Recently I have viewed a series of new Clorox commercials, under the overall message of cleaning up life's messes. I found two of these commercials to push the envelope on tastelessness, as they directly refer to urine and defecation. While they attempt to use a 'cutesy' angle and obviously are targeting mothers, the remainder of the bleach using public...of which I myself am a member, likely would find them to be tasteless. I happened to see one of the commercials during my dinner, and I immediately found it disgusting because of the images that it generated. I don't know about anyone else, but I suspect that a sink full of baby shit or a hallway full of kid piss aren't conducive to good digestion.
I've noticed this phenomena in advertising for some time, but in the previous years it seems to be more prevalent to utilize imagery that is borderline disgusting to sell a product. One of the earliest instances I can recall is for a foot odor product that featured an animation of a sweaty foot, the swamp foot as it was referred to in the advertisement. Granted these are powerful images, and they do communicate well, but come on, there has to be a more effective way of selling a product than to make people lose their appetites with your calls to action.
Further, why in the hell do I want to see someone's pustules on a large screen, even if I did need to acne medication, I don't think that I want to see a pustule ridden face in high definition.
Can we please get some taste control back into the messaging in advertising these days? Would it kill any art director to say, "Okay, this is going to drastically affect some viewers, I'll take a different tack with this." There are better ways to sell products instead of resorting to the jugular of good taste by relying on bodily waste, pustules, sweaty feet, throbbing corns, hammer toes, and all other manner of formerly taboo images.
I think that it's indicative larger forces at work in society today however. It doesn't seem that there is respect for the sensibilities of consumers in this day and age, or respect for the fellow humans in general that there was at one time in our society. You have only to look toward the current state of presidential elections and the smear campaigns that they are generating for proof of this. Half messages, misquotes, untruths, obfuscation, faulty claims, all of those things are present in the current campaign, specifically on the republican side of the coin if you've paid any attention to current events, you likely would have heard at least a few stories about the distortions in the messaging.
The only course that any of us have of late, is to vote with our dollars in regards to the products we buy and vote with our conscience in everything else.
I've noticed this phenomena in advertising for some time, but in the previous years it seems to be more prevalent to utilize imagery that is borderline disgusting to sell a product. One of the earliest instances I can recall is for a foot odor product that featured an animation of a sweaty foot, the swamp foot as it was referred to in the advertisement. Granted these are powerful images, and they do communicate well, but come on, there has to be a more effective way of selling a product than to make people lose their appetites with your calls to action.
Further, why in the hell do I want to see someone's pustules on a large screen, even if I did need to acne medication, I don't think that I want to see a pustule ridden face in high definition.
Can we please get some taste control back into the messaging in advertising these days? Would it kill any art director to say, "Okay, this is going to drastically affect some viewers, I'll take a different tack with this." There are better ways to sell products instead of resorting to the jugular of good taste by relying on bodily waste, pustules, sweaty feet, throbbing corns, hammer toes, and all other manner of formerly taboo images.
I think that it's indicative larger forces at work in society today however. It doesn't seem that there is respect for the sensibilities of consumers in this day and age, or respect for the fellow humans in general that there was at one time in our society. You have only to look toward the current state of presidential elections and the smear campaigns that they are generating for proof of this. Half messages, misquotes, untruths, obfuscation, faulty claims, all of those things are present in the current campaign, specifically on the republican side of the coin if you've paid any attention to current events, you likely would have heard at least a few stories about the distortions in the messaging.
The only course that any of us have of late, is to vote with our dollars in regards to the products we buy and vote with our conscience in everything else.
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