Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Ads of the Damned: Greater Wisconsin Committee, "Remember"


The script starts with a deceptively innocuous question: "Remember how we got into this mess?" What mess? There's a mess? Where is it? Of course, it turns out that the narrator is talking about the economic mess, but why not just state that from the beginning?

Most people have multiple messes in their lives. Trying to grab someone's attention by ambiguously referring to one of those messes with the hopes that they'll stick around to find out which one the TV is talking about is asking a lot. I honestly tuned out after the question was asked and never really devoted a significant amount of attention to the rest of the spot. I had to watch the damn thing a half dozen times in order to register a reaction to it. That's not good.

If the script would have read "Remember how we got into the financial mess?" then I would have understood immediately what was going on right from the outset, but the omission of a single word derails the whole thing.

Massive problem #2: why is this ad attacking both Scott Walker and Mark Neumann? Pick a bad guy and stick with him. If you can't decide on whom to attack then the ad is running way too early.

The rest of the ad is void of anything that really drives home the point that Neumann/Walker's economic policies are bad for the state. The six black and white squares don't really pop and the symbols contained therein just get lost in the clutter.

And so does the message for that matter.

Final Grade: D-

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