-By Andrew Boehm

I haven't worked in advertising for very long, but I'm confident of a nascent yet keen sense that I've already developed: I can spot a bad, ineffective TV spot faster than an airline gate rep can tell you you've been bumped from your flight to Cleveland. Yes, I know what industry people say: If you're just talking about the ads, they've done their job—a dismal variant of the no-publicity-is-bad-publicity mantra.

Spare me. The more commercials I see as a marketer, the more I'm convinced of one thing: The world of TV ads needs a mirror.

For instance, I like Olive Garden as much as any other corporate lunch lizard—but the cheesy family banter in their commercials that's held out as genuine bonding is not what'll bring me in the door. In fact, it's this kind of plastic portrayal of a good time that's done much to keep me out of the restaurants. Can we hold the cheese, please?

Or take the well-known spot for heartburn medication Prilosec OTC. I'm all for any drug that helps people, but a middle-aged woman who can't dance is not going to convince me to choose Prilosec over Tagamet. (And I'm being kind, OK? A recent posting on the "Commercials I Hate" online forum read: "She looks like an idiot and needs to be slapped." So, there's one more viewer who's not going to be buying Prilosec.)

Now, I know that no matter what goes into a commercial, there are always going to be people who don't like it—but that's not my point. My argument is that today's consumers are much smarter than many ad executives seem to think. We have reached the point where creativity has been dumbed down to mimic the straightforward message. Or, to put it more personally, I feel dumb for having watched some of these commercials rather than changing the channel before they're over. That's how I perceive things as a consumer; as a marketer, it looks to me as though the effort expended to create these commercials has become secondary to the effort required to place them. Perhaps true creativity may seem like an unnecessary cost to some brand executives, but I have a message for them: People are starving for it.

My aim is not directed at those second- or third-tier efforts that run in the sleepless, wee hours when even the Weather Channel seems like valid programming. One sees the same lack of imagination even in the alleged showcase of marketing's best and brightest: slots in the Super Bowl. This year's next-day discussions of the best commercials felt to me like a kind of formality. Super Bowl commercials used to be the pinnacle of creativity in the advertising business. Now, it seems like there's more excitement over the cost of a 30-second spot than what's actually in the thing. Back in the days when Mean Joe Green tossed his torn-up jersey to a wide-eyed kid who offered him a Coke (that was 1980, for you aficionados) cost was not what people talked about.

There are exceptions to my rant, some of them coming out of the Super Bowl. The Tide Pen spot telling people to "silence their stains" was funny, inventive and relevant. But it also seems, ironically, that a company that knows damn well what it takes to sell something winds up doing the worst job of it via an expensive commercial. I mean, is Ling Ling the talking Panda (tapping on a laptop made out of bamboo) really the best way of telling us we can double our sales leads through Salesgenie.com? Are truly serious, truly successful account executives supposed to be impressed by a cartoon? The lasting impression I took from that commercial was that Salesgenie is a cheap outfit and would only be able to deliver a list of weak leads, if that. This concept could have gone way beyond such simplistic imagery and messaging. Too bad it didn't.

I used to work in radio advertising. I can't overstate how important creativity is in that medium, where the message must arrive unassisted by visual imagery. Unfortunately, the prevailing belief on the part of business owners is that radio ads are nearly useless and must include saturation to achieve any kind of effectiveness. These were the same owners who, while lamenting the dull nature of radio spots, ordered me to script their radio spots into numbing reminders about weekly specials. It's this same lack of creativity—the lack of understanding the value of creativity—that I see hobbling TV as much as radio.

It's hobbling Toyota, which is trying to base an entire TV campaign on a crappy jingle (fashioned, Muzak-style, from the Fixx's 1983 hit "Saved by Zero") and various car models zipping around a rubbery "0% APR" centerpiece. Even with nifty loan terms like that, the problem is that zero is the last thing anyone associates with buying a car. Worse, the entire spot rests on an offer that seems too good to be true. Did any other brand messages happen to be handy? Something that would turn heads—and then stay in those heads? Apparently not. When I see (or even hear) this commercial come near my television screen, I change the channel immediately. It's not zero that saves me; it's my remote control.

In our line of work, creativity is king—or so we're told. I try to sell ideas that convince executives as well as consumers. Maybe it's time to return to some basics that our predecessors seemed to know better than we do: You don't succeed by slapping information on a sheet, only to surround it with mindless filler. This was a principal that all ad execs once knew before they decided to downsize—literally and intellectually. Maybe, when I remember that Mean Joe Green ad, I'm wistful. Most of TV advertising needs to go back to the good old days.



Andrew Boehm is a team member with Baker

Creative, an agency based in Groveport, Ohio.

He can be reached at (614) 836-3845 or via

www.baker-creative.com.