By Nat Ives
Taco Bell advertised its Nacho Fries on TV this year with a
glossy, expensive commercial. It convincingly imitates a movie
trailer for a sci-fi epic, complete with scenes of actor James
Marsden as an astronaut en route to a swirling portal in space
"We had so many fans asking when the movie was coming out," says
Tracee Larocca, senior vice president of advertising at Taco Bell,
a subsidiary of Yum! Brands Inc. The work was entered for awards
consideration at this week's Cannes Lions ad festival in
France.
But the restaurant chain also recently offered consumers "The
Taco Bell Show," a low-budget, short-form YouTube talk show in
which lesser-known celebrities such as Spencer Pratt play games
with hot sauce. "We definitely have a channel strategy," Ms.
Larocca says. "We have a different aesthetic for all of our
platforms."
While beautiful, costly productions remain most big advertisers'
favored tool of persuasion on TV, high-polish work is being chipped
away online as consumers enthusiastically spread amateur and
semiprofessional aesthetics, meme by meme and like by like.
Marketers are learning the art of looking a little less artful, the
better to show that they understand certain audiences and
platforms.
Tim Leake, senior vice president and chief marketing and
innovation officer at the ad agency RPA, calls it the rise of "ugly
advertising."
"I really don't want to agree with it. I don't like it. I've
come up in a world where craftsmanship is what it's all about," Mr.
Leake says. "But at the end of the day it's about connecting with
people. If people are connecting with this, we owe it to ourselves
to understand it."
Examples include the Senate and presidential campaigns of Beto
O'Rourke, whose messaging often takes the form of live-streamed
shaky-cam footage -- the candidate talking from behind the wheel
during a nighttime drive on the first day of his official run for
the White House, for example, shot with a smartphone camera.
Deliberately "ugly" advertising, according to Mr. Leake's
checklist, is perhaps somewhat random but not sloppy, conveys an
idea simply, and isn't overly concerned with looking cool.
Red flags
Growing ad avoidance by consumers is eroding the value of
perfection. "People are developing an aversion to ads that look
like ads," says Mr. Leake. "When they see that production value,
it's a trigger that you're trying to sell me something, and people
aren't interested in that."
General Mills Inc. marketing at the polished end of the spectrum
includes Honey Nut Cheerios commercials featuring the brand's CGI
bee and tie-ins with movies such as Walt Disney Co.'s latest
"Avengers" film. But the company also distributes GIFs of someone
wearing a very analog bee suit and grainy vertical video of
teenagers dancing with Reese's Puffs cereal.
"Ugly can sell," says Bill Roden, director of creative at
General Mills.
High-finish content is a red flag on some channels, suggesting
to users that the advertiser is an interloper, according to Mr.
Roden. "When brands show up with work that's really slick, it's
like they're putting content on the platform, not in the platform,"
he says.
"You need some degree of control and influence, but by no means
should you be held hostage by your own brand guidelines," he
adds.
Asked whether unslick advertising will become common on TV, Mr.
Roden says yes -- in a sense. "Tweens, children, they watch
YouTube," he says. "That for me is TV."
But marketers must avoid the appearance of insincerity -- of
trying to present themselves as something they're not.
"If you're a bank, you should not be doing this," says Nick
Douglas, a staff writer at Lifehacker who wrote about what he
termed the "Internet Ugly Aesthetic" in a 2014 paper in the Journal
of Visual Culture. Financial institutions should emphasize
professionalism and attention to detail over relatability, he says.
"I want my bank to be very much not like me."
Craft is important
Brands sometimes deployed Intentionally ugly work before the
modern internet era. Burger King's creepy "Subservient Chicken"
campaign, which featured someone in a chicken suit with garters,
ran online and on TV in 2004, a year before YouTube existed.
Also in 2004, Quiznos used the Spongmonkeys, crudely animated
furry creatures born of the web, in a TV commercial.
"It was talked about so much because no one had done anything
like that, " says Jerry Hoak, executive creative director at the
chain's agency then, the Martin Agency, part of the Interpublic
Group of Companies. (He didn't work on the campaign.) "In fact the
internet was still young and brands weren't really in that space.
Half the people were ready for something like that and the other
half completely didn't understand it."
Perhaps counterintuitively, the spread of ugly advertising is
actually increasing the premium on craft, Mr. Hoak and others say.
"It doesn't always have to be expensive, but care and
professionalism is still important," Mr. Hoak says.
Procter & Gamble Co.'s Old Spice may still be best known for
"The Man Your Man Could Smell Like." The humorous and elaborate
ads, launched in 2010, saw actor Isaiah Mustafah move with very
little effort from the shower to a boat to the back of a horse. But
this year Old Spice posted a video of social-media personality Chaz
Smith promoting its body wash with plenty of humor but seemingly
amateurish lighting and effects. The viewer comments on the video
are full of sentiments like, "I'm OK with this being the future of
advertising."
The Chaz Smith Old Spice ad "looks and feels like the internet,"
Mr. Hoak says. "That's not what makes it successful. It's
successful because it's flawlessly executed."
Mr. Ives is the editor of CMO Today at The Wall Street Journal.
Email nat.ives@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 16, 2019 09:52 ET (13:52 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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