The fact is an idea can often look good on paper, then get lost somewhere along the way to executing it.
And I'm just man enough to say that sometimes bad work happens to good writers: the lousiness of some of my spots has been my creation and mine alone.
For example, the am/pm mini mart spot where I made a joke about the son in the family being adopted. Immediately after it aired, they started routing all the complaint calls from adoption advocacy groups to me so they could tell me, in very raised voices, why adoption jokes weren't funny. I listened patiently, then told them I was adopted and I thought it was hilarious.
I’m not, but sometimes you just want the noise to stop.
Then there was the absolutely awful campaign my partner Doug and I presented for Suzuki cars using the cast of LOST. There were several spots, but the highlight (lowlight?) was one where instead of a blue VW van, we had them discover a Grand Vitara on the island. We liked the show and we wanted to go to Hawaii, so sue us.
It's a good thing it never went anywhere. It wouldn't have been nearly as good as this one:
I don’t remember this, but my wife swears years ago I wrote a radio spot where the characters were building a house out of meat (SFX: Hands slapping ground beef). This was pre-Lady Gaga. Obviously I was way ahead of my time, which is so rare (see what I did there?).
This isn't the first time I've written about good and bad ads. I posted a piece here about it.
But I'm beginning to think putting up posts running down the list of bad ads I've done is probably not the most career-enhancing move I can make. So forget you've seen this.
Just like you did with all those bad ads.
