I don’t normally waste my time drawing attention to specific examples of advertising that are plain rubbish, but it seems like silly season for the UK retail food sector at the moment and I simply can’t ignore it.
The new campaign for Sizzling Pubs leaves me speechless its so ridiculous, but nowhere near as mindless as the commercial for Harvester. What the blazes are these people trying to do? Together, these two campaigns prove the point I was making a few weeks back that marketing is dumbing down. These simply have to be examples of inexperienced marketing managers who lack the confidence to tell their agencies, when they present this crap, to stop having a laugh!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKSzN06gflQ]
I can imagine the scene. The agency guy making out that a rap, which in Harvester’s case doesn’t rhyme or scan, is the kind of “groovy” solution that will appeal to a hip new target market and the client failing to notice that they had buried any product benefit there might have been beneath the awful treatment and not having the balls to draw him a route-map to reality. Is the story here the diversity of the menu or is it just a case of having to come up with a commercial to disguise the fact absence of a proposition? Whichever, it failed.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI1cZMYqW18&playnext=1&list=PL2385D1C20CC0F9ED]
The Sizzling Pubs agency guy has clearly allowed self-love to obscure the fact that even if they can work out what the blazes is supposed to be happening the behind-the-scenes antics of the ad. business is about as enthralling to the target audience as a day watching paint dry. Its neither funny nor interesting, but because I know how hard food retailers like these two are working to come up with a point of difference these days, its particularly galling to see what could be a genuine opportunity flushed down the toilet. If Sizzling Pubs are successful it will definitely be despite their advertising and that’s a shame because, without breaking sweat I can think of a number of entertaining ways of getting the idea of sizzling food across.
Michael Weaver
August 16, 2011