PhotoDude.com

Mon. May 05, 2003

One Crappy Ad Campaign

One Crappy Ad Campaign – If you have food or beverage in hand, move along. This is a bit … scatological. I thought maybe I was just weird (stop snickering) in my reaction to a certain ad campaign that’s been going on for some time now. I thought maybe it was just some childhood trauma from toilet training deeply buried in my subconcious that caused me to react the way I did. But I’ve recently learned that others had the very same reaction to hearing the dominant catch phrase in this ad campaign:

“What Can BROWN Do For You?”

I can’t think of a more negative connotation to associate with my business. What were these people thinking? When I think of the most common brown thing I deal with every day (hopefully), it isn’t UPS. Though there is a certain element of “delivery” involved, I really don’t need the help of a multibillion dollar corporation.

If I need help with that, I’ll go to the hospital (that’s the cleanest of the many punch lines that came to mind).

Did they do any focus group testing on this campaign? Surely someone said, “excuse me, but when I think BROWN, I think crap.” Perhaps the focus group had the same reaction to the campaign that the general public is having … it’s so bad, we don’t even want to talk about it.

That’s why I’m here.