You knew this was coming.
Since the weekend marks another consumerist holiday and another opportunity for marketers to try and convince us to buy stuff we will never need, various agencies have created theme videos to mock the big day…and possibly do a bit of shameless self-promotion in the process.
First is L.A.’s Mistress, which has never shown any reluctance to play on its semi-scandalous name in the past. Seems the agency often receives written propositions or voicemails seeking a very different sort of agency service…
The agency writes:
“We’ve received some very interesting Valentines ranging from the eccentric to the explicit. This year, we thought we’d get into the romantic spirit and share some of the more endearing direct messages and emails found in our inbox.”
Was it real, or did Mistress employees write these notes? You be the judge.
Next, RTO+P continues its string of not-ads with a video playing on a classic joke. You’ll never guess what “it” is!
Now here are a couple of actual ads. From Minneapolis-based Colle + McVoy, a real stunt to promote a real local beer that we’ve never tried.
We feel like that paper would be discarded quite quickly, but we do like the low-budget appeal to The Poors.
On the international front, Grey Warsaw and Polish health care provider Affidea demonstrate the one proven way to save your failing relationship: take a baking class together. But wait…there’s a milky twist!
OK, that was totally unexpected.
Just because we feel like it, this is truly the worst Valentine’s Day ad we have ever seen. Like every other Vermont Teddy Bear promo, it is awful in every possible way, and we weren’t the first to notice. But we saw it in the laundromat last week, and good fucking god…
The guy at 1:30 could not possibly be any creepier.
That was too bad to be a joke, really. We would inquire as to which company produced this monstrosity, but who would admit to such a thing?
Has any commentary on this completely fake holiday ever surpassed this effort from that one show that used to be good more than 15 years ago?
We are genuinely curious, though: do agency folks actually buy stuff for Valentine’s day, or do they decline to participate on principle because they know what a bunch of bullshit it really is?