Urbzen

Since the days of Burma-Shave and the Victrola, advertisers have used jingles to worm their way into their customers’ conciousness. Advertising has gotten a lot more sophisticated since then, but these insipid anthems still have the power to hijack our brains in a way few other strategies can.

As consumers, we like to think that we’re not so easily manipulated, and maybe you’re not. But try to read the following lines to yourself without also humming the tune:

• My bologna has a first name, its O-S-C-A-R
• What would you do for a Klondyke bar?
• Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat Bar

See?

Recently, the Gods of Marketing added two more jingles to our playlist from hell: Subway’s “Five Dollar Footlong” and Toyota’s “Saved by Zero.”

Launched earlier this year, “Five Dollar Footlong” has met with largely good, if exhasperated, reviews. It also seems to have had a dramatic impact on sales of, you guessed it, $5 footlongs.

“Saved by Zero,” on the other hand, has recieved a downright chilly reception. In place of the bemused irritation of the Subway campaign, reactions to “Zero” have been much more hostile. Why?

It’s not that “Zero” is inherently more annoying than “Footlong”–at least it doesn’t come with corresponding dance moves. Instead, the reason “Zero” makes viewers’ teeth itch is that we don’t really know what this musical beast that’s taken residence in our heads even wants from us.

Saved? By zero? From what? What does that even mean? And what the hell does it have to do with a Toyota? 

The beauty of the jingle is it’s simplicity. If you get me humming “Five. Five dollar. Five dollar footlooooong,” my takeaway is that I can get a footlong for five dollars. If I’m humming it around lunch time, I just might march myself right into a Subway. Conversely, walking around humming “Saaaved by Zeeroooo,” isn’t going to get me to do anything besides grind my teeth. It doesn’t make me think about why I might want a Toyota, and in any case, I tend to purchase automobiles with a bit more gravity than I do my lunch.

Unfortunately, it looks like “Zero” is going to be here for a while, so you might as well carve out a little cranial real estate, maybe next to the ever-popular “I got my baby back baby back baby back baby back… Chiliiiiiii’s baby back riiibs…”

Oops. I hope I didn’t get that one stuck in your head.

Last week, I noted some of the unsettling racial/sexual overtones of the new Axe Dark Temptation campaign. But it’s not surprising I don’t like the ad; I’m nowhere near Axe’s 18-24 year old male target demographic.

Which is what makes CP+B’s recent Volkswagen “Routan Boom” campaign so bizarre. As an educated, solidly middle-class, 26-year-old female who would like to have children in the not terribly distant future and who is, as a matter of fact, actually in the market for a new car, I’m sitting square in the middle of VW’s ideal consumer real estate.

And yet the ads, which should be tailored to appeal to me, instead achieve the unfortunate trifecta of offending, confusing, and utterly creeping me out.

The 30-second spot “Meet Christine” opens with spokesgal Brooke Shields sounding the alarm about a growing “epidemic”:

“There’s an epidemic sweeping our nation. Women everywhere are having babies just to get the new Volkswagen Routan. Take this couple. Christine here is so seduced by German engineering, she’s having a baby just to get it.”

 

Probably the weirdest note these faux-public service spots, presumably aimed at the educated young women who make up a full 61 percent of the minivan-buying market, hit is the mocking tone they apply to one of the most monumental decisions in a woman’s (or man’s) life: When, or if, she wants to become a parent.

As traditional gender roles begin to thaw, more and more women are agonizing over the choices that come with potential motherhood—Can I keep my career and have a baby? What am I going to do about child care? Can my spouse or I afford to stay home? What if I’m still single, but my biological clock is ticking?

The Routan spots minimize these life-altering moments with a gusto not seen since Coors’ ’07 spot “Pregnancy,” in which the woman’s positive pregnancy test is equated with the changing color of the temperature indicator on the man’s beer.

Interestingly, as I was transcribing the line from the “Christine” spot above, I typed “Couples everywhere are having babies…” before listening again and realizing that it’s not couples, but women. That’s another unsettling aspect: Even though all of the women in the ads are coupled up (Dan Quayle would be proud), it’s always the woman who has initiated the pregnancy, apparently covertly, painting the men as dupes and the women as manipulators.

Also bizarre is the choice of Shields as the face of the “Routan Boom” campaign. In recent years she has spoken publicly about her struggle first with infertility, and then with post-partum depression. Now here she is making a joke about women who approach having babies with the same gravity as changing their hair. What?

Sales figures for the Routan aren’t yet available, but it will be interesting to see if they hit their mark. In portraying women as wonton, overgrown children impulsively having babies to get a new toy, the campaign dismisses the legitimate and pressing concerns of exactly the consumers it’s trying to reach. They’re not just doing a disservice to women, they’re doing a disservice to themselves.