Ad (g)lib
I'm at the airport heading to a wedding. A friend I don’t see. Her daughter I met once. A fiancé whose name I don’t know. Michael. Maybe. There, now you’re caught up. Life is one big ad for life.
Not five feet away from me was a group of guys in their late-20s and early-30s. There was nothing diverse about them. They were cliches straight outta the kinda ads that ended when models wearing swimsuits stopped flogging overstuffed hamburgers. The only thing that separated these dudes from the guys in the Dockers ads that Seinfeld hated was that they wore Lycra®-infused sweatpants that looked like actual clothes. They sported running shoes pretending to be actual footwear. They were so comfortable in their Comfiwear (patent pending) that they had no qualms ordering martinis and gin-ands at 10am. I have to say, it was refreshing.
I didn’t envy the lifestyle. I lamented why we all don’t want to live life as caricature in a Dockers ad. And not just because I was Warwick-Bacharaching myself on by the free sausage bar so I could sausage myself into my tux. The wedding is black-tie. Of course. And, I’ve let myself go. Of course. I’ve been eating salads for, like, three days. Straight. I have no idea how people dedicate themselves to the church of endless suffering. Torturously low caloric intake is giving me the kind of urban privilege PTSD I get when Amazon deliveries don’t add complimentary Ring ringing as a notification option.
Since I attended the last black-tie-not-so-optional wedding three years ago, I’ve added 15 pounds of what I’ll politely call, “Christmas weight.” That’s because the people I see hugging cuddle-pets in today’s good-for-me ads look like me. And, they’re fine with it. They’re the reason I’m fine looking like me. I don’t want good-for-me ads, I want good ads. Ads that feature “after people.” Who shame me for being a “before person.” Call them aspirational all you want, but those ads had the balls to call strikes.
You know who gets this? My friend, [name withheld so as not to get him canceled], who sends me clips of Archie Bunker. He gets them from a racist adjacent guy he knows. Who knows a guy. It’s been Rob Reiner in jean shorts and a thin Sally Struthers time ago since it was considered reasonable to put a racist caricature on in primetime. Don’t click this and tell me you’re offended. It *IS* offensive. You will be triggered. This is your only warning. You can’t use Archie’s words on TV anymore. Hell, you can’t use them in public anymore. Good. But did we take good too far? On our behalf, Google worries we’ll find this 1988 Dockers TV ad so distasteful that they blur the image when it shows up in search. The ad had all the edginess of Paul Reiser in Mad About You.
Good ads were the Jackass of the content world. They did stupid, crude, borderline dangerous things to amuse us. They had one job. Find fun ways to tell the same story over and over. But that wasn’t good enough for them. It’s like they woke up one day and decided to trade their Peter Pan Syndrome for messaging dysphoria. When did ads become self-loathing?
So, ads try to be content. Content tries to pretend they’re not ads. It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world. And we’re all worse off for it. The toolish species adis habilis wiped itself out in a K-T-Y-style extinction event. In 1988, a line like, “The dildo of regret seldom arrives lubricated,” would have been a killer tag for a jel-based sex product ad. Without an outlet for playful prose, the old dude who thunk it up is left to leave it as a comment on Threads.
When ads get all serious, we do too. I’m back from post-adpocalyptic wedding. The dudes at my table of misfit friends wore misfitting everything. Shirts too big. Pants too long. Jackets that didn’t quiet button. Loafers for Pete’s sake. You’ll be happy to know I got into my tuxedo pants. A shoutout to whoever invented fat-guy hooks that expand waistbands. After perfunctory introductions, we strained to make small talk. When someone commented that the pinot grigio lacked woody, apricoty tones, I offered, “Episcopalian,” as a critique. I was the only person at the table who finished my laugh.
Good ads, like good wine, lubricate the laugh track of our life. They inspire us to live life like the people in a thirty-year-old Dockers ad. Or like those thirtysomethings at the bar. My last few stories have been Boring. Miserable. Pseudo-intellectual crap that you don’t want to read and I struggle to write. Bleh. I was all set to write another one. Until I realized, I WANT TO WRITE ADS!
Anyone need an edgy copywriter?
