Not All Publicity Is Good Publicity

Advertisers are a strange group. For supposedly being so deeply in touch with people, they really don’t know us at all. Ads in general are hit and miss and more often miss than hit. Most are entirely pointless, i.e. wasted money. And some are actually harmful. Indeed, advertisers subscribe to an axiom that couldn’t be more wrong: there’s no such thing as bad publicity. This is something I’ve literally heard from dozens of advertisers -- in classes, in person and in interviews, and it's just delusional.

Here’s the thinking. Getting the audience’s attention is a win no matter how you do it because people aren’t smart enough to remember why they remember your product. Thus, the next time they need a motor oil or a grave liner, your brand name will pop into their heads and they won’t think twice about the offensive ad that put it there.

But that’s not how reality works. In reality, people mute offensive ads or change the channel long before they even figure out what the product is. And if they do figure it out, they store their anger right next to the product name in their minds. So whenever the product comes up, out pour the words "oh, I hate them." I literally cannot tell you how many times I’ve held an ad against a company and how many times people have proudly told me in line at a store, “I’m buying this one because I hate the other company’s annoying ads.”

The latest example of this woefully wrong philosophy comes from an advertisement for an AT&T/Samsung Infuse (which appears to be a phone for assh~les). This ad begins with some indifferent “business people” sitting around a table in a restaurant when Jerk No. 1’s phone suddenly shows an image of a spider. Jerkette No. 2 starts screaming at the top of her lungs. Jerk No. 3 then starts beating the phone with his shoe, presumably because he doesn't like the product either. The rest of the commercial is irrelevant because by that point I’ve either hit mute or changed the channel (I actually had to watch the ad through just to find out what the product was to write this article). I can’t tell you how offended I am to have a woman screaming at me at full throat during a commercial break. Whining babies get the same response, as does rampant liberalism. . . if that’s not redundant.

This ad has cost the company severely. By forcing that ad upon me, they have generated such ill will that their product now has a huge hurdle to overcome before I would even consider it. Without this ad, I would consider this phone along with all the others. Now, this one falls into the "no, I hate them, and unless they're super special I won't reward them" category. And AT&T ain't special.

So it seems that not all publicity is good after all.

What commercials anger you and why? What commercials do you like? I find myself very impressed with a recent Heineken advertisement called “the entrance,” where the guy enters a party and interacts with several guests before getting his beer. It’s a clever ad. And the most interesting man in the world ads are kind of fun too. . . no screaming.