It seems to be a trend for companies to have a recurring couple in their ads. Lots of TV ads take place in a home, but I'm talking about using the same family each time. Canadian Tire tried it a few years ago, and people quickly got sick of them. Now both Leon's and Rogers are trying the same thing.
So why do they do this? Could it be cheaper this way, filming several spots the same day with the same cast and set? Great, now even marketing is using economies of scale. Can Chinese ads be far behind? Or maybe it's because they've noticed that having actors in different ads for different products is confusing (Dammit man, are you a PlayStation exec or a Holiday Inn customer?) Signing up the same people for all your ads means that there's no brand confusion, and a couple of Canadian actors won't starve for a couple of years.
The Leon's couple is easily the more tolerable of the two. I even laughed at the banana joke the first time I heard it. But better than that, they actually break out of the goofy, immature man/smug humourless woman template (a little.) In contrast, the Rogers couple are just generic 21st century television ad archetypes. And the whole series really hit bottom with the most recent spot, which features a Matrix "bullet time" reference. I did the math, and that would be the equivalent of an "E.T. phone home" joke in 1995.
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