The Rant: So, Telling The Truth In Advertising Is Crazy?

I just popped down to my local dollar theater (hey, I’m an intern earning shit so gimme a break) and caught a turd of a movie called “Crazy People,” which purports to be a movie about advertising. Most movies about advertising suffer from a complete lack of truth, but some of them do it with class. For instance, “How To Get Ahead In Advertising” is completely bizarre and I thank everyone involved for it (especially Richard E. Grant). This is neither truthful, nor bizarre, preferring instead to drag around in the dirt and pull out every rampant cliché in the book.

I got into advertising for the exact opposite reasons highlighted in this movie. It takes the very radical approach that everyone in the business is a two-faced liar who dreams up more and more scurrilous ways to con people. Wow, advertisers are the bad guys…dangerous territory guys. What next, German terrorists?

Anyway, it’s a comedy so I’ll let that go. But as it’s a comedy, I was hoping for something funny. But I’d already seen The Hunt For Red October, and I would rather eat my own cold vomit than watch Pretty Woman or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So, I plumped for this one. Hey, it’s only a dollar. Out of the 90-ish minutes on the screen, I laughed maybe two or three times. 33 cents per laugh. Think I got robbed.

Here’s the premise. Dudley Moore (if you’re a comedy philistine and don’t know his work with Peter Cook, then he’s the drunk guy in Arthur) plays a guy called Emory Leeson, an advertising creative who has got tired of lying to people and wants to produce ads that tell the truth. You know, the ads that we all create daily, or at least try to. The ads that DDB, under the leadership of Bill Bernbach, pioneered for clients like VW (Lemon, Think Small), Avis and Levy’s.

The kind of horseshit ads being produced here, most haven’t seen the light of day in decades. Remember, it was over six years ago that Chiat/Day wowed us all with the 1984 spot. We’re hardly in the realm of “smoke cigarettes, they’re good for you” here.

So, these “truth in advertising” ads get shown to Emory’s boss and his reaction is natural. “Emory has clearly gone insane, we need to commit him to a lunatic asylum.” Of course, the bad ads somehow all get sent to press, and people go nuts for the true statements and start buying the products! It turns out people respond to the truth more than bullshit headlines with fantastical claims. I’m shocked.

(Quick aside, if I had been locked up every time I presented a crazy idea in college or to my boss, I would have spent my formative beer-drinking years licking the wallpaper with the real crazies).

What are these “far out” ads?

They’re actually pretty good ads. Headlines like:

Porsche. It's a little too small to get laid in, but you get laid the minute you get out.

Forget Paris. The French can by annoying. Come to Greece. We’re nicer.

Volvo – They’re boxy but they’re good. (This could be an old VW ad.)

The FREAK (horror movie) – It won’t just scare you, it will fuck you up for life.

Sure, you can’t say “fuck you up” in an ad, but you say the same thing in other ways. The strategy on that ad is fine. In fact, the strategy behind all of the ads Emory presented would have been at home in a modern agency.

That doesn’t stop the makers of the movie painting this Emory guy as some kind of a genius living in a world of devils and backstabbers. The rest of the movie is as formulaic as the ads Emory despises in the movie, with most of it being set in the lunatic asylum. And to add insult to injury, the really good ads start being produced by the drooling imbeciles in the asylum. See that? Our job is so easy that your average nuthouse inmate can write better ads than we can.

Sorry, this may seem like a soft target but fuck this movie, and anyone who thinks advertising is anything like the shady world within. I may only be an intern but I’ve spent time studying ads and working with real pros. Great ads are everywhere, the truth sells and we are all following in the footsteps of Bernbach, Ogilvy, and now Lee Clow. Ads are based around the dramatization of a truth, or several truths. It’s not lying, it hasn’t been for a long, long time. Can we stop demonizing the ad guys and aim Hollywood’s giant scope at the real villain of today – Windows 3.0. Bill Gates is trying to take over the world, and only Steve Jobs can stop him!

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