| Saturday, January 14, 2006 |
14:40 - Work with what you've got
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When you see that OxyClean ad, with Billy Mays yelling into the camera about his cleaning products, does it make you want to buy the product more than if it were sold with some tastefulness and subtlety? When you see those "Blue Hippo" computer ads, are you filled with confidence in the products they're selling? Does Matthew Lesko really seem like he holds the secrets to personal wealth and happiness?
It doesn't seem to do it for me. But apparently it works well enough that some companies—notably Real, with its Rhapsody service—are trying to sell online music through the late-night cable TV avenues, with all the scumminess that entails.
Rhapsody's ad features a guy in a white room who grins way too widely as he demonstrates a computer running Rhapsody, belting out imploring lines like "You gotta get this!" He gleefully shows off all the marvelous features of what he repeatedly calls "the #1 rated online music experience" (whatever the hell that means), how it's free (it isn't), doesn't require a credit card (it does), and has no monthly subscription fee (which I guess means they're just calling it something else when you go to the site to sign up for $9.95/month). He sneers at how "some other online music stores" only give you 30-second free previews, whereas apparently Rhapsody's streaming music thing is a much better deal. And the best part? The website/domain, which is at www.81.freerhapsody.com. Nah, that doesn't sleaze me out.
Remember those ads for DiVX—not the video codec, but those awful pay-for-play video-disc competitors to DVD that Circuit City and Disney tried to foist on us? With their VHS-like resolution, their low-rent sound, and the fact that the player had to be hooked up to a phone line so you could unlock a movie every time you wanted to play it? (Presumably Apple based its iTunes business model in part on the failure of DiVX and the demonstrated fact that people like to own their media, even if it's more inefficient, and don't like having to phone home to keep unlocking it.) The ads made hollow-sounding claims just like the Rhapsody one about how great and immersive the sound was (showing a family on a couch getting doused with water coming out of the TV), how crisp and clear the video was, and so on. But it felt as cheesy as those "Video Professor" schpiels. You just got a really weird vibe from it. It's a case where the superior technology was so much better that it didn't even need to advertise... whereas the slimy and sleazy competitor would never exist without the ads, however brief and ignominious its life was.
iTunes hardly advertises either—its multicolored silhouette-dancer ads might be iconic and ubiquitous, but they tell you nothing about iTunes' feature set other than that it lets you dance around with white earbuds hanging off your head. Apparently that's all they need. But Rhapsody has to do this? If I were the ad agency, I'd see the game as lost from the outset just by virtue of the fact that that kind of ad is necessary.
Poor guys.
UPDATE: Of course, sometimes it's the ad agency's fault. I'm sure Nasonex is a fine product, but thanks to that horrible 1995-grade CG bee, I'm guaranteed to treat it as though it's some kind of unsanctioned Guatemalan hair-growth treatment made from tree bark and poison-dart frog juice.
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Brian Tiemann
