Did you happen to catch it? The television commercial for Kellogg's Smart Start cereal? (January 18, 2006 - SC-NC market)
Well, I saw it once and then it seems the commercial has vanished, as it has not repeated.
The presentation went something like this: A mother and teen-age daughter were sitting and eating breakfast at the kitchen table. What the daughter was slumped over and ingesting, I have no idea; mother, on the other hand, was gleefully polishing off a bowl of Kellogg's Smart Start cereal - a product that Kellogg is promoting to lower both blood pressure and cholesterol.
Mother is extremely proud of herself that she's on a dietary program that should contribute to her enjoying a longer life. So much so, she says something like this, as best I recall: "Now that I'm on Smart Start, maybe I'll be around for a lot longer."
What do you think happened next? Did the daughter look up and at her mother and say, "Gee, that's great, mom. That means you'll be around to enjoy your grandchildren."? Or, "That's wonderful, mom. I'm so happy you'll be with me for a long time."? Kindly words from a loving and caring daughter?
Not in this ad, folks. No kind and loving feeling eminating from the daughter to the mother in this Smart Start commercial. Instead, the opposite happened. The teenage daughter resorted to what I consider to be the most powerful and infuriating antisocial expression yet developed: the upward rolling of the eyes while accompanied by an over-exaggerated scowl. Add to this the daughter's under-her-breath utterance, "Oh, great..."
Up to the moment of the spoiled, pampered princesses' childish reaction to her mother's words, the commercial was reassuring me that it was one of those 'comfort commercials' we associate from Kellogg's. Then, when the daughter's reaction flashed, the entire message of the advertisement went south. Why in hell wouldn't the daughter be glad to have her mother with her for years to come? Why must mothers - and parents sometimes together - be portrayed as their children's enemies? (In this specific commercial, it was more than obvious that the daughter couldn't wait to get out from under her mother's authority.) What happened to the loving family relationships that were prevalent in advertisements as I grew up during the mid-20th Century? Why portray hard-edged adversarial family relationships in breakfast cereal commercials?
Something tells me that those and other questions have been asked by Kellogg's upper management; especially management higher up the pay grade than marketing and advertising director. The premise of the ad was okay; the script and direction of the ad was just plain mean spirited. This commercial for Smart Start should never have been released. How did it happen?
A more fundamental question is, where has professional advertising disappeared? Is there no longer any 'class' and 'style' left in advertising? Is today's advertising talent nothing more than a direct reflection of today's social ill-mannered abruptness and crudeness? Beyond the advertising talent... who inside the corporations is sanctioning and purchasing such clap-trap advertising? Advertising that really doesn't sell anything, but instead seems bent on providing 'put downs', embarrassing jokes, meanness, cheap thrills, sexual innuendo, along with special visual and sound effects just for the sake of television viewers' entertainment; who's ordering this stuff?
In the January 23, 2006 issue of Advertising Age there's an excellent 'Viewpoint' article by Joe Dell'aquila and Darryl Lindberg entitled: "Why do the best and brightest pick the FBI over ad agencies?" The reader gets a clear picture why there's a scarcity of good advertising talent. The writers sum up the situation with this: "When you don't get great people, you are in trouble. When you don't get them for a generation, you have what may be a dying business." Go ahead, get Ad Age and read the article.
It is my opinion that advertising agencies today are populated by 'not-so-great-people' but, instead, by immature, self-centered, power-hungry minds that really don't know diddly about the art and science of advertising. When Toyota's VP of Marketing, Jim Farley, has to publicly tell (Ad Age - Jan 23, 2006) the creative people at Publicis Groupe's Saatchi & Saatchi-Los Angles - to get busy and find out what really makes Toyota's customers emotionally bond with their cars, you just know that a wave of inexperience, immaturity and a lack of real world wisdom is awash in the advertising industry.
Well folks, it's time for the ad game to reach back in history and regain its maturity and artful skills. Again learn the meaning of discretion, taste, subjectivity, civility, culture and, above all, visual and verbal salesmanship. What's needed is a resurrection of sorts. Would it be so lovely that the spirit of David Ogilvy would arise and re-ignite the direction of advertising in America today. Or, if David's out preparing some haute cuisine, a visit from the likes of Rosser Reeves would do just as well.
— Don McKay
