Well, there’s some truth in
advertising that’s easy on the eye…as far as I’m concerned, at any rate. This week’s first instalment of Vasco da Gama has a little somethin’-somethin’
(as Sparky tells me the kids like to say) about false advertising…or misleading
packaging, at any rate. M’Dear (pictured, in purple dress and flaming red dye
job) and I took advantage of the lull in between Funsville’s annual
celebrations of Rod Carew’s birthday and Buster Keaton’s birthday to put
together a couple of odds and ends for you, on the general topic of packaging
and advertising and what have you.
After exhaustive collegial research and
deliberation (that is to say, an evening with a couple of bottles of domestic Asti
Spumante and a bootleg DVD of the Dick Sargent seasons of Bewitched), M’Dear
and I have divined that there are three basic categories into which the purely
inexplicable in advertising and/or marketing can be sorted.
The first one is something that M’Dear
decided should be called “Get out much?” Her rationale for calling it that is
that anyone who comes up with stuff like the example we’re about to show you is
so out of touch with reality that, in her words, “they must be spending all
their spare time staring backwards through binoculars at the damp underside of
a flat rock”.
And with that, on to the example. A
certain German candymaker puts out a line of fruit chews, and other crimes
against the separate and conjoined concepts of fruit flavours and chewy
textures, under the brand name “Mamba”.
Mamba.
Let that sink in.
Now, I don’t know much about making candy,
much less selling it, but I do know a little something about a planet called
Earth. Rumour has it that one of the deadliest, most merciless killers on this
particular planet is a certain species of poisonous snake called…
…have you guessed it yet?
That’s right—
it’s called…
the…
Mamba.
I may hang around a lot with Sparky, and
therefore don’t have much experience with what’s considered normal for
children, but I’m pretty sure that normal children wouldn’t be thrilled to the
gills by the prospect of chomping down on a gobstopper chock full of snake
poison.
In case you’re thinking something got lost
in translation…well, the German for “mamba” is, um…well, as it turns out, that’d
be…“mamba”.
“Die Mamba”, to be precise. Not such a Jim
von Dandy piece of der old Image Management by der old Candymaker. I don’t
imagine the mamba thinks the whole thing is too good for its image, either.
Leaving poisonous snakes and candymakers
to settle their differences as best they can, we move on to the next category,
which I’ve chosen to call “Stupid—like a fox”. Every now and then, you come
across a piece of advertising so bizarre, so boneheaded, that you wonder what
the people behind it were thinking. Then you realize that it doesn’t matter
what they were thinking. They got your attention. Take this sign outside a
clothing store, for example:
Indelicate
but not ineffective, eh M’Dear?
No indeedy do it isn’t, M’Dear. You can
bet your bottom…uh, dollar, that is.
Then there’s a third category of
advertising—a summum bonum of the ad biz—that sets itself apart from all the
rest. We call this one “Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”. Let’s face it,
some products don’t exactly sell themselves. If, for instance, the product
you’re trying to sell is turkey roasting bags, here are your major selling
points:
- It’s a bag.
- It’s made of tinfoil.
- You stick a turkey in it and roast it.
It’s every bit as exciting as it sounds.
So how do you sell this turkey…uh, I mean, turkey roasting bag? Well,
you can either turn tail, admit defeat, and write it all off as a dead loss, or
you can do what one company chose to do:
I don’t know if I want one, but I sure
took a good—what’s the word I’m trying to think of here…it’s right on the tip
of my tongue…I can almost see it—before making up my mind.
The name of the game is product
recognition—and recognition is a whole lot easier when the suckers…er, marks…er,
customers have their eyeballs pointed at the product. Getting them to do that
thing the turkey roasting bag is telling you to do is half the battle won. It all
comes down to this: when you need to roast a turkey in a bag—and one day, you
may have to, no matter what you think right now—whose turkey roasting bags are
you going to remember?
Yes, you’re right—you’ll probably go to
the deli for a sandwich instead…but you can’t blame those lovable rapscallions
in the ad business for trying.
We hope you won’t blame us for trying to
find out how many of you out there in Internet Land have run across ads and
packages that seemed inspired by something other than rational thought. Jot your
findings in the space provided below for comments—we’re always glad to hear
from you.
And, just in case you think we haven’t
been responsible for our own share of strange ads over the years, here are some
station ID’s done for radio by El Cousins-o (click here and here)…and something with me and Sparky in it.
As always, it’s been a pleasure doing
business with you,
Uncle Fun
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