bob garfield wins friends and influences people

The Official Bob Garfield Boycott of the Daily (Ad) Biz, which Bob started after I called him out for failing to do even basic research before writing a typically sloppy critique of an ad campaign, has gone so well that my readership has more than tripled since then.

So I can only imagine what will happen to HighJive, blogger behind the excellent MultiCult Classics.

What started with a biting satire of Garfield’s deranged, over-the-top, beyond-the-original-valid-point attack on offensive messaging in advertising has broadened to include a spirited commentary on this whole situation.

Especially funny is the big-headed one declaring that he brought an end to offensive advertising:

“Yet one can’t help but wonder if Garfield considers himself successful in the Snickers scenario. It’s pretty likely, given his humungous ego. But take a closer look at the realities. For starters, the commercial was pulled after the Human Rights Campaign Foundation directly confronted Mars Inc. Word of the spot had already worked its way through the GLBT grapevine, even before Garfield addressed his letter to Wren. So it’s tough to say if Garfield played any role at all in the decision to yank the offensive message.”

Of course he did…he’s Bob Motherfucking Garfield. BMFG for short.

If he’s not being condescending toward a blogger, he’s declaring that he has righted a major wrong in the world.

Sometimes he even does both, as in his comment on HighJive’s post:

“Honestly, HJ. This is silly. I know you hate me, for reasons that still aren’t clear to me. But as I never “declared victory” in the Snickers situation — or anything like it — isn’t a bit ridiculous for you to prove that such a declaration is wrong? Bloggers use this strawman technique all the time, but you get the prize.”

Er, Bob, except that HighJive doesn’t hate you and actually, more than anyone, was arguing in support of your main principle just without the lack of research, clarity of thought and condescension toward those who aren’t J-school grads.

I am sick of pompous old media writers like Mr Garfield telling me that I love to hate them when in fact I hate to hate them.

Mr Garfield, in no way should you take any joy in being so wrong about something that throngs of people, even experts in the field you comment on, rise up as one to denounce you. This is not what it means to be a writer, no matter how proud of yourself you might be that you are a ‘contrarian.’

When your every column is followed by reams of emails, comments and blog posts about something you wrote that was wrong, you should not just shrug and rip them for being ‘bloggers’ and happily pat yourself on the back for ‘doing something right to get people that interested in you.’ No. Those emails, comments and blog posts mean that you were wrong. So wrong that people were driven to action to call you out for it. So wrong that you made people angry.

There is nothing respectable about being this wrong. Please stop doing this.

the cheetos kerfuffle & bob garfield

Apparently, there is a budding controversy about the Cheetos campaign by Goodby, Silverstein + Partners…Bob Garfield calls it irresponsible and there is even a thread at AOL that discusses just how bad a message it sends.

All of this is really weird because the Cheetos spots have been running for months now. I think that Garfield needed to get his readership up and, just how George Parker posts about Draft/FCB when he needs a boost, Garfield just needs to say something controversial.

Even though the controversy, if real, would have started in the spring.

At any rate, the creative is certainly sub-par:

I know that most kids’ parents don’t really want them snacking on Cheetos, but it’s hardly the choice that sticks it to the man. Just seems a real reach for the brand…and kinda mean-spirited and not that fun…not to mention the fact that a corporate CPG brand is the last place kids will go to for authentic counter-culture direction.

But socially irresponsible? And irresponsible enough that Senor Garfield is commenting on Adverganza about it?

Let’s break this down.

From Bob’s AdAge column: “RAoC stands for “Random Acts of Cheetos,” and the idea is to recruit users to perpetrate Cheetos-centric pranks against those who deserve comeuppance — like tossing a handful in somebody’s dryer load of whites at the Laundromat. Ha ha!”

You’re right, this is kind of a hacky joke…but let’s be honest and realize that kids in the target watch MTV and like Ben Stiller and aren’t actually known for their grasp of subtlety and dislike of slapstick.

One point to Goodby for speaking the target’s language.

As the (unbelievably amateurish) 20-something orangeunderground.com presenter says, pointing to an outsize Cheeto in a glass case, “The third rule of RAoC is to stick it to The Man, preferably with one of these.”

Get it? Alienated teenagers and young men chafe against authority. So frustrated and resentful are they about their humiliating powerlessness, they tend to lash out — or at least fantasize about lashing out — at the powers that be.

Again, I don’t think that the strategy or creative are particularly breakthrough but, knowing that you are going to call both a threat to the well being of the nation I am underwhelmed so far.

One point to Garfield for boring me to the point that I might accidentally agree with him before nodding off.

That would be mainly parents, teachers, principals and bosses, but anyone and anything will do — which explains the tens of thousands of mailboxes destroyed each year by baseball bats, with a trail of Mike’s Hard Lemonade bottles littered along the curb.

The perpetrators don’t necessarily harbor animus toward the U.S. Postal Service.

They just harbor animus in general.

Fact: This is already happening.

Fact: This has nothing to do with Cheetos and their new campaign.

Fact: This article is already annoyingly pulling what I call the “Bob Garfield Special” wherein Bob desperately scrambles to associate unrelated events, usually bad, with a brand and its new campaign, usually that he doesn’t like, even though the relationship is tangental and best and causal only if you are Bob Garfield and don’t bother to realize things like “kids are already destructive assholes and have been forever and, since they already do this stuff maybe a recently launched ad campaign is not the cause.”

Adolescent angst. This is powerful psychology and therefore fertile ground for someone wishing to cultivate that demographic. Ask any tattoo artist or death-metal performer or drug dealer or anyone else in the rebellion industry.

So…because adolescent angst plays a part in kids liking death metal and drugs as well as in liking Cheetos (and staying up too late and not doing their homework and driving too fast), apparently each of the the things kids with adolescent angst like are the same. You heard it here, folks, Bob Garfield just granted equivalence to Cheetos, staying up late and doing drugs.

This is intellectually lazy…this is the Bob Garfield Special.

But here’s a question: What should we think when a leading national advertiser borrows a marketing strategy from the drug trade?

Hmm, you mean like selling through a broker which is what most mid-sized CPG companies do?

Or do you mean decentralized distribution which is how Wal*Mart transformed logistics and basically did away with warehouses?

Maybe aggressive sampling efforts? Discounts when you buy in bulk?

What should we think?

Here’s an answer: It’s cynical and disgusting

And very profitable, based on the examples I gave at least.

There is another word for Random Acts of Cheetos: vandalism. The Cheetos Underground explicitly incites its shadowy network of crap eaters not only to perpetrate mischief but to document their petty crimes on video for the Cheetos website.

If one thinks that advertising drives people to do exactly what the ads say and that your basic over-the-top, take the situation to the extreme advertising will make people do what it says then yes, this is disgraceful.

If, however, you understand that people do not exactly what advertising says and that the brand positioning and the spots and purposely ridiculous then it’s quite a bit less than disgraceful.

Unless, of course, you want to manufacture a controversy so people read your column.

[Bob describes the spots, both of which are months old and both of which show people playing "pranks" on other people...neither are that funny mainly because the pranks aren't original and aren't good clean fun]

Can you see how this is all destined to lead to litigation? Or worse? Can you see how ethically bankrupt it is — Frito-Lay in the role of Ken Lay?

Another Bob Garfield Special! By throwing in the name of an ethical boogeyman Bob totally doesn’t have to make an actual argument because there is connection between the name of Cheetos’ parent company and Enron guy Ken Lay! Lock ‘em up because THAT is the final piece of evidence needed for indictment.

Take THAT bad guys! There’s a new sheriff in town.

…this campaign is mean-spirited and reckless and generally contemptible.

It’s the whole reckles and bad for society thing that I don’t really get…it’s mean-sprited, yes, but is hardly going to result in a wave of bad behavior by minors. Seriously, Bob, it’s not. You can unlock your door, put the safety on your shotgun and sleep soundly tonight. Things will be okay.

It’s bad advertising, not the death of Western civilization (even though you like totally made the connection with Ken Lay – BOOYAH!).

I would like to write columns like Senor Bob…the trick is to make some bombastic claim about how this campaign is totally awful and damaging to all of humanity and then not back it up and conclude weakly before veering off into…

You like crunchy snacks and want to join a real Orange Underground? Sweet. Boycott Cheetos and eat carrots.

Because THAT is the voice of rebellion.

more mistakes from the bearded one

Bob Garfield has an issue with doing basic research. I don’t know what his issue with it is, but every time I read one of his columns I find glaring and simple errors that could have been fixed had he bothered to, say, Google the subject.

For example, in his column today about the 72andsunny Guy Ritchie-shot spot for Nike, he says:

The video, like the soccer campaign itself, is tagged “Take it to the next level.” It’s a POV story — minus dialogue or narration — of a talented soccer player who somehow is plucked to play for England’s Arsenal. In the opening scene, from his last match as an amateur, he is awarded a penalty kick — which he drives over the defensive wall and bends like Beckham into the goal.

From that point on, all again through our faceless hero’s eyes, we see his career go to the next level, including women, autographs and eye-popping on-the-field action. This is all recorded via classically swooping, quick-cutting Ritchie camera work until the culmination of the guy’s transition to stardom: a penalty kick, in front of 40,000 roaring fans, exactly like the one he scored on his neighborhood pitch.

Maybe Bob is not a soccer fan. Maybe he is mailing it in these days. Maybe it was too challenging to take the 0.0043 seconds to find out that the situation in the spot is not actually a penalty kick, but rather a free kick and that there is a large difference between the two (roughly, penalty kick is to short field goal – almost guaranteed – as free kick is to two-point conversion – much more challenging and unlikely to succeed).

It’s a little embarrassing that a professional makes so many simple errors.

He writes only a single column a week! He has editors who read his stuff before it’s printed! This is his actual job! Yet he still makes mistakes.

This is a small one, granted, but the small mistakes are almost more irritating, especially as coming from a guy who consistently pokes holes in commercials for the slightest of flaws. The top drawer bloggers do a better job of getting the details right, not to mention the fact that they are more prolific and timely (the Nike spot was bandied about the blogs last week) more engaging and entertaining to boot.

Proper journalists who do the research and track down the stories are important insofar as most bloggers, who do this unprofessionally and don’t have the resources to, say, report from Cannes or track down bigwigs at BBDO for the story behind their new campaign, simple cannot replicate what they do. Print opinion writers, especially ones like Bob Garfield who write irregularly published, mistake-prone columns, are archaic.

Why wait all week for the single Garfield column about an ad that I’ve already read well-written critiques of (by actual advertising professionals who know what they are talking about) a week ago?

fire bob garfield is back

PSA Won’t Change Perennial Parental Bleacher Creatures

This just in: advertising won’t automatically make everyone in the target do what the advertiser wants!

In other news, I have been away from Garfield columns for too long…

Little League Effort Is a Well-Intentioned Swing for the Fences

Baseball is here, and what does that mean?

It means that the boys at Fire Joe Morgan are hilarious, it means that the Minnesota Twins are two seasons away from leaving the Metrodome and it means that the House of Biz softball team will start to play soon.

It means renewal. It means optimism. It means spitting. It means San Francisco is going to have a very bad six months.

Oh, right. Well, I guess it means those things too.

That’s because the Giants stink, substantially because their best hitter is a Giant no more, but an unsigned free agent, languishing at home with his all-time career home-run record and tattered reputation.

Bob, you really need to get the hang of this research thing. Last year, even with Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants were a pitiful 71-91 and finished a full 19 games out of first place.

I am pretty sure that they suck now, like they did last season, for reasons other than Barry Bonds.

Yeah, Barry Bonds, the most prolific slugger ever, can’t get a job because he’s been denounced as a cheater. Very good power to all fields. Very bad role model.

Is this an article about advertising or about baseball? Because if it’s about baseball I have a lot of thoughts about Bonds and his two-sizes to big head, more body armour than a U.S. Marine and general dickishness…I just won’t share them on my advertising blog. Because I write about advertising.

Baseball’s steroid scandal has robbed a generation of children of so many heroes. Bonds, Jose Canseco, Mark Maguire, Roger Clemens, Miguel Tejada — tainted by drug allegations all — have left a trail of disillusionment. Baseball may have long since ceased being the true national pastime, but it is still uniquely situated for role modeling. Every player’s approach — swing, delivery, batting stance — is distinct, and therefore prime for imitation by the kids who see it again and again over 162 games.

Advertising is about being quick and to the point. Advertising criticism, however, clearly is not.

But we digress.

Were you having trouble hitting your word count this week?

So if a kid can’t believe in Barry Bonds, then who?

Why, Dad, of course. He’s the instructor, the mentor, the No. 1 fan and the voice of encouragement in the stands.

Are we ever going to start talking about advertising?

Or (sigh) not. Because with spring comes another annual rite: the obnoxious Little League parent at a kids’ game, behaving like a jackass. He screams at the umpire. He hectors the other team. He second-guesses the coach. He berates his own child. And he can’t claim he was doped covertly.

He’s a dope all by himself.

Haha, good joke. That joke is the most fun that I’ve ever had with my pants on. It is way more enjoyable than Splash Mountain at Disneyland. I think I am going to re-read it again and again.

None of this is lost on the Little League itself, which is airing a PSA on ESPN designed to discourage Bleacher Rage.

Finally! We are going to talk about advertising!

That’s right folks, it took more paragraphs to lead in to the part about advertising than paragraphs about the advertising itself. In an article by an ad critic. Writing for Advertising Age.

A short but pointed 15 seconds, the spot from DCode, New York, focuses on a 10-year-old at the plate. From the stands, we hear the kid’s father chiming in, more or less perfunctorily, “Come on, son. Hit the ball.” The boy rolls his eyes and spins around to face his dad. Then he starts hollering:

“DAD, IS THAT THE BEST YOU CAN DO?! THAT’S PATHETIC. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY YOU BOTHER SHOWING UP! WHY CAN’T YOU BE MORE LIKE JIMMY’S DAD?! ALL THE OTHER PARENTS ARE GOING TO LAUGH AT YOU! YOU MAKE ME SICK!”

In my commentary on Garfield’s commentary I am going to say something about the advertising first: This is a really good spot.

Personally, I always wanted my Dad to be more like Jimmy’s Dad because Jimmy’s Dad always let Jimmy have soda and a hot dog after a game when I had to go home and have regular dinner. Jimmy also always had new gear and I had to wait for mine to wear out because my Dad said that it was fine. To top it all off, Jimmy’s Dad drove a Corvette and my Dad had a sensible car.

Later on I realized that Jimmy’s Dad was going through a mid-life crisis and otherwise kinda sucked.

Digression over. And in fewer words than Garfield’s.

The title cards punctuate the obvious: “Now you know how it feels. Just let them play.”

Well, yeah. And the turnabout does nicely sharpen the point, along the lines of the 45-year-old “Like father, like son” PSA, which showed a little boy mimicking his cigarette-smoking pop. With other role models performance-enhanced and reputation-diminished, more than ever we need Dad to set the right example. Could the prospect of creating pint-size douche bags be a moderating force?

Well, considering how it turns the situation on its head to illustrate just how out of line and ridiculous it is, not to mention the breakthrough “kid screaming at father” situation and well-written title card, I think that it just might drive awareness of the issue.

Which is what PSA spots are supposed to do.

Not likely. This spot is a game effort, but boorishness is not an affliction much sensitive to consciousness raising. In all of human history, this conversation has never taken place:

Person 1: “Don’t be a dick.”

Person 2: “My, have I been? My error. I shall endeavor in future not to shame myself.”

This conversation has never taken place because people haven’t said a sentence like “I shall endeavor in future not to shame myself” ever. Not even in freshman English papers about Jane Austen.

People behave like dicks not because they are uninformed, but because they are dicks.

They also behave like dicks because they know that they can get away with it without social approbation.

It used to be okay, decades ago, to use racial slurs in public…why is it not okay now? Because people were willing to step up and call out those who used them.

And they won’t be eradicated, least of all by advertising. Like daffodils and misplaced optimism and wads of spittle, they are perennials. They pop up every spring.

The children’s sports fan dicks do pop up every spring (what a weird visual…I blame Bob). The key for the continuing “bloom” is that rarely does anybody say anything.

No, advertising will not convince everyone it targets to do exactly what it says, but it is a start on the road of making it completely beyond the pale to act like this. These spots are beginning the process of making it unacceptable to act like this. These spots are making it easier for people to have a quiet word with offenders and shut them up. These spots are raising awareness of the problem…which is what they are supposed to do.

In Garfield’s view, this spot won’t make people immediately do what the ads want them to and is thus ineffective. He sounds like he is pitching Direct Marketing to a CMO.

ad blogs are everything that is wrong with the universe ever

I haven’t posted much recently about Bob Garfield because this isn’t a Bob Garfield blog, it’s an advertising blog that has occasionally reserved a scathing assessment for the bearded one…but when AdPulp’s mild-mannered David Burn started in on Bob Garfield, I knew that I could hide behind the mountain of briefs and unfinished projects no longer.

Yep, it’s time to look at Bob’s recent article and bash it:

Lost Souls?

Trying to Explain the Difference Between Commentary and Vandalism

Whenever Bob starts to talk about other peoples’ souls, he is really talking about how upset he is that other people, specifically bloggers, disagree with him.

Why do people kill themselves? Schizophrenia. Depression. Despair. Agony. Shame. Who can say?

Nobody can say, but I know that Bob is going to try.

I didn’t know Paul Tilley, the DDB creative executive who committed suicide a week ago, and I would never presume to divine what was going on in his life, much less his head, when he jumped from a Chicago hotel room to his death. But I do know this: In his last days, whatever else was tormenting him, he was also under professional and personal attack from persons unknown — most of them, presumably, subordinates — who used the shield of internet anonymity to mercilessly disparage him.

I called it. Did you see that? I totally called it.

Bob thinks that blogs were either the cause or, in some, way correlated to Paul Tilley’s suicide.

A quick thought directed to you, Bob: maybe you could just leave Paul Tilley to rest in peace and not use him to further your anti-blog agenda. It is really unseemly to do something like this. Soulless, in fact

—
Skipping down past some trite phrases and adjective-laded invective against bloggers that is just too tiresome to comment on, but you can read here if you like, we get to:
—

Once again, I have no insight into what motivated Paul Tilley to take his own life; correlation is not causation.

Correlation may not be causation, but there is a reason that attorneys correlate events to try to prove guilt…and there is clearly a reason that you try to correlate blog posts with Paul Tilley’s death.

Hmm, I wonder what that reason would be?

Suicide is a dark, desperate, often unknowable act, and those who believe the man was essentially blogged to death believe so knowing virtually nothing about his non-professional life, much less his inner one.

After drawing a line between blog posts and Paul Tilley’s death Bob, like a lawyer withdrawing a question after a sustained objection, has already done his damage and now pretends that he never got his hands dirty.

But it is easy to see why his suicide has triggered such a backlash, with ad blogs at pains to account for their treatment of the man. I surely can’t but wonder whether the vicious public assaults on his competence and character — assaults destined for digital immortality — did not pain his tortured self at least as much as such things have pained me.

The vanity and self-absorption it must take for a person like you, a mere critic, to compare yourself to the Executive Creative Director of DDB Chicago, and that you have tried to compare the pain that a man who committed suicide felt with your own hurt feelings…it is utterly dumbfounding.

There are not words for how sad a person you are.

The ad bloggers (after, of course, offering gushing condolences to the grieving family) have been quick to dismiss such connections as asinine — and maybe they’re right.

I am among those bloggers who has dismissed such connections as asinine…because they are, not to mention that the belittle the life of a man. As for those bloggers that commented on Mr Tilley and then offered condolences to the family, maybe they meant the gushing condolences because as humans, they were able to understand the pain that Mr Tilley’s family must have been feeling no matter what they may have felt about Mr Tilley’s business practices.

But the bloggers are still evil, right?

But as Tilley’s worst detractors continue to use these blogs to posthumously slime the departed, the lords of the flies could do worse than to think about the loss of the human soul.

After an entire article bashing bloggers and correlating their posts with a man’s suicide in a limp attempt to further his anti-blog agenda, Bob finishes up by actually blaming the commenters on blogs, internal consistency of what he is saying be damned.

The good news: we’re all off the hook!

The bad news: we’re still soulless, evil bastards who ruin people’s lives and by the way need to control the comments section better.

It could be worse.

garfield pans monster.com and i pan garfield

Bob Garfield is back with another ad review column and, though he hasn’t had any grievous errors of fact like he did in his last column, he is in the mix with the classic Garfield Column-Filler-Outer strategy of finding the smallest flaw in an otherwise excellent spot and flogging said flaw to death until he has reached his word limit.

This sort of writing (a limp imitation of journalism crossed with commentary) drives me up the wall because it is short-sighted, unreasonably negative and completely tangental to the actual value equation of the spot. It is so short-sighted that I went line-by-line through it adding my own commentary.

Yawning Production Flaw Keeps Ad Half a Second From Genius

I hope that Garfield doesn’t write his own headlines…that pun is more shocking than the time I saw that picture of Donny Deutsch in a Speedo.

This will be about a new spot from BBDO, New York, that is almost a masterpiece but also monstrously flawed.

When Bob Garfield leads with a line like this, you know that he is going to find a nit-picky “flaw” that he will flog to death before saying that the spot is otherwise genius, thus hedging his bets and allowing himself to say that his review was right no matter how the business does.

It’s easy to be “infallible” in your ad reviews when you so successfully hedge your bets (or, in the case of the Wendy’s red wig campaign, comment on the spot after the campaign has been killed and use made-up sales figures to back up your reason to follow the Wendy’s marketing team and pan the campaign, too).

First, though, a brief trip down memory lane. Go back a dozen years

Or go back ten years. Not that facts are important.

to the famous Pepsi ad “Security Camera,” in which a Coke delivery man sneaks a can of Pepsi from a convenience store, only to be caught on video as the entire contents of the Pepsi refrigerator case spill onto the floor.

That was a great spot, thanks for reminding me of it.

It was very nearly a perfect TV commercial — 3.5 stars in AdReview — compromised by one tiny detail. For whatever reason, the sound of full soda cans weren’t dubbed over the actual sound of the empty cans used to film the spot.

From a professional perspective, that’s a little annoying because you want every detail to be perfect. But if it doesn’t affect the spot, does it matter?

Only if you need to write a column and don’t have anything original to say.

The tinny, hollow result slightly, but noticeably, undercut the illusion.

It undercut the illusion if you are an ad critic focused on finding something, anything wrong with an ad. It did not undercut the illusion if you are a regular consumer and are busy laughing at the spot, and anyway aren’t intensely poring over a thirty-second spot looking for flaws because THAT’S NOT WHAT CONSUMERS DO.

Because I am scientifically rigorous here at the Daily (Ad) Biz, I did a study using ten out-of-industry friends…who, even when pressed, did not recognize that the cans were empty.

My friends may not be the brightest bulbs, but they absolutely know what an empty can sounds like when it’s dropped on the floor. I know that they know this based on last weekend’s ski trip, where empty cans hit the floor with admirable regularity.

That June the ad still fetched a Cannes Gold Lion

And it fetched said Cannes Gold Lion because, despite your silly complaint, it was a damn good spot.

but it also got us in dutch with a liquored-up (now former) BBDO creative executive, who came lurching across a French dinner table to inquire about our parentage.

I like the use of the “now former” in parentheses as if to say that this altercation was the reason that he is no longer at BBDO. Don’t fuck with Garfield!

As the little fellow was being restrained, AdReview was more bewildered than angry.

The “little fellow”?

I am glad to see that you don’t hold a grudge (and why would you – you were more bewildered than angry, right?).

Why, we wondered, was he mad at us? And, by the way, why did they record empty cans?

He was likely mad at you because you gave a bad review for a pathetically small and meaningless reason to an exceptional spot that deserved only accolades.

There may have been any number of reasons for recording the empty cans, a few of which I will list below:

1. Because they used empty cans and were recording sound on set
2. Because when they laid in the music track and adjusted the levels, the music drowned out any obviously tinny sound for all except the one person who viewed the spot multiple times in a row while frantically looking for flaws
3. Because nobody thought that even now, ten years later, someone would hard on this tiny detail that doesn’t even matter to the integrity of the spot

Memories of the episode came spilling back this week, like so many Pepsis

But were they empty Pepsis? Because if they were empty, it’s absolutely unforgivable. Just in case they were, I am going to give this sentence a mere 1.5 Biz Medal Star Power Ranking Things.

as we watched BBDO’s extraordinary TV spot for Monster.com.

The use of “we” when you mean “I” just tickles me pink. It’s like I am reading a column in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times by a real journalist who is bound by style rules, when I am really just reading Garfield’s column in AdAge.

It, too, is based on a simple, powerful idea. It, too, is exquisitely produced, in realistic animation reminiscent of the movie “Happy Feet.”

Bob, this is Reason calling. You said something smart. Please stop your column right here.

And it, too, is compromised — more than slightly — by an unaccountable failure in production.

Goddammit, Bob! You always do this. I am Reason – you will have to listen to me sometime…(sob)…please listen to me. Even just once…

Due to nothing more than an editing detail, this beautiful, arresting, almost-poetic 60-second tale basically makes no sense. At least on first viewing. And, in our case, third.

(Garfield kicks Reason in the face Chuck Norris-style and stuffs him into the trunk of his car)

Here’s the synopsis: a stork braves darkness and storms, harsh geography and predators, blazing desert heat and freezing Alpine cold to deliver its precious bundle — a gorgeous baby boy — to a California doorstep. In the next scene, the same stork peers into a cluttered, dingy office where a fatigued white-collar worker is burning the midnight oil. The working stiff and the stork make eye contact, whereupon the bird lowers its head and flies away.

Let me get this straight…you struggled to make sense of the spot but are able to immediately place the doorstep on which the boy lands in California?

Truly, your Shaolin-style ad review powers are strong.

Then the super: “Are you reaching your potential? Monster.”

So, what have we witnessed? Well, come to discover the loser in the office is the infant, 30 years later, and the stork wonders why he went to all that trouble only to see his charge rubber-stamping sales contracts or whatever. Which is, indeed, a brilliant idea — a moving and wholly unexpected bit of storytelling about human (and avian) disappointment.

We have come to discover that the guy in the office is the infant thirty or so years later. Some of us even got that on the first viewing.

We got it on the first viewing for many reasons, not the least because there are only two people in the spot – the baby and the office worker – and those two people are connected by the yawn. It’s a technique you may have seen before in movies and other commercials and stuff.

But we missed that, because we never registered the transition that was supposed to connect the baby with his adult self — namely, a baby yawn butt-cut onto the office-workers yawn.

Did Comcast cut out right at this critical moment in the spot or something?

Let me repeat. There are only two people in the spot, the baby and the man (and the stork, but birds aren’t people). The spot opens on the baby, then, as the baby yawns, it cuts to the man yawning. The stork returns to shake his head sadly at the plight of the man.

How is the confusing?

This may, of course, have to do with our own personal obtuseness.

It may.

On the other hand, we daresay most TV viewers don’t hang on every frame, one playback after another, the way AdReview does. We may be a halfwit, but we are an extremely attentive one, and as wowed as we were by the visuals and as sucked in by the narrative, we still failed repeatedly to get it.

I am completely unqualified to say or even imply that I am smarter than Bob Garfield. Or that all of those who commented on your review are smarter than Bob Garfield. And I would definitely hesitate to say that my eight year-old cousin is smarter than Bob Garfield. But somehow this spot made sense to all of us on the first viewing and Bob Garfield repeatedly failed to get it.

Maybe we got it quickly because we aren’t looking for a flaw in the spot to blow up into what passes for an ad review column. Just maybe. I wouldn’t want to get all ad hominem on you Bob, but it is a possibility.

Because the baby’s open mouth wasn’t wide or prolonged or obviously yawn-like (vs. coo-like) enough to be understood as a parallel to the adult yawn with which it was juxtaposed. A half an inch, a half a second, or half an overdubbed baby yawn would have done the trick — and if not that, in worst case, a super that says “30 years later.”

One of the reasons that this spot works so well is that the narrative does not need to be spelled out to the viewer with long shots of a yawn or with supers. In fact, lingering too long on any one scene kills the flow. And an explanatory super would ruin the animated movie-esque feel of the spot.

I can’t even believe that there was the suggestion of an explanatory super. Art is, in many ways, subjective, but I can state with complete confidence that if I suggested a super on this spot there would be a chance that I would get fired. Or at least put on less creatively-demanding projects.

This ad is one tweak from a Gold Lion. Till then, baby, it just isn’t reaching its potential.

First, I hate puns. They are the refuge of the uncreative and the 19th Century dinner party bore.

Second, potential is a hard thing to quantify because if means different things for different people. Gold Lions, however, are easy to quantify. You either win them because your peers, actual advertising professionals as opposed to critics without an ounce of experience, think that your work is the best.

BBDO won before despite silly ninny nit-picking by Garfield, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they do it again.

fire bob garfield, first in a series

I used to just ignore AdAge’s resident ad critic Bob Garfield…but then he had a very public temper tantrum because Adrants disagreed with him and I started reading the baseball blog Fire Joe Morgan.

Why is that second part relevant? Because Bob Garfield is the advertising industry’s Joe Morgan. He is an increasingly out of touch crotchety old man who says things that are simply ridiculous and yet is somehow the resident critic at the primary trade magazine of the industry. Also, Fire Joe Morgan has inspired me to go through Garfield’s articles to point out just how tremendous they are in every way.

Let’s start with his article from today:

Just Imagine How Trump Would Have Looked in Wendy’s Red Wig

I would rather not, but since you insist: he would look awful.

You know that Super Bowl commercial with the cavemen?

There was a Super Bowl commercial with a CAVEMAN in it?!?!

They were having trouble transporting a case of beer to a party, so they invented a wheel, carved out of a boulder.

That is so racist, homophobic and otherwise offensive to my delicate-as-lace sensibilities.

But they didn’t put it on an axle and roll it; they used it as the world’s heaviest tray. “Wheel suck!” they grunted.

Ha ha. Wheel not suck. Wheel good. But caveman not understand what they had.

Ha ha. Still offensive, though. Not offensive because it is bad to make fun of cavemen, even though it like totally is haven’t you even seen the Geico spots, but offensive because these lines are the set up to a tortured metaphor that will reappear at least once in an article that is really talking about a different commercial.

I can’t believe that you do this writing thing professionally.

Same goes for Wendy’s, and Saatchi & Saatchi, New York, and the red wig…Alas, the campaign did nothing to improve Wendy’s flat same-store sales.

Well Bob, that’s not exactly true. Though Wendy’s originally announced that same-store sales were down, by the time you wrote this piece you may have noticed that they revised those numbers…to show a 1.4% increase in same-store sales (which compares favorably to the 0.6% increase in 2006). By the way, they also reported that income from operations increased 134%. That isn’t a typo. They are up 134% on the year.

Quick question: Do you do any research before you write a column? Do you read the news? Or do you prefer to just write whatever comes into your head no matter how out of date your information because it’s so much easier (and anyway you’ve spent years doing it without being called on it because the democratization of media hadn’t happened yet)?

Just asking.

The franchisees said, “Red wig suck!”…and now the wig is gone, replaced with an utterly innocuous campaign from Kirschenbaum & Bond that would be instantly forgettable if it were noticeable to begin with.

Oooh, burn!

By the way, I hate it when I agree with you.

Poor burger slingers. Poor Neanderthals. The red wig was the freakin’ wheel. They just didn’t understand how to work it.

The first four paragraphs set you up for this? If you were a joke writer for Carrot Top, not to mention someone who is actually funny, and submitted this, you would be fired (though Pauly Shore might keep you around).

Saatchi’s spots, with the silly headgear as their centerpiece, never had to be otherwise silly themselves. But they tried to be absurd and offbeat and self-consciously goofy…only to seem just odd and off-putting.

Except to the consumers who powered Wendy’s to earnings and revenue growth that, in the words of CFO Jay Fitzsimmons, left the business “stronger today than a year ago.”

But what if the wig had simply appeared in otherwise ordinary slices of fast-food life, noticed by others with squints and sidelong glances but not by the wearers themselves?

If that happened, it would be boring.

It would have been fabulous on celebrities, for instance — especially ones famous for their hair (or no hair). Donald Trump comes to mind.

Great idea! There is nothing a consumer would like more than Donald Trump in a red wig, getting squints and sidelong glances from bystanders, talking about a hamburger. That would be hilarious.

Why don’t you open an agency?

In that way, it would have been not only a brand symbol but part of an continuing, escalating story line. And the commercials might have been funny, too.

No Bob, in that way it would have been only a brand symbol because the red wig as you use it would have had no more to do with the brand message, positioning or point of difference than it did when originally conceived.

Look, I was never a huge fan of the campaign. I don’t disagree with your not really stated but sort of read between the lines point that the red wig was used to be merely off-beat and didn’t do anything for the brand, didn’t do anything to sell. I just disagree with the ridiculous idea that putting the wig on a celebrity would solve any of the issues with the campaign.

(I also think that you should have researched a bit so you knew the facts. But we covered that.)

As a final though, the campaign could possibly have been saved (in terms of aligning the spots closer with the brand message and the comfort zone of the franchisees) with additional executions that took less emphasis off of the absurdity of the spots, more on the brand message/difference and perhaps relegating the wigs to more of a mnemonic. The numbers are good. The advertising did its job.

The real question, and the real discussion point, is did Saatchis deserve to get the axe for a campaign that generate sales even though it made the franchisees unhappy?