When good music happens to bad ads
We here at Ads of the Weird like Bob Mould a lot, and as business writers and editors we also are partial to financial news. But we know better than to mix the two.
Apparently the folks at TIAA-CREF don’t agree. The financial services company has decided to use alt-rock icon Mould’s “See A Little Light” as the cornerstone of an ad campaign touting the benefits “dot-orgs” over “dot-coms.”
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| TIAA-CREF |
The problem here isn’t that good musicians are selling out by deciding to let their music be featured in an ad. It’s increasingly hard to begrudge a musician trying to eke out another paycheck in an era when album sales are faltering and radio play is harder to come by. And let’s face it, if you excluded all the musicians who have sold out commercially or had other shortcomings of character, your record/CD/MP3 collection would be pretty thin.
The issue is that advertisers think co-opting our favorite songs will get us to buy their products instead of just ruining the songs for us.
Listening to Mould, of Husker Du and Sugar fame, should evoke memories of that guitarist you had a crush on in high school, or the concert where you were crammed up against the stage, singing along as loud as you could and still unable to hear your own voice. It should not make you think of potential investment vehicles.
Advertisers claim to revel in being creative and original. How does repackaging someone else’s artistic efforts for their own sales pitches accomplish either of those goals?
Beyond the music, the other problem with TIAA-CREF’s new campaign is the insipid implication that using a “dot-org” Web address makes for a stand-up group of people who are, to quote the ad, “serving the greater good.”
For starters, although such Web addresses are often used by nonprofits, in reality anyone can create register as a “dot-org.”
Also, although, there’s unquestionably plenty of good in the nonprofit world, there are also more than enough people using their nonprofit status less responsibly. (You only have to deal with one fast-talking, contribution-soliciting telemarketer to know that.) Implying that a “dot-org” Web address makes an organization somehow more morally pure than a “dot-com” is simplistic at best, and irresponsible at worst.
Click here to see the TIAA-CREF ad.
Update! Need more ad fun? MSNBC.com's television editor, Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, has posted the results of her best and worst ads contest. Click here to see the results.
