If Every Brand Is Funny Online, Is Anything Funny?(nytimes.com) |
If Every Brand Is Funny Online, Is Anything Funny?(nytimes.com) |
But advertising never was authentic. The goal is to drive sales using whatever tools the audience can tolerate, however shameless, and advertising has always pushed boundaries, followed by the inevitable wave of copycats that turn the innovative into the mundane.
The tool in this case is constructing a parasocial sockpuppet personality as if McDonald's or whatever deserves a seat at your digital table in between your actual friends. When everyone is just an avatar grinding for likes and followers anyway, they might as well be.
I don't get it, but I'm also not the audience so I try not to judge too harshly.
The Superbowl used to be not only the ultimate NFL event but also the "super bowl" of commercials. They used to make you laugh. We used to actually want to watch them. The last 5-ish years of Superbowls have completely flipped that. Now we mute during commercials because they are all so sterile and unfunny or faking sincerity about this year's major social topic.
Now, watching NFL, the commercials are actively grating, annoying, and the complete opposite of entertaining.
I mute these shitty commercials now. I used to love them.
Marketing departments have ruined yet another thing that used to be enjoyable.
WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSUUUUUUUUUUUUUPPP???
Oh yeah commercials used to be so good...
The future is going to be fucking awesome. We're gonna have cute girls on ebikes. We're going to have GMO food that eliminates hunger worldwide, and robots that harvest them and end farm worker exploitation. You're gonna have solar panels on your ADU, they'll power a little light, and you're gonna read a book and listen to the bugs and life will be good.
Optimism is as much about what you want to happen as what you think will happen.
Most brands are _trying_ to be funny.
A lot of social branding is made by the upper class, for the upper class. After all, they are the ones with disposable income looking for meaning at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Increasingly, as pools of wealth become so concentrated as to be impossible to consume entirely within a statistically average adult lifespan, and are thus passed on to offspring, there is little to no intelligence or talent necessary whatsoever.
For an extreme example consider that in my country we are about to endow yet another habitual gambler with a multi-billion dollar fortune, instantly catapulting them and their entire family over multiple generations, into status of what amounts to minor nobility. And their contribution to society, at least as far as this reward is concerned, is that they had the foresight to spend $5 or $10 or $100 on lottery tickets for the unknownteenth week in a row.
How much disposable income does the illiterate 20% of Americans have, and who is targeting them with their social consciousness marketing
> Heinerscheid, who became a vice president at the company in July 2022, stated that her goal was to evolve the Bud Light advertising to make it more inclusive, and to move it away from its "fratty and out-of-touch humor". (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Bud_Light_boycott)
"Fratty and out-of-touch humor" stuck the landing well enough to be remembered for 24 years and counting. Budweiser's customer base being both brand-loyal and outspoken homophobes, Heinerscheid thought it would be a hip and trendy idea to associate a trans influencer with the brand. Now Budweiser is on its deathbed.
Talk about being out-of-touch...Heinerscheid must have been the former VP of advertising at Quizno's.
Grandparent comment:
> Now, watching NFL, the commercials are actively grating, annoying, and the complete opposite of entertaining.
These are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps toeing that line is a key to good marketing?
Yes it got played out just like the Bud Wise Er frogs, or the Real Men Of Genius, but the first couple were hilarious.