People love to get their feathers ruffled. I think it gives them something to do. They can post on blogs, rant to their friends, exclaim “Can you BELIEVE that???” with lots of question marks and capital letters. But more often than not, they end up backing themselves into a situation where the forest becomes obscured by all those annoying trees. Two articles found today on Advertising Age seem to illustrate this point. Neither article is long-winded, but the list of comments goes on and on and on… with people inciting flame wars and getting all bent out of shape over some very silly details.
The first: a comment about the new “we/me” logo for Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. The article itself skewers the logo as a highly unoriginal recycling project. Featuring a leaf green circle with the word “we” spelled with an upside-down “m,” I admit it’s nothing earth-shaking, but it communicates the point and the use of the tail on the lower-case m does a nice a subtle job of cuing the viewer to flip the letter over in their mind. I can think of a lot more heavy-handed ways to communicate the same simple message. And so it’s green – of course it’s green, what do you expect? For good or bad, “green” is the buzzword of the day. It’s tough to communicate that idea effectively with, say, a red logo.
Ok, so the “brilliance” of the logo aside, there are 10 comments in response with everything from comparisons to the WE TV logo (it’s green, and it says we… that’s about where the similarity ends) to Gore bashing to support for the logo in defiance of the article. There’s even a mock suggestion that M&M should sue for infringement due to the green candy-shaped circle with an M on it.
Continuing to read through the articles, I run across a brief explanation of how the pro-Mexico Absolut ad caused the company to issue a public apology… and it was all due to a woman browsing a magazine in Mexico City, seeing an ad that she thought was amusing, and eventually posting it on her blog with surprisingly strong results. There was an article about this same ad earlier this week on AdFreak with its own flood of comments. Everyone getting their panties in a bunch because an ad that was meant for a country-specific market dared to suggest an alternate outcome to the Mexican-American war. The horror.
All I’m saying is, there are better things to get riled up about. It reminds me of the cliche of the “Mothers Against Anything” groups, clusters of squawking busybodies who have nothing better to do than sit around thinking of things to get outraged about. Seriously, people. Just chill.
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