Dichotomy Consulting :: Social Media | Advertising | Branding

Ugh. Tasteless. Punny. Memorable for all the wrong reasons.

From my play blog cavworld.net.

When I was a kid, I was the lucky cub scout that won the Pinewood Derby. The moment is, as you might imagine, easy for me to remember. Pleasant memories of once-in-a-lifetime events–I was in the fourth grade at the time, so I felt like I had won the Indy 500–usually are.

Many years later, I had another moment that has stuck with me. I was in a restroom at Chandra Bose International Airport in Calcutta when a mangy, battle-weary black-and-white cat sauntered under the partition and into the stall. The poor devil had a big fat tick feeding off him at his haunches. The cat then proceeded to rub himself all over my bare shins. Being somewhat indisposed at the time, there was little to do to avoid this short of kicking him, and that’s not the sort of thing I do. I spent the next 20 minutes standing in front of a sink with my pants off trying to wash my lower legs with powdered airport soap, much to the consternation of my fellow travelers. Luckily, I had another pair of trousers in my carry-on. I did not want to spend my flight to Delhi itching and scratching due to a bad case of kitty cooties.

In many ways, this ad reminds me of that feline encounter of the icky kind. You see, I will remember it forevermore, and not because the layout looks like a Technicolor yawn, or because of the trite, just-got-my-bachelors headline with accompanying see-say visual. No, it’s because the masters of the universe behind this obviously-groundbreaking product (what if we made an athletic shoe with springs in the heel? Genius, I tell you!) decided that a spermatozoa was going be their Nike swoosh.

I don’t think I could forget this if I joined the French Foreign Legion.

Boar’s Head. How I love and hate thee.

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”  – William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style.

Back when I taught aspiring young copywriters, this was one of my ongoing refrains. Such it continues to be that when I see something like this–on a PIN pad at the Ikea in Tampa–it jumps out at me. It’s as if the pad assumes I not only have a secret PIN, but also one that I give out to strangers.