Saturday, March 31, 2012

Scotts Turf Builder Starving Lawn Ad

It looks like Scotts has personified their brand with a Scotsman named Scott who nags people to buy Scotts lawn care products. He stands there wearing a tartan-ish shirt, and badgers his neighbors in a Scottish accent to feed their lawns. (But then he gets mad if they buy a different brand of lawn food, and he sneaks back at night to pour gasoline all over their lawns to kill the grass so he can show up the next morning and say: "Oh no! It looks like you didn't use Scotts brand lawn feast, er, Turf Builder!") Maybe they should have Scott play golf on his lawn while wearing a kilt too, and drink Scotch whiskey just to further call attention to his Scottishness. But I have an even better idea!

If Scotts is trying to get a mascot character for their company to make us remember their brand name when we want to buy lawn care stuff, then how about using the character of Mr. Scott from Star Trek (wearing his red shirt uniform from the TV series and the new movie version of Star Trek)? He could spaz out like Scotty from Star Trek does about the engines of the Starship Enterprise, but do it about someone's lawn instead. So he could run over to someone's browning lawn, kneel down on it, and in a panicked, Scottish-accented voice, say stuff to the homeowner like: "Look at this lawn! She can't take much more of this captain!" Or perhaps he could talk to the lawn about its (female) owner: "I'm giving it all I've got! She just won't respond! I don't know how much more of this she can take, but I'm doing the best I can captain!" And then he would fall onto the brown lawn, hugging the ground and crying, which makes the woman say: "So you're saying I should do something for my lawn?" Then the announcer could say Mr. Scott used his brilliant engineering mind to engineer the world's best lawn care products, or something. And they could say their products use "space-age technology" to make your grass grow at warp speed!

Also, since a lot of homeowner associations require fresh green lawns or else fine and/or have members arrested and imprisoned, Mr. Scott could help the homeowner, his "captain" (maybe even played by William Shatner), defeat the threatening homeowner association, personified by some Romulans or Klingons or something. So the Romulans are trying to conquer the captain's house and throw him out of the neighborhood by using his brown lawn against him (or else they're trying to kill his lawn to use this as an excuse to expel him from the community), so he calls on Scotty to solve the problem, and with much chewing of the scenery, he uses Scotts Turf Builder to wake up the lawn and get it back to full health, thus foiling the Romulan plot and making the neighborhood safe again for the Federation.

(Oh, and since so much special effects stuff is shot on "green screen", the Star Trek characters could want to get the lawn so nice and green so they can sit on it and act out scenes from Star Trek, and have the ship and stuff all matted in around them. And maybe they could show how they tried it with an unhealthy lawn with brown patches, and it didn't work, and they just ended up looking like grown-up nerds making fools of themselves; but once they got the lawn all bright green with Scotts Turf Builder, they go out onto the lawn, and then it switches to photo-realistic backgrounds with CGI characters for them to fight and stuff. And then all the nerds in the neighborhood congregate on the sidewalk to watch the "new episodes" of their neighborhood Star Trek! And just for even more fun, it could turn out that all the actors from all the Star Trek movies and TV shows live on the same street, and they always come over in character, wearing the make-up and costumes, etc., so it looks like all the Star Trek episodes and movies are just made on the Captain's lawn.)

Anyway, it would be silly and fun, and I'll bet Star Trek fans would love it! But it would cost a lot more to license the character of Mr. Scott than it does to use a generic Scottish guy and call him "Scott", because the latter is free. (<Actually, it's Scot free!) (Maybe this Star Trek "Scotty" lawn care ad would make a good SNL-type sketch.)

Here is the ad I'm talking about: