Dow claims to have developed technology that makes inner city trains less noisy in this ridiculously silly ad. But it looks like this silencing technology is pretty simple, and hardly something to brag about, if you ask me. That’s because this commercial shows people riding on the outside of the train (!). So this is their new train-quieting technological breakthrough? Um, I think we all know that if you completely cover the exterior of a train with people, it will dampen the sound (as long as they’re not all screaming with terror! They’re not in this ad, but that’s because they’re all actors being told not to scream or they won’t get paid. But in real life, this scenario might not be as quiet as demonstrated here.). And maybe they’re putting people all over the train tracks too, so when the train runs over them, it will just be the muffled screams and squishy sound effects we’ll hear, rather than the heavy, loud banging of the train’s wheels actually pounding the rails.
I don’t know about you, but I think I’d be willing to put up with the noisier trains if it meant I got to ride on the inside of the train (!!). It may be quieter for the train to be covered with people all over it, but isn’t it less safe, not only for the passengers, but also for the driver and everyone else in the path of the train? If the driver can’t see through all the people covering the train’s windshield, then how are they supposed to not drive into stuff all the time? And if this isn’t the kind of thing Dow wants me to think of, then why are they showing such a scenario? It just seems like a bad idea to me.
But hey, I think I might understand why they’re doing this. Perhaps people who live next to the train tracks are so angry and impatient with the infuriating banging of the trains, they want someone to have to pay with their life over the noise. And if that’s the case, then they will see this ad and figure that finally someone will pay the ultimate price for their annoyance at the noisy trains. Could that be it? Because if that’s not what they’re trying to communicate, then I’d say this commercial is a resounding failure. Because I’m not thinking about noise, but rather, the safety of the people riding on the outside of the train (!). And then I think about how if Dow is doing this with train commuters, they must be endangering the lives of countless others in all kinds of other ways I don’t know about. And that makes me think of Dow as being ridiculously reckless and depraved. So this entire scenario makes me think about all kinds of negative things relating to Dow, and completely distracts me from the message they’re paying so much money to communicate with this commercial. And we really shouldn’t be distracted from the message they’re trying to send by other elements in the spot.
Oh, and another thing about this commercial that’s a resounding dud in my opinion: When this train passes people and buildings and such, all the people hanging on for dear life on the exterior of the train make shushing sounds with their fingers over their mouths. This is, I guess, to indicate that the train is quiet. But it looks instead like they’re asking people not to scream at their plight, or not to call the cops to stop the train and arrest them for the reckless endangerment they’re all engaged in. Because if someone called 911 about this, they’d all get hauled off to jail, and nobody would even get where they were going. So they would have risked their lives for nothing! (Plus, this is what trains in third-world countries look like, with passengers hanging on all over them and riding on the roof, and they wreck quite often with many lives lost: Is this type of economic and technological leap backwards that Dow wants us to imagine they’re involved in? Because that's what this looks like.)
(Question to me: Okay then, wise guy, how would you have done it?) There are two possibilities that immediately come to mind for how this ad could have worked a lot better to communicate the quieter train issue, or at least I think so. The first is that rather than covering the train with passengers, they could have covered the train with something like a quilted tea cozy, but with little holes for the windows for the passengers (and especially for the conductor) to see out of. Each train car would have its own tea cozy covering it, muffling the sound a lot, and they could show the train passing by close to people who don’t even turn to notice it.
The second possibility for me is even simpler: have a big volume knob (like from a stereo system) on the outside of the train’s first car. The ad would show the train pass by a station very noisily, causing all the waiting commuters to cover their ears with their hands. Then the picture would cut to a shot moving with the train as it speeds down the rail line: We’d see the volume knob on the first car of the train, and the announcer would tell us that Dow has developed new technology to help quiet noisy trains; then we would see the volume knob turned down from all the way up to all the way down. Then the train speeds through another station, and all the passengers waiting on the platform hold their hands up to their ears in anticipation of the noise, but when the train passes by, they are pleasantly surprised that it makes almost no noise, and they all smile and lower their hands from their ears. Then, at the end, there is a tag line that says: “Turning train noise down”, and the letters “DOW” in the word “down” are written as the Dow logo.
Either of those scenarios would have communicated the message of silencing train noise effectively and efficiently, and without making everything look ridiculously dangerous and illegal, and distracting from the message. Oh, and they could have shot either of my scenarios for less money than the one that’s on TV now, I’ll bet, because they wouldn’t have had to hire so many actors to cover the train, and it would have been a lot easier to computer animate, composite, and render out the spots too.
Here’s the sound-silencing spot:
