Bird shit

 Have you seen the TV ad for Obama with Big Bird? (http://bit.ly/Rb0yzL) With mock seriousness, it spoofs Romney as the candidate who knows that the real enemy of the economy is not Madoff and the Wall Street “gluttons of greed” but the yellow-feathered devil incarnate itself.

 I think the ad reeks of ad people being addy.  I think it schtinks (a morphing of “stinks” and “schtick.”) Howard Fineman, in The Huffington Post, did, however, elaborate a bit more than me. He wrote, “It’s not just that crusading for avian rights is silly, or that PBS funding is somewhat indefensible. It is that deficit-reduction is a Republican issue, not a Democratic one. Has anyone told the president that the annual deficits have been more than 13 trillion a year?” The Democrats have more important issues to be talking about.

 Dave Trott recently pointed out (http://bit.ly/SQgbic) that President Clinton, in his speech at the Democratic Convention, bequeathed to us advertisers words to live by. “When people are hurting,” he said, “explanation trumps eloquence every time.” The Big Bird ad team should have been listening. Along similar lines, a teacher of mine at SVA said, “Better to be clear than clever, than clever and unclear.” However you look at the spot, the conceit dominates the point.

 And, it would have been nice if that ad team had thought about the audience. Combining the language from each of those two quotes, here’s a more fundamental one:  “When people are hurting, seriousness about their problems trumps self-indulgence every time.” I said that.