It’s Friday, so I think I’ll just rant about ads I hate
First off, I know that I’m not being highly original here, but is there anyone who actually likes the ubiquitous ads that deal with, ahem, ED? I watch a lot of baseball games, so I see an awful lot of these suckers, and, while I’m sure that they are effective I find them god-awful. I especially despise the one where the bunch of guys - aging Baby Boomers who look just like just about every guy I know in my age group - are jamming the “Viva Viagra” ditty. I really like the implication here - and in other ED ads - that the men folk are just doing it for their women folk. Right. (Let’s face it, if the wives were all that keen on it, the boys wouldn’t have to be all hanging out together jamming on a Saturday night now, would they.)
Not that I’m a repressed, parochial school prude when it comes to any mention of delicate, bodily functions, but next up on my rant is the Pepto-Bismol ads. They completely give me nausea-heartburn-upset stomach-indigestion-diarrhea. Bad enough the holiday-inspired version with the elves. Now we’ve got civilians doing their American Idol best version of the P-B macarena. Let’s face it, we all know what diarrhea is without having someone pointing to their nether regions. Pepto-Bismol? Pepto-Dismal!
Back to the Baby Boomers. I’ve had just about enough of the Touch of Gray ads to last me a lifetime. Don’t trust anyone who uses Touch of Gray and thinks that they’re fooling anyone. At least the Boomer-women I know all admit that we have no idea what color is actually under there. All I know is that the color that’s on my head now is actually a color that was found in nature on my head. Sure that was 20 years ago, but, still, it’s a color that was once my own. And most of us have our hair colored professionally, so it looks a lot better than the dye-jobs I see on some guys. Maybe Touch of Gray does come out really natural, and the touch-of-gray beards aren’t ones I notice. But why is it that so many of the men I see with dyed hair look like they do it themselves with shoe polish. And that includes Paul McCartney. Paul, sweetie, you weren’t my favorite, but you were the cutest. Go gray, my friend, I assure you it’ll be fine. (So, am I a sexist hypocrite when it comes to hair dying. Hell, yes. And I think it’s only because of the refusal of the men’s hair dying products to acknowledge that they’re actually hair dye, rather than a “hair treatment”.)
And what’s the ad that calls late middle age the “summer of your life.” (Is it Touch of Gray? Yes, of course it is.)
Am I crazy, or is being in your mid-to-late 50’s and early 60’s - the plight that us first wave Boomers find ourselves in - not the autumn of our lives?
This is not to say that these can’t be wonderful years. Fall is my favorite season. Blue skies. Gorgeous foliage. Halloween. McIntosh apples. It even comes with Indian summer. But, if I’m not mistaken, it is followed by winter.
It’s time for us Boomers to start accepting the fact that we’re getting older - and maybe even start accepting it with grace and good humor. (Nah, that will never happen.) Any ads that enable us Boomers to con ourselves into thinking that there’s no end in site DRIVE ME CRAZY.
No, I’m not ready for Fixodent and Depends, but spare me the BS about that implies that, if we don’t want to get older, there’s a way to avoid it that doesn’t involve, say, dying. And that’s by buying some font of youth product to use during this, the summer of our lives.
It’s not just Baby Boomer and/or bodily function ads that are causing me to rant today. For those who live in New England, home to a cornucopia of furniture ads in which the company owners do their own ads, is there anything worse than Bob’s Furniture ads. Give me Bernie & Phyl any day - especially the ones where the man, woman, and kid on the street sing the B&P theme song. And, what can I say, Elliot of Jordan’s Furniture is witty and Shakespearean compared to most owner-shills. But Bob’s? I would spend from here to eternity sitting on a cold concrete floor before I’d set toe in a Bob’s Furniture Store. Even if they offered me a special discount for those of us who admit that this may well be the final bedroom set purchase, given that we’re in the autumn of our lives.
2 X 10
Here’s a pair of useful lists of 10 things.
The first, is a rundown of essential legal points for bloggers from Steve Imparl at Daily Blog Tips. Some are pretty obvious (don’t use other peoples’ copyrighted material, copyright your own content) and some are things that you might not have thought about: what does you agreement with your web host actually say? Do you have an explicit privacy policy or comment policy? These are all things worth thinking about; if you don’t think your blog could cause you legal problems, you’re kidding yourself. Everything can potentially cause you legal problems.
That list is a necessary evil, but David Meerman Scott’s Top ten PR tips for small businesses at his Web Ink Now blog is necessary and anything but evil. In fact, along with offering some wise tips for businesses of any size, David’s got one that is near to my heart and can’t be repeated too often:
Comment on blogs, forums and chat rooms (but don’t talk about your products and services).
That’s a “don’t be evil!” social media tip that everyone needs to keep in mind. I’d expand on it to add that you must be honest about who you are (this one seems to be tough for PR firms to remember…).
The rest of the tips are all useful and on-point; some of them are things that we all know, but we don’t always do as consistently as we ought to. It’s worth a few minutes to give yourself a reminder by reading David’s post.
