Grey New York released a series of new ads for DirecTV which signal the end of its campaign with Rob Lowe, which launched last September.
That campaign didn’t sit well with Comcast, and on Tuesday the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus ruled that DirecTV needed to stop using several of the claims it made in those ads. In Lowe’s place is Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition’s cover model Hannah Davis, who appears in a pair of ads which made their debut last weekend. In the first of the ads, Davis talks up the wireless aspect of DirecTV, which she says makes it so you don’t have to look at “ugly wires and boxes.” She then tells viewers you don’t have to take it from her, you can take it straight from her horse’s mouth, who then starts talking. In a second spot, Davis mentions DirecTV being rated higher than cable in customer satisfaction for the 14th year in a row before her horse goes off on a tangent.
As Adweek notes, the new efforts from Grey trade in three of the most tired advertising cliches: casual sex appeal, a talking animal and a literal interpretation of figurative language. While the Rob Lowe campaign was far from innovative, it at least started out as entertaining, before inevitably running out of steam. This campaign doesn’t have the same kind of potential, but at least it’s not likely to result in a lawsuit.