Actions speak louder than words. ProgressNow and Colorado Consumer Health Initiative were buried under an enormous amount of flack after publishing bizarre ads featuring over-aged frat boys doing keg stands and a woman hoping to lure a poor, unsuspecting man into her lair.
The major complaints included that the left reduced women (again) to simply a set of reproductive organs and that the ads weren’t clever. Don Draper would not approve. Frankly, the ads seemed to be a caricature of what middle aged adults thought interested The Young People. All in all odious and embarrassing.
Nonetheless, ProgressNow and CCHI asserted – INSISTED – that the edginess of the ads helped sell the terrible insurance. The ads were working so well, in fact, that the team changed them. Now, instead of hooking up, the ads feature a milquetoast guy wanting a relationship with our cougar in training:
“OMG, she’s hot! Let’s hope she wants to opt into this relationship as much as I do. Now that the website is working, buying health insurance is easy – which means all I have to worry about is getting her to make us Facebook official. I got insurance (I hope I get her too!)”
Nevermind that no man aged 18 to 35 we know seriously uses the term “OMG” in casual conversation (see second paragraph), our criticism from last month stands:
“The ads’ carefree demeanor seems particularly tone deaf in light of the fact that 250,000 Coloradans have lost their health insurance as a result of Obamacare. Unfortunately, the reach of these ads isn’t confined to Colorado as the uproar over the ads has gone national. Let’s be really clear: this is an embarrassment to our state.”
We can all acknowledge now that the original ads were no good and very bad, and the new ones aren’t much better, right?
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