Long gone is the heyday of great print and TV ads. What’s replacing them is desperate and pathetic “shockvertising.”
Nobody reads hard copies of magazines and newspapers anymore.
Print ads are as good as dead.
Nobody watches TV commercials anymore, except during the Super Bowl.
And those spots have gotten inarguably worse and worse in the last 20 years.
What's an increasingly marginalized ad agency — long considered the one and only place to get "good creative" to do?
Make videos, of course. That's what the kids watch. Make a video, and hope like Hell it goes viral, so you can then point at the views number in client meetings and say "see, we're getting eyeballs."
One of most popular methods now to get those "eyeballs" is the fake ad stunt, or "shockvertising," (or "prankvertising") as is it is called by trade journalists.
How this usually works is the ad agency sets up a scenario where "innocent" people are ambushed or even horribly shocked in public. Let's look at some recent examples.
Dead Man Down
The above instance of shockvertising was created last March to promote the movie Dead Man Down. It was made by Thinkmodo, a New York City agency whose website copy line is "BE CREATIVE. BE ENGAGING. GO VIRAL."
Thinkmodo claimed that this horrifying video features "regular bystanders, not actors, happening upon what appears to be an attempted murder."
That, is almost certainly complete bullshit.
These people may or may not have been actors, but if they were "regular bystanders," they were at the least told that this was a fake scene, if not exactly what the scene they were about to witness, was going to be. The reactions were too staged, and, well, somebody could have gotten seriously hurt.
This is the new shockvertising. The video has over 6 million views, so it's a "success."
The movie, however, starring Colin Farrell and a major supporting cast, made under $11 million domestically — not many eyeballs.
