Maybe I’m just seeing the world through a darker set of glasses this morning given my beloved Bears lost to the Packers and it’s freezing and gloomy outside (A-GAIN!), but I’m actually backtracking a bit on my typical Brand Guy stance and beginning to believe that not all products have deep ‘emotional’ dimensions worth leveraging in marketing communications.

Or, to paraphrase Sigmund Freud: that, yes folks, sometimes a bar of soap is just a bar of soap.

So, in lieu of some sort of useful info or insight I usually try to provide here, today’s post is mostly just me being cranky: about a certain type of really bad advertising that seems to abound these days; the kind that reeks of straight-from-focus group-to-execution banality; that screams ‘frustrated, high maintenance CD in a boring category’.

More specifically, looking at the current lot out there, a genre of overwrought, hackneyed attempts at approximating ‘grass roots’, ‘ social media’ and ‘consumer generated content’ in broad mass media like TV that can be reduced to three basic themes of:

1.     ‘It’s not a product, it’s a community of similarly minded folks all in love with it’.

In these increasingly hackneyed little train wrecks, agencies typically try to approximate the hip and intimate dimensions of social media simply by showing lots of people—thereby connoting a bottom-up consumer-driven tsunami of love around, say, Advil pain tablets. 

2.     ‘[We’re so wacky, we’re] takin’ it to the streets!’

We’ve all seen these, right? TV spots replete with tricked out parade floats resembling some sort of mundane consumer product, or vans emblazoned with brand logos dispensing kooky kids and spokespeople in public areas trying to approximate a ‘toilet paper flash-mob’ or something I suppose. To painful, clumsy effect usually.

3.     ‘It’s more than just a floor cleaner/widget, it’s a cultural/emotional touchstone/icon.’

Lastly, and more generally, any execution for a primarily ‘functional’ purchase that takes pains to avoid actually talking about old-fashioned niceties like benefits or efficacy. Pick one these days, but Allstate’s ridiculous efforts to create some sort of ‘Mayhem’ Spuds McKenzie youth-oriented mascot are among the most egregious. Honestly, do you need to go to that much effort and expense to explain that ‘stuff happens, people get hurt and things get broken’? Good grief, like insurance is that complicated a sell.

Alas, it’s my hope that agencies and clients alike resolve to less of this artifice and obfuscation and more clarity and logic in 2011. Especially considering a still-challenging economic environment out there and marketing’s ultimate job of driving good old-fashioned sales within it.

Okay, again: I admit this may all just be influenced some by other external personal factors…I mean, I did mention it’s really, really dark and cold outside, right? And wait: and I’m now being told that apparently Lovie Smith is getting a contract extension?!!

Ugh. God help us all….Hmm: can that Mayhem guy be sent up to Lake Forest any time soon?