On Advertising 11/20/2020

Ahh advertising. It’s a career I spent 39 years in and John spent almost as long (he’s just 5 years younger). And it’s a career I’d like to think we know a little bit about. A little bit. And it’s the career we used to do before this new career as underemployed cartoonists. So when we were talking about new topics to explore for some upcoming strips, we thought, why not write about advertising? Al has a pizza franchise, Pizza-on-a-Stick, so let him try to come up with a new campaign that will take his franchise to the moon (that’s the way they talk in advertising). They say stuff like, “We want to own the casual dining experience.” Or, “We want to own the weekend.” Now the question is, who exactly gave you ownership of a particular day of the week/time of day/mealtime/or made you the official non-alcoholic beverage of the Kansas City Royals? And the answer is, who cares? And that attitude is probably why we’re both doing a comic strip instead of creating ads. That and being over 60, which is a fate worse than death (unless you own the agency, and maybe not then either), but I digress. From our years in the ad wars, we know that franchises like Al’s are given ads from “Corporate Headquarters” in places like Akron, Topeka or Cincinnati. Usually, they hate it. And frequently the individual franchisees want to run their own stuff. And therein lies the tension for the first two comics in our three part series. The third and final part is coming next Tuesday.

Here’s a dirty little secret about most creative people. They thumb their noses at pop culture, figuring anyone can do that, but what I do, now that’s special. So Al’s reaction is based somewhat on that emotion. But he doesn’t want to admit to that so he latches onto another popular trend that has taken off, thanks to the internet. Crowd sourcing. What does that mean, you ask? It means fielding ideas from the crowd (online in general, but in this case from his store employees) for free, but then you only have to pay the person if their idea has actually been chosen. It’s just another way for an agency to not have to pay so many employees. It doesn’t matter if the ideas stink, they’re free! Well, in this case, the crowd sourced idea is so bad, it matters. And the trouble is, even though Al detests that jingle, he can’t top it. More on that next Tuesday.

Anyone want to crowd source some comics?

Have a great weekend

Andy and John