The Geico cavemen ads have clearly outlasted their humor usefulness, but that rarely stops advertising executives.
The new tennis ad simply baffles me, though. As you're sure to have seen unless you're one of those who manage to live without the pleasures of television, the caveman is playing a match against Billy Jean King. As he taunts her, she points out he's not winning and hasn't even gotten a serve in, to which he responds "you might want to look at the scoreboard." Both do, which shows that, in fact, he hasn't scored a point.
So here's my problem with all this - what's the point of the caveman appearing to not know the rules of the game? The whole premise of the Geico campaign is fact the tagline "so easy, even a caveman can do it" plays into a wrong-headed stereotype in this alternate world where cavemen simply happen to be a hirsute minority constantly struggling with the perception they have not evolved past the primitive pre-humans who lived in caves.
So either this ad is saying cavemen really are so stupid they don't know what's going on, in which case the point of the previous commercials sort of gets lost, or maybe they're indicating that the whole match is rigged, right down to the scoreboard operators, which doesn't seem very sporting, really.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
cavemen
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2 comments:
The caveman gets it, but we don't.
I'm not sure that you "quit" a tennis match. You might forfeit it... But this commercial is meaningless and horribly written.
i can't figure out the point of the commercial either. i was searching to see if others got it and i was missing something. interesting point that maybe they're trying to say that the caveman doesn't know how to play the game and just assumed that he was winning. maybe that's it. i can't think of anything else that would make him say 'i get it, i quit but i get it'. get what? how the game is scored / played??
total misfire from whoever thought of this one. i guess any idea around tennis was good enough for the execs who approved it going into the us open. would love to see the look on the faces of those who thought it was a good ad and paid for it when they saw it for the first time. wonder if they had questions for those who developed it and had to have it explained to them? why would they then think we would get it?
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