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In which Bumblebee helps some responsible mall rats make $8/hour
Because I had two hours between when they took my office’s servers down and when I had to be at my exercise class, I ended up in the Trumbull mall last night. I had the exceptional experience of buying dinner at the Sbarro’s stand only to discover that both the oil in the pizza crust and the lemon flavor in the lemonade had gone off in the ways totally typical for those ingredients. They weren’t bad enough to not eat the stuff, but I felt like I was at the six-month pull for some sort of fast food product storage study.
After convincing myself that none of the things I almost picked up in the Just-A-Buck store were in fact even worth a buck, I ended up passing by the ubiquitous bench full of teenagers with clipboards, wearing too much makeup and looking perky and trying to attract the attention of people in their thirties while not looking too uncool in the process.
I felt sympathetic. I stopped. I’ve been the beneficiary (at least in the abstract sense of I use the results for product development and then they pay me) of consumer mall-intercept tests enough times, that I kind of feel I owe the universe back some data now and again.
They did the kind of screening that made the client half of me cringe. They let me read the screener across their laps, so I could see which answers would get me into the study for which they were recruiting. "You live in New York?" *frown* "Oh, well, do you work in Connecticut? Could you give me that as your address?" "You think you might buy a new car in 1-2 years?" *despondent look* "Do you think you maybe might think about buying it in less than a year maybe?"(I agree.) *perks up* "Oh, good."
They showed me a bunch of TV commercials on a computer screen, the Nissan ad they were testing nestled in the middle. (Luckily, the screener didn’t actually ask if I ever watched TV. I guess they assumed that. Actually, I don’t.). It was annoying, and aimed at mean-spirited people in their twenties, featuring a group of people driving away in their Sentra while their buddy was behind a tree taking a piss, and making him chase the car. For the first time in a while, I felt old. "Nissan: it’s a fun car to drive. Unless, of course, you are the person in your clique with the worst bladder control, and perhaps sensitive to the fact that your friends might not actually like you." I guess this pregnant woman with sporadic self-esteem issues just didn’t appreciate that message. I think I was also supposed to recognize the background music, since they asked about it, but I didn't.
I trashed the ad soundly, helping the young woman typing my answers into the computer with the spelling of the words I was using, and escaped with my six dollar incentive, just about enough to cover the bad pizza and lemonade.
After convincing myself that none of the things I almost picked up in the Just-A-Buck store were in fact even worth a buck, I ended up passing by the ubiquitous bench full of teenagers with clipboards, wearing too much makeup and looking perky and trying to attract the attention of people in their thirties while not looking too uncool in the process.
I felt sympathetic. I stopped. I’ve been the beneficiary (at least in the abstract sense of I use the results for product development and then they pay me) of consumer mall-intercept tests enough times, that I kind of feel I owe the universe back some data now and again.
They did the kind of screening that made the client half of me cringe. They let me read the screener across their laps, so I could see which answers would get me into the study for which they were recruiting. "You live in New York?" *frown* "Oh, well, do you work in Connecticut? Could you give me that as your address?" "You think you might buy a new car in 1-2 years?" *despondent look* "Do you think you maybe might think about buying it in less than a year maybe?"(I agree.) *perks up* "Oh, good."
They showed me a bunch of TV commercials on a computer screen, the Nissan ad they were testing nestled in the middle. (Luckily, the screener didn’t actually ask if I ever watched TV. I guess they assumed that. Actually, I don’t.). It was annoying, and aimed at mean-spirited people in their twenties, featuring a group of people driving away in their Sentra while their buddy was behind a tree taking a piss, and making him chase the car. For the first time in a while, I felt old. "Nissan: it’s a fun car to drive. Unless, of course, you are the person in your clique with the worst bladder control, and perhaps sensitive to the fact that your friends might not actually like you." I guess this pregnant woman with sporadic self-esteem issues just didn’t appreciate that message. I think I was also supposed to recognize the background music, since they asked about it, but I didn't.
I trashed the ad soundly, helping the young woman typing my answers into the computer with the spelling of the words I was using, and escaped with my six dollar incentive, just about enough to cover the bad pizza and lemonade.
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Hee. I like this image. Were you using four-dollar words, or was she just a poor speller?
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The purpose of advertising is not to make a commercial that you 'like', or that's in good taste. The purpose of advertising is to get you to buy a product.
Advertisers have switched to just making sure that you remember the product name. (They can't expect much else, since we're so bombarded with advertising.) ANYTHING they can do to keep you remembering it will do.
We're reached supersaturation of advertising.
Information Overload
They're not interested in selling a product or even really in delivering a message, true. The goal is to reinforce a positive view of the brand name through whatever imagery, music, theme or concept they can. If they could blipvert the joy-joy idea into your head every time you walked past a TV playing their commercial, they would, because they know that if thinking about driving a Dodge Ram makes you feel good about yourself, you'll buy Dodge Rams every chance you get.
I think the ultimate goal is to create PLIF's HappyCard, in which every time you make a purchase the contact on the card delivers an instant flash of electricity to the pleasure centers of your brain. I think on this day I will create my commune, and I'll take up hermitting and pole-sitting as a profession. It'll be safer than going to the mall.
Kristy
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I separated out the pepper flavor from the heat, and made the product actualyl not too spicy, unlike the above-mentioned Brianwash, which if I remember it right, had the main objective of blowing the top of your head off.
But maybe it sucked. *I* liked it, anyway.
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