For what we believe is CP+B’s Hotels.com debut, the agency decided to turn the “Captain Obvious” of middle school insults into an actual person, and boy is he annoying.
The risk in trying to make a humorous ad is that when it misfires it usually comes across as irritating, and this is a textbook example. Captain Obvious spends the 60 seconds given (there’s also a 30-second version) roaming around a hotel — “the best place to talk about hotels” — pointing out obvious things like what “all you can eat” means, that “gym is short for gymnasium” and that Hotels.com is on the Internet. Does this sound mildly irritating to you? Because it should. Clearly, the ad is attempting to say that Hotels.com is the obvious choice for booking hotels, but instead it will just make most people want to punch Captain Obvious in the face and/or change the channel after about three seconds.
As mentioned, tipsters tell us that “Captain Obvious” marks CP+B’s first work for the brand since taking over for Y&R Chicago on the account last October. If it’s any indication of what’s to come, we’re really going to miss Y&R’s approach, such as with this clever skydiving effort from a few years back. Maybe CP+B will change up their strategy to something less obnoxious, but we’ve got a bad feeling we’ll be seeing this character for a while.