(My 300th Post!)
Okay, finally there is an ad that takes into consideration the fact that most people probably are watching the ads with the mute button on! Yes, I usually do too, and I’m really interested in advertising! So that means everyone else is probably watching with two or three mute buttons on.
The problem is twofold: first, the ads are louder than the show you’re watching, so you have to hit the mute button to prevent your hearing from being blasted out (Congress passed a bill recently to make that illegal, but from what I can tell, it hasn’t been implemented yet.); and second, ads are played over and over again, ad nauseum (a very appropriately-named term, by the way!), until people want to smash their TV sets. These are the two main reasons why the mute button was invented.
So here’s what this JG Wentworth ad does: it has subtitles, so you can see what they’re saying/singing even with the sound off. This is brilliant, and all ads should do this sort of thing from now on. I was thinking recently about how all ads should really be like silent movies now because of the mute button. Aflac did one ad recently that was like a silent serial (like The Perils of Pauline or something), where the duck rescues a woman tied to the railroad tracks and then is hit by the train to punish him for his offensive tweet about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. (<Oh, sorry; that last part was a slight editorial.) But in any case, I liked the ad anyway, but I didn’t realize at the time how brilliant it was! I had thought many times about how the mute button had killed the usual ability of ads to transmit their messages, but I hadn’t actually thought about a solution, and this is obviously it!
So worry not, hucksters and greedy merchants! There is a way to break through the barrier posed by the mute button! Just subtitle your ads like a foreign film, or else make it like a silent movie with inter-titles, or even other else make it so everyone can follow it visually without any language at all. See how easy it is? (I really ought to get paid for this!)
Here’s a link to the JG Wentworth ad I’m talking about:
And here’s another one that uses the same subtitle technique:
And here’s the Aflac silent serial commercial:
