Take my ad, please! (Oh you kids!)

My career was in marketing, and during my time in marketing, I wrote plenty of advertising copy. The products I was marketing were dreary, boring, techie. They were B2B (business to business). B2T (business to techies). Or, when it came down to it, T2T (techie to techie). 

Sure, sometimes I used a bit of wordplay, or a teensy-tiny bit of fun-poking, hoping it would grab enough interest to get someone to read the copy. But there was no getting around the fact that the products were dreary, boring, techie.

In many ways, I always enjoyed advertising. 

That said, although I was a mad magazine and newspaper reader - including the ads - I can't for the life of me remember any print ad that I thought were especially clever or amusing. They may not have been as dreary, boring, techie as the ones I wrote, but...

Oh, the ads of the 50's and 60's were generally more interesting than the earnest and preachy ads of an earlier age, but there were still plenty of holdout ads which were still plenty old school.

I loved the beautiful ladies in their gauzy gowns in the Modess...because ads, even though I didn't have a clue what the "because" was for Modess sanitary napkins.

But many ads of the my childhood and beyond were full of iconic brands, iconic images, iconic taglines (more iconic than Modess...because, anyway), iconic "characters." These inconics were memorable - even though none of them were all that clever, and few if any were funny (at least not intentionally: is there any Baby Boomer who never uttered the words "Mother, please, I'd rather do it myself.")

Everyone knew that Coca Cola was the pause that refreshes. And somehow, when it came to December, there was a strong association between Santa Claus and Coke.Didn't Santa ever want a Pepsi or a 7-Up?

But it was the Jolly Green Giant, not Santa, who gave us Ho-Ho-Ho. 

One of the few truly interesting print ad campaigns I remember was for Levy's Jewish Rye Bread, where folks of all races, religions, and ethnicities were shown happily chomping on sandwiches made with Levy's. 

TV ads weren't all that clever, either. Like print ads - and campaigns used the same imagery and taglines across all media - they relied on what they hoped were catchy taglines and characters. 

But we knew our TV ads even better than we knew our print ads. After all, there were only three channels - one for each of the major networks: ABC, CBS, NBC - and the same ads ran on all of them.

So we all knew the midget bellboy hollering "Call for Philip Morris" cigarettes. We all knew that the essence of masculinity was the Marlboro Man. That the essence of femininity was avoiding  "dishpan hands" or using Clairol to wash away the grey hair you hated. We all knew Tony the Tiger. Bucky Beaver. Speedy Alka-Seltzer. 

So many ad images are embedded in our brains, indelibly ours forever.  

What was most memorable, the catchiest about TV ads was often the background music (Marlboro Man used the theme from The Magnificent Sever) or the jingle (Plop-plop, fizz-fizz, oh what a relief it is.) 

I'm sure the advertising bombardment of my youth had plenty of impact on consumers in terms of what products everyone purchased. If you'd heard of a product, heard of a brand, you were probably more likely to reach for it on the shelf as opposed to buying something generic. That's the theory, anyway. 

But advertising didn't save brands, either. 

Everyone knew that Braniff flight attendants wore zany space age uniforms, but Braniff didn't survive. And there's not a person my age who can't sing the Ipana Toothpaste brusha-brusha-brusha jingle. But does Ipana even exist anymore? (Sorry, Bucky Beaver.)

It must be so much more difficult for today's advertisers to navigate the waters, especially if they want to reach the young folks/young spenders market. Nobody that age reads print magazines or newspapers. That's for us old fogies, and we pay a lot more for the privilege and pleasure of indulging in print, because mags don't have as many ads as they used to. 

Nobody watches TV shows the way they used to, either. Especially young folks. Most of the TV ads I see are on the news shows or baseball games I watch. And most of them are for drugs and financial services aimed at the olds (or the getting olds). 

We are still, of course, bombarded by ads - many directly aimed personally at us, based on past searches/purchases - that pop up whenever and wherever we're online (other than email, where we don't have ads incoming, but where our spam folders are chocked full of attempts at engagement). 

The name of the game for advertising is, of course, engagement. 

I suppose this has always been the case, but in the old days engagement just meant getting us to buy something, but not getting to know us personally so they can sell us more.

But today, advertisers are engaging via social media.. They want influencers to push their wares. They want non-influencers to share their thoughts by responding to and sharing TikToks and Instas. (Facebook is not the way to reach youngsters. Twitter/X, which, thanks to Elon Musk, seems to be in a self-inflicted death spiral, is still at least marginally relevant for the young folk - but that relevance is fading fast.)

To engage with their potential customers, many brands have been, for a while - since the while of social media, anyway -  "using slang and snark to appeal to younger consumers."

But, the New York Times asks, whether the jokes are "wearing thing...the tactic falling flat."

In the comments on a recent TikTok post by RyanAir, an exuberant traveler posted about flying the airline for the first time. In the past, the typical corporate response to this might have been something like, “We’re glad to have you!” or “Thanks for joining us!”

Ryan Air went with: “Do you want a medal?”

It was quirky, except not. Being weird on social media has become standard practice for corporate brands.

This has long caused some older people to recoil. And there are signs it is no longer working with millennials or Gen Z customers — people like Priya Saxena, 25, who works in digital marketing in Atlanta.

“I roll my eyes,” Ms. Saxena said. “A lot of them are trying too hard. I think sometimes they’re trying to fit in and reach out to my generation. So it’s not very natural.” 

Ron Cacace, a 33-year-old former social media manager for Archie Comics, said the brands are now in a “race to the bottom.”

“When you see that everyone is kind of doing this lowercase funny, sarcastic posting or outlandish slang-based advertisements, what happens is you have to continue to one-up it,” Mr. Cacace said. “The quality is kind of dropping across the board.” (Source: NY Times)

Increasingly, the targets don't find all the memes, slang, and attempts at cool-via-humor all that engaging. 

Still, if a brand gets it right:

“When a brand can allow you, the audience, to play it, make it your own, that’s when you see things really transcend,” said Ariel Rubin, a 38-year-old former communications director for the Iowa-based Kum & Go, a convenience store known for cheeky social media posts.

Kum & Go? Really? KUM and Go??? I'm guessing they're open to all sorts of meme-ing. 

Anyway, quirky/funny/cheeky/LOL ads are running their course. 

Gen Z, it seems, is more interested in buying from brands that are strong on corporate ethics and morals, and that share their values (environmentally conscious, committed to diversity and inclusion, etc.).

Hmmm. Maybe we'll see advertising return to the just the facts pre-war acts. Or to the dreary, boring, techie ads of my career.

We'll see.