What's Up With... MTV's Wack New Ad Campaign
Just when you thought MTV was as weak as it could possibly be, it goes and gets weaker. The channel's new ad campaign was recently introduced in the streets of New York: a series of posters each featuring a made-up slang word and its supposed definition, as in "bingo" equals "sex," "salt" equals "money," and "round" equals "cool." The MTV logo and a tagline ("Stay Tuned") complete the design.
When we first saw the posters, we thought, "What? We never heard of that." Then, with a rush of embarrassment for MTV, we figured out the advertising agency/creative brainstorming session-type logic that produced the pairs. It would hard to overstate the queasiness this campaign has produced among 14-to-29-year-old we've talked to-- young New Yorkers who, until now, had accepted MTV as a harmless spot to rest when they're flipping through TV channels and need to drop the remote to pick up a slice of pizza. You could practically feel the MTV brand slipping down on people's mental lists from "Can Tolerate" to "Must Actively Screen Out."
The new campaign couldn't be good for business, could it? Well, it seems that MTV thinks it could. In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Brian Bacino, a creative director at Foote Cone & Belding/San Francisco, the advertising company that helped MTV dream up the new campaign, noted that the ads were not even aimed at viewers, but at the "media buyers and decision-makers" who buy advertising there-- folks who are supposed to get the message that since MTV is so very buzz-o-genic, it makes things cool: sneakers, jeans, movies, iced tea beverages, phoney slang words.
"If I'm running a big company I don't have to understand these people-- I can rely on MTV to do it for me," chirped Brian, confirming a major reason why advertising is fading off the radar of younger consumers: corporate cynicism and detachment from reality.
The campaign won't appear on TV, because, as the New Yorker's Leslie Savan delicately puts it, "the artificial argot might be... something that the MTV audience could make fun of." Too late, guys. Everyone's already making fun. So ya better put away the market research, quiet down that creative team that thinks it's "so young we can kind of focus-group as we create," and start hyping your programming in a way that isn't all tragically hip. (Oh yeah, and get some cool programming, too.) Unless you want the slang word "MTV" to mean "dangerously wack on a planetary scale," instead of just "amusingly lame."
When we first saw the posters, we thought, "What? We never heard of that." Then, with a rush of embarrassment for MTV, we figured out the advertising agency/creative brainstorming session-type logic that produced the pairs. It would hard to overstate the queasiness this campaign has produced among 14-to-29-year-old we've talked to-- young New Yorkers who, until now, had accepted MTV as a harmless spot to rest when they're flipping through TV channels and need to drop the remote to pick up a slice of pizza. You could practically feel the MTV brand slipping down on people's mental lists from "Can Tolerate" to "Must Actively Screen Out."
The new campaign couldn't be good for business, could it? Well, it seems that MTV thinks it could. In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Brian Bacino, a creative director at Foote Cone & Belding/San Francisco, the advertising company that helped MTV dream up the new campaign, noted that the ads were not even aimed at viewers, but at the "media buyers and decision-makers" who buy advertising there-- folks who are supposed to get the message that since MTV is so very buzz-o-genic, it makes things cool: sneakers, jeans, movies, iced tea beverages, phoney slang words.
"If I'm running a big company I don't have to understand these people-- I can rely on MTV to do it for me," chirped Brian, confirming a major reason why advertising is fading off the radar of younger consumers: corporate cynicism and detachment from reality.
The campaign won't appear on TV, because, as the New Yorker's Leslie Savan delicately puts it, "the artificial argot might be... something that the MTV audience could make fun of." Too late, guys. Everyone's already making fun. So ya better put away the market research, quiet down that creative team that thinks it's "so young we can kind of focus-group as we create," and start hyping your programming in a way that isn't all tragically hip. (Oh yeah, and get some cool programming, too.) Unless you want the slang word "MTV" to mean "dangerously wack on a planetary scale," instead of just "amusingly lame."
posted by Lucia Toledo at 8:28 AM
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