Kicking back in the couch at my mother in law’s place (well… we’re not married, but my girlfriend’s mom’s place) watching “When a Man Loves a Woman“. Don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, but it’s a kind of a sad story about a woman who’s an alcoholic and her family. A sad but good movie.
But wait a minute. What the hell is going on in the ad breaks? Both Smirnoff and Absolut are pumping vodka ads! In a sad movie about an alcoholic. A movie so tear-jerking that I’m basically starting to consider never to touch even a single cocktail again, and we are now anchoring that feeling to these two vodka brands. And they’re paying for it to happen.
Who the hell placed those ads there? And who persuaded Absolute and Smirnoff to pay for those slots? Somebody should be fired.
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Chances are: http://bit.ly/7RlXnf
Very bad timing indeed. Either incompetence or cynism.
The whole EU should adopt the french “loi Évin”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_Evin
A good example of when it isn’t very good to let money do the talking. I’m fully convinced that numbers in a lot of cases overrules communication strategies simply because it looks good in some statistics somewhere. Statistics shouldn’t be neglected, it can be a very good tool indeed, but used without human judgements and qualitative analysis’s statistics can also do damage whereas it can point out good solutions on paper (in this case for example perhaps the statistics shows good numbers of viewers that time of day?) that isn’t put into an analysis of the situation as a whole.
There really is a lot of bad decisions being made in the world today, and advertising isn’t any protected area against those bad decisions.