

It's the cheapest arrow in a writer's quiver, but if you're totally bereft of ideas, there are many Emotional Shortcuts for you to use. The Out-Of-Nowhere Car Accident is one, and the Cutesy Kid is another.

The AIG ads are deserving of hate because, like all Cutesy Kids Ads, they are manipulative and lazy. Rather than work hard to create a universe within the ad whose inhabitants you will care about, just show some Cutesy Kids. Because hey, no one can hate Cutesy Kids, right?

Yes, they can. Oh god, can they ever. Really, it's okay. Go ahead and hate.

Posted 11.01.07 12:03am * Permalink

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