Positive messages can help make ads effective

Mona Ridder
Cumberland Times-News

January 05, 2008 09:48 pm

— Advertising is part of being in business and some companies’ ads, whether they are in the print or electronic media, have a significant impact on the public’s perceptions of a product or service.
A successful advertising campaign can bring a company new business and help it sell more of its products or services.
A notable success in the local area several years ago was the Potomac Farms cow. The perky cow’s happy face became the company for many people as it appeared on the sides the dairy’s trucks, billboards, newspaper and magazine ads and television screens throughout the area.
The campaign was the creation of a local advertising agency and helped the dairy sell many more of its products than it might have otherwise.
There are some ads currently running on television for two international companies, however, that disturb me. One depicts a woman checking out at an IKEA store. She looks at her receipt and apparently realizes her total is significantly less than she anticipated. She looks furtively around her then walks quickly out of the store and nearly runs along the sidewalk yelling to her husband to “start the car, start the car.”
She gets into the car and her husband takes off while a narrator points out that it is true, IKEA is having a tremendous sale. The whole thing leaves the impression, at least with me, that the woman believes she is getting away with something or putting something over on the store.
I’d much rather have seen her go back and ask the clerk if the total were correct.
The other company is Toyota. The popular Japanese car company is currently running a series of ads on television that depict owners creating ways to destroy their vehicles so they can take advantage of the “Toyotathon” and buy a new car.
One ad shows a family shoving a boulder over a cliff onto their car. Another shows a guy burying his car in a snow drift so that when the snow plow comes by it is destroyed. Still another one, shows a driver pulling his pickup truck onto a ferry and dropping a mooring rope over the hitch so that when the ferry leaves the pier the truck is pulled into the drink.
I’m sure all of these ads are intended to be funny and to sell more IKEA and Toyota products but I don’t find them humorous. Yes, I’ve been accused of having little or no sense of humor. But, think about it. When someone leaves a store without paying for an item, that constitutes shoplifting and has the potential for the shopper to be arrested.
I remember a case a few years ago where a teen-ager in a large city bought an item in a small boutique and another item inadvertently fell into her shopping bag before she left the store. As she was going out the door, a clerk stopped her. She was arrested for shoplifting and had to pay a fine.
Such incidents should make us all more cautious about what we think we might be getting away with.
When a car is destroyed, usually the first thing the owner does is file an insurance claim. To do so in one of these Toyota advertising cases would constitute insurance fraud. The last time I checked people get arrested for destroying property to claim insurance.
The problem I have with these ads is that they appear to be promoting, or at the very least, condoning nefarious behavior on the part of consumers.
Advertising is an industry that often gets a bad rap but it is campaigns like these that make me wonder if, at least in some quarters, it isn’t deserved.
Contact Mona Ridder at mridder@times-news.com..

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