Recently, I was jamming out to my new favorite song, "Forever" by Chris Brown, when I caught part of the lyrics,"double your pleasure, double your fun." "Hmm, that’s weird," I thought, "was Chris Brown even alive when that Wrigley’s Doublemint ad came out? You know the one, where there is a video montage of a variety of twins doing a variety of activities all while supposedly chewing on Doublemint gum, with a voice over proclaiming "double the pleasure, double the fun!"
I later mentioned my thoughts to my boss and he informed me, (much to my shock) that Wrigley’s had actually commissioned Chris Brown to write an extended version of their old Doublemint jingle in the form of what is now the song "Forever."
Now as someone in the advertising industry, I know I should be applauding the innovative way that we can now market products, but I don't. In fact, I feel that this is a deceptive way to market because the audience doesn’t even know they are being marketed to. I know the old adage "what you don’t know won’t hurt you," but in this case it does. It hurts the ad industry because when people do find out, a lot are outraged at the fact and feel deceived, which could cause industry backlash. Industry backlash could happen in a variety of forms from boycotts to tighter advertising and marketing laws which would end up restricting the ad industry even more than before. It hurts the audience because they become even more jaded overall about advertising causing them to pay less attention to it, which in the end hurts us all.
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