Uh Oh, Domino's!

(...with apologies to The Banana Splits.)

Public relations campaigns are powerful weapons, and can be remarkably useful in corporate self defense. That's why it's important not to use them unless absolutely necessary, and then only with the greatest caution. Sadly, all too often companies don't practice proper P.R. safety. They reach for their 9mm chrome-plated P.R. pistols at the slightest provocation, they don't check to see if a bullet is already in the chamber, and end up accidentally squeezing the trigger while it's still pointed at their own feet. Think it can't happen to you? So did Domino's until last month, and now that poor bastard is missing 3 toes.

It started rather when a video popped up on YouTube showing a couple of Domino's employees in South Carolina -- Michael and Kristy -- having a grand old time in the kitchen of their franchise. It was a delightful video: Michael gleefully adds his own bodily secretions to several items on Domino's menu while Kristy narrates and assures viewers that the delicious offerings will soon be delivered to some "unlucky" customers. After a few days the video became, eh, kinda sorta popular, with about 1 million views on YouTube. The video has since been removed for some reason we can't fathom (though perhaps it has something to do with the criminal charges facing the video's makers), but here's how the Today Show covered it:

Okay, our sympathies go out to Domino's. It's pretty rough when your own go-getting, ambitious employees take the initiative to develop and test market the new Domino's Snotzerella Cheese Pizza and market it all by themselves on YouTube. What's a brand to do?

Well, some companies might respond to this by cleaning up the store, firing the pranksters, releasing a few press statements about how measures have been taken to make sure that this could never happen in a Domino's restaurant again, waiting for the whole thing to blow over and then mentioning indirectly the unparalleled cleanliness and hygiene of Domino's stores in future advertisements. Maybe if you're feeling especially punitive you help bring charges against the mucosal mischief makers. The advantage of this approach is that in time the people who saw the video will forget about it, and the people like us at Badvertised -- who somehow never saw the original video and didn't hear a thing about the whole affair in April -- will remain ignorant.

In fact, we wouldn't have known anything at all about the Domino's new Snotzerella Cheese Pizza promotion until last week when we were busy scanning YouTube's most popular videos for procrastination material. To our surprise, Domino's HQ had released a video with the ominous title, "Disgusting Dominos People - Domino's Responds":

Since we had never heard of this prank, we assumed the message from the Domino's President was a clever viral marketing ploy about some fictional hoax. Domino's discovered a video but they won't mention the specifics? Ooh, maybe we should search for it! Felony warrants are out for the fugitive employees? Ah, now we get it: this is one of those alternative reality games in which we, the audience, are supposed to go hunting for the missing employees! (After all, what company in its right mind would defend its brand's cleanliness in a video titled "Disgusting Dominos People"?) Fun! Excitement! Intrigue! Let the online detective game sleuthing begin!

We were ready to declare this a brilliant marketing move, since it had so intensely piqued our interest... until we found out that Domino's people really were disgusting (or at least two of them were). We at Badvertised will be the first to admit that Domino's was in a tough spot here, but we'd just like to submit polite that, in our case and likely those of many others, this particular PR effort backfired. When Domino's first noticed it had boogers on its corporate face, maybe it should have done what real people do in such situations: hope that not everybody noticed, politely excuse oneself, and wash up in private.

BK: Burger Kolonialism

Up to now, we at Badvertised were deeply disappointed by the commercials of 2008. This year's crop of ads were, frankly, bland and thoroughly underwhelming. We expected so much more from you, you crafty advertisers. For crying out loud, a year ago you figured out how to make factory layoffs into a sales pitch. But this year, it's as if there's been some sort of recession in your creative output. What's the matter? Global economic crisis got your tongue?

We were really starting to worry that we'd never see another nightmarish and actively repulsive ad again. But then, just as we were beginning to lose hope, came Burger King to our rescue with an utterly tasteless and revolting new take on the old hackneyed "taste test" gimmick!




You've probably heard about the ads by now. The idea is simple (and simply offensive): Whopper Virgins is a short documentary-style film that chronicles a team of intrepid marketing tools who travel to the furthest corners of the globe to find people who have (gasp!) neither tasted McDonald's nor Burger King's mass produced crap before. Or, to use the campaign's terminology, these ad geniuses are looking to expose their burgers to Whopper Virgins to see how they like it. See, the idea is that people who have never tasted American fast food burgers can provide a scientific, objective and unbiased measure of which company's burger is really tastier.

Now, the staff of Badvertised are currently on an extended trip abroad, so we don't know firsthand how this campaign has been received in the U.S., but we hear that it's caused quite a fuss. Apparently there have charges of racism and exploitation. We at Badvertised can certainly understand why Whopper Virgins might seem exploitive. After all, to the untrained observer, there might seem something unsavory about the image of a troop of well financed Western advertisers traipsing about the globe on a mission to take the virginity of as many [burger-ignorant] natives as possible. Perhaps some might even take offense at the blatant attempt to make money off of the Whopper-naivety of people who will never be fairly compensated for the role they play in boosting Burger King's profits by participating in this publicity stunt.

The short film begins with one advertiser saying, "It's been very interesting to see their reactions to the burger because they've never seen such a foreign piece of food before. And they didn't even quite know how to pick it up. And they didn't know how to... from what end to eat it!" (Boy, don't I feel stupid! I never knew that there was a proper end from which to begin eating a burger before, and I've been eating burgers for as long as I can remember! I must be an ignorant savage myself!)

Another -- this one identified as a "researcher", explains: "What we're doing is really talking to people who have absolutely no awareness of either Burger King or McDonald's advertising and have never experienced a hamburger: typically, very difficult people to find... and would be impossible to find them in the United States."

Now, to some it might seem vaguely reminiscent of scenes from the classic Nanook of the North, in which the man who appears as Nanook mugs for the camera and jokingly acts if he's never seen a phonograph before and has no idea what to do with it.

But we at Badvertised take issue with this ad for a far more fundamental reason. Sure, it's exploitive. Sure, the ad blatantly seeks to make a dollar off of cultural and economic difference. But at the heart of this promotion is this premise that Americans cannot trust their own sense of taste. And it's for this reason that we raise our middle fingers to Burger King. As one of the filmmakers in the Whopper Virgins documentary explains:

"You can never really get an entirely pure taste test from a group of Americans because they've been exposed to so much advertising, [and] burger culture [and] those types of things for such a long time."

Did you catch that? Supposedly the sole motivation for this experiment is the corrupting influence of advertising and exposure to the very food being advertised. You American consumers cannot actually trust your own taste buds, you see, because you live in a world saturated with advertisements that distort your perceptions. If you truly want to know which burger tastes best, you simply cannot trust your own marketing-spoiled sense of taste. Rather than naively judging for yourself, you should rely upon the burger-naive judgment of someone who has never tasted a burger before.... as represented by an advertisement.

The shamelessly self-undermining message of the campaign, then, is this: You can't trust your own preferences because your ad-drenched culture interferes with your natural connection to your own taste. But thanks to this commercial, now you can see you how you would react to a burger if you lived in a world where advertising didn't corrupt your relationship to your own taste buds. To put it bluntly, this advertisement's essential argument is that advertisements alienate consumers from their own bodies and from their own senses of taste. And the solution to this problem proposed by Whopper Virgins is one more advertising campaign.

Matthew's Meat

Ladies and gentlemen, it is our horror to present to you this radio advertisement for Matthew McConaughey's penis:

I Got Your Catch Phrase Right Here

I don't know exactly when or how the term "catchphrase" came to mean something of which one could be proud, something more than a label for cheap and empty hucksterism, or something more virtuous for a poetic device deviously designed to spread like a virus that infects audiences with an overriding desire to spread the infection and consume more from its source... but I do remember specifically the moment when I realized that this change had occured: when news reports (and if I'm not mistaken, his own widow) characterized United 93 passenger Todd Beamer's overheard remark, "let's roll," as a catchphrase.

A catchphrase? Really? Not an expression, an idiom, or a plain old phrase, but a catchphrase? Like "¡Ay, caramba!"? Like "Ancient Chinese Secret"? Wow. How thoughtful of Mr. Beamer, in his last moments, to craft for the United States such a powerful device for strengthening national brand identity, huh?

If I sound disrespectful, let me be absolutely clear about who and what I'm showing disrespect: not Todd Beamer, nor his actions, nor what he said, nor even the people who found comfort and strength in what he said. No, what I'm disrespecting is the act of treating a man's last known words like a movie poster tagline or a fast food slogan. For crying out loud, "Let's Roll" was eventually trademarked by the Todd Beamer Foundation because so many people were using the phrase to make a quick buck.

So we at Badvertised take the radical position that one shouldn't use the term "catchphrase" for something about which one feels reverent. Catchphrases are useful for certain ends, but they're insidious little monsters. At Badvertised, our idea of a dystopian nightmare is a vision of a world in which everyone speaks in catchy ad copy.

It's for this reason that we at Badvertised hold the following marketing gimmick by Crest in particular disdain:



Pardon me, but how fucking lazy is an ad agency that farms out its own job -- coming up with a catchphrase -- to the consumers to whom it's advertising? It's bad enough that you're asking us to hand over our cash for overpriced flavored toothpaste, but now you expect us to come up with the slogan that will encourage us to do so? This is like holding a contest among slaves in which prizes are awarded to those who come up with the best slave-whipping machine.

Hey, that gives me an idea... Here's a catchy slogan to give Crest's whitening toothpaste a distinctive identity: how about "White Power"?

Microsoft: Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

I could spend pages going on and on about Microsoft's dismal attempt to reboot its image with Jerry Seinfeld, but it kind of seems like piling on at this point. It's been said elsewhere and countless times already why this was a dubious idea at best. (For instance... Nothing says innovative and hip like an aging comedian who hasn't done anything funny in a decade. Oh, and on his show, he used a Mac.)

Still, I was hoping that the first ad with Seinfeld would be worth watching. Instead, I get this:



Microsoft certainly isn't the first company to put out an ad that has absolutely no mention of its products or services and instead focuses exclusively on brand identification and image, but they may be one of the worst at doing so. Watching this ad, I kept expecting it to turn out to be a commercial for something else: American Express, right? No, no, Discover. Wait, maybe a short film festival?

How disappointing to see that the ad's message boils down to nothing more than, "See? At Microsoft we can take a joke. We've got a sense of humor too! And we're making the future more playful. Like a Seinfeld episode. Remember Seinfeld? He was the most boring of those people on that sitcom back in the 90s with that god awful laughtrack and possibly the most disappointing finale ever. Still don't remember? It was the show with the guy who yelled the N word and talked about a hypothetical lynching of an African-American man in his audience at a comedy club? Exactly. At Microsoft, we're working to make the future just like that."

And yet, if one thinks of this ad less as an attempt to improve Microsoft's public image for consumers and instead see it as a projection of the company's self-image, then it all makes sense. Just like Seinfeld, Microsoft became hugely successful and then, in the late 90s and early 2000s, seemed to take a break. Just like Seinfeld, when Microsoft tried its old act again, it seemed hamhanded and awkward. Just like Seinfeld, Microsoft's recent failures and missteps don't seem to bother it all that much. (I don't use Vista, but perhaps someone out there can tell me if there's a way of extending this metaphor by likening Bee Movie to Microsoft's latest bloated operating system.)

It didn't have to be this way. Frankly, I would have laughed out loud and applauded if this ad had recreated a scene from Seinfeld's show... only with Bill Gates as the Soup Nazi, now transformed as the Software Nazi. Imagine Jerry walking into the restaurant, wanting to go from his Mac to a Windows machine, but the Software Nazi is unimpressed: "No software for you!" Bill's MS outfit would look suspiciously like an SS uniform. Elaine asks if maybe the next version of Internet Explorer would be kind enough not to use up all the memory and processing power in her 3 year-old laptop: "No software for you!" Bill is angry and we see brief glimpses of what looks like a bondage dungeon over his shoulder through a doorway off in the distance. Kramer comes in listening to a Zune, and the camera settles on Bill's face as his lips just barely twist into a smile under his phony Hitler mustache.

Now see, THAT is how you get people talking.

In a world where even an individual's voice is commidified...

R.I.P., Don LaFontaine.

P.S. WNYC's On The Media offers this obituary for LaFontaine:

It Does a Body Good

As highlighted on Photoshop Disasters:

Supposedly this is just a case of Photoshop malpractice, but I'm not so sure. She's pretty skinny, so maybe the bright yellow type is visible through her skin and bones... which would be stronger and less translucent if she drank more milk... Oh! So that's what makes this a trendy ironic T-shirt!