I RATE ADS

sjbooher: SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP! Also, SHUT UP! Fury, hate, rage and anger. Those are the emotions I feel with this whole campaign. Imagine annoyance as pure as Blue Magic heroine. These characters are all so “off-the-cuff”, so “cool”, so “it”, so “matter-of-fact”; they drive me crazy. And why do so many investment/financial ads feature one person just yapping? I feel like this whole genre is out of touch and needs some new ideas. F-

jtherkal: Whoa. Calm down. I don’t love this, but I don’t hate it. I actually like some of them. The cartoon-mapping over real people style gets your attention, but maybe not in a good way. To me, these are just really average financial ads. Person talking about money, blah blah blah. Maybe that’s what the target audience likes (target audience = real grown-ups with portfolios and a family). I agree there’s room in this category for someone to step in and do a breakthrough campaign. Talking heads and borrowing an annoying technique from A Scanner Darkly won’t do it. That movie sucked. C.

sjbooher: These existed BEFORE A Scanner Darkly, by the way, and I am getting so irritated right now thinking about how long these have run. Oh my god. Fury. I hated that movie too, if that counts. Maybe it is purely the animation style, now that you have brought that up.