Bad advertising? No advertising? No problem. Part 2.

By Gonzalo López Martí        LMMIAMI.COM

• I’ve been receiving an unexpected amount of fanmail since my rant last week so the topic is back by popular demand.
• If you are one of the few marketing &/or advertising professionals in the planet who did not read my previous column, lemme ‘splain a little more in depth what the premise was: it is not unusual for bad advertising to work as well or even better than good advertising.
• Or, to frame it from a different angle, how come so many brands out there manage to carve a solid following and healthy sales despite their seemingly lackluster advertising?
• E.g; Billy Mays (RIP)
• The man who solely armed with his charcoal-hued beard and his baritone filled millions of American pantries and garages up to the roof with inexplicable, yet mighty, contraptions.
• Oddly enough, on the opposite end of the aspirational spectrum, Rolex is another great example of dubious ads doing a decent job.
• More so, Rolex is a prohibitively priced product that somehow manages to sell briskly despite its dismay advertising.
• Indeed Rolex spends dozens of millions in ads and sponsorships.
• Yet every marketing effort they roll out looks depressingly stodgy.
• Their product shots are inexcusably staged and fake.
• The photography is horribly airbrushed.
• The copy is stilted, stuffy, lawyerly.
• Even the brand name itself sounds like a campy neologism out of a 50s SciFi movie.
• Rolex campaigns somehow manage to make the coolest people on this planet -Roger Federer- look like dorks.
• Still, it is a bulletproof brand.
• Why?
• Because it is a bulletproof product.
• Industrial design at its finest.
• Impervious to fads and novelty.
• Undented by the readily available proliferation of counterfeits.
• (Some wackadoodle conspiracy theorists claim that Rolex itself is behind the massive manufacture of knock-offs in the pursuit of some brilliantly Machiavellian marketing ploy aimed both at creating a parallel revenue stream and reverse psychology product placement).
• You see, last week we were pointing out the fact that Hondas are the most stolen cars in America, due in great part to its second-to-none resale value.
• Rolex presents a similar case: it’s only natural that it would be one of the most imitated products in the planet when it is not unheard of for it to command a premium at times higher than its original retail price even after years & years of wear & tear.
• Needless to say, it is also one of the most hocked personal and not-so-personal items in the history of mankind.
• Now that’s a killer tagline: Preferred by forgers, muggers, pawn brokers and stock brokers.
• So.
• The reason why those forgettable Rolex ads work might also be due that old, overused -yet very true- advertising cliché: our ads are bad because we put all of our effort and attention into making a great product.
• I can relate to that.
• Which reminds me of a funny headline I read once in the legendary satirical news outlet The Onion: “Nike to shut down its sweatshops in Southeast Asia to concentrate on what it does best: ads.”
• To be continued.