Ads I Hate!

Have you heard the news? It's not likely you could've missed the announcements. Those folks in Golden, Colorado, are literally shouting it from the mountaintops that Coors Light now comes in wide mouth cans. I can only ask: is there a poor soul anywhere to be found who leads an existence so dismal, so dreary, that this news brightens his or her day?

Adolph's people claim that their new can offers a smoother pour, which, of course, begs the question: who's been having difficulty pouring beer? I've been dispensing beer, either into a glass or down my gullet, for well nigh twenty years now and I've rarely spilled a drop.

Admittedly, it's not only the Coors company that resorts to such tactics. After all, they're just carrying on a long and storied advertising tradition of making much ado about nothing. Take the "smaller is better" school of product design. Folks were paid (and handsomely, I'm guessing) to come up with such products as Mini M&Ms, Ritz Bits or Butterfinger BBs. See, they're exactly like a regular Butterfinger, only smaller! Get it? Well, just in case you don't, an extensive ad campaign, costing millions, was launched and continues to this day. But are the folks at Nestle so bereft of inspiration that they couldn't concoct a new variety of candy bar? Were they forced to settle for resizing an old one?

Companies who peddle paper goods trumpet the addition of adorable little icons to the edges of their paper towels as if this amounts to a design breakthrough. In the ads, it always seems to be a female homemaker who is thrilled by this development but can there possibly exist a harried housewife who, in her haste to sop up Junior's regurgitated baby formula from her sweater or Rover's backyard droppings from her shoe, pauses first to admire the pink daisies or blue teddy bears found along the edges of her paper towel? Of course not. If ever a product were utilitarian, not decorative, in nature, it's the paper towel and why pretend otherwise?

Imagine if those whom we strive daily to impress were as easily satisfied as the advertisers think we, the consuming public, must be. Suppose your supervisor at work recommended you for a big promotion simply because you'd taught yourself to count to ten in Spanish. Would you consider touting, in bold print at the very top of your resume, that you're expert in the proper handling of a pair of scissors and can stay inside the lines when using crayons? Try impressing a prospective paramour with your newly-improved VCR programming skills and see how far it gets you.

I'm wondering if perhaps there is not a potential market for ad agencies to shill for individuals. I could certainly use someone to make a mountain out of the molehill that is this humble little rag: "The new, improved BRETTnews: 10% fewer typos than before!"


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