Sunday, November 4, 2007

This is our parody

If you're anything like me - or just about anyone else who doesn't work for Chevrolet - you probably hate those John Mellencamp "This is Our Country" ads. Turns out the folks at Fruit of the Loom don't much care for them either.




Everyone recognizes those Chevy ads as annoying and incredibly full of themselves, so they were a pretty ripe target for parody - although it's a little odd to see Fruit of the Loom doing it, rather than another automaker. I guess one brand war at a time is enough.

A gold star for Fruit of the Loom, although I must say they run the risk of distracting people from the actual product message by virtue of the parody; when I first saw the ad, I spent most of the 30 seconds thinking, "Is this song a parody of those Chevy ads?" and almost none noticing the visual image of all the people wearing tagless t-shirts and sweatpants in lieu of "standard" clothing. Most people still probably associate the name "Fruit of the Loom" with underwear, so making sure to get the message across that Fruit of the Loom makes many other products was fairly important. It's not that they didn't do it, but they did it in such a way that you'd have to see the commercial at least a couple times for it to really sink in, and that can be a risky proposition. Still, I'd say this is one of the better ads I've seen recently.

1 comment:

Quivering P. Landmass said...

Ok, that's two good ads in less than a week. We have to slow this down. That means we have to lampoon at least 30 more lousy ones before we feature the next ad that doesn't suck.

I was kinda iffy on this commercial. I agree with you that it takes a few viewings to see they're all wearing regular shirts. You can't rely on subtlety when you're filming a 30 second piece of communication.