Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Kim Kardashian and the Snow Storm of 2015.

There's the old advertising joke about a woman of 70 who dies and goes before St. Peter. 

Everything seems to be in order until St. Peter notices that she'd been married 45 years and is still a virgin. "Explain," St. Peter tells her.


"Well, my husband was in advertising," she answers. "Each night he'd sit on the end of the bed and tell me how great it was going to be."


--

The heaviest snowstorm since the end of the Ice Age seems to have resulted in little more than a few inches of snow and a few miles of over-reaction.

The news ran non-stop. Airports closed. City subways and buses--stopped at 11PM. Even the hardiest of all, Chinese delivery boys, were pulled off the streets. That's when you know things are serious.


Me?


I'm stuck in Atlanta because every flight from Teterboro to Timbuktu was cancelled.


Hyperbole seems to be our modern metier.


In weather. In sports. In celebrity. And of course, in advertising.


In advertising, we don't have to do anything.


We just have to talk about it.


Maybe I'm reacting this way because I just saw a well-done spot by that queen of nothingness, Kim Kardashian, for T-Mobile. It's a funny-enough spot, and she is certainly attention-getting. What's more, as T-Mobile's CMO puts it "Who better than Kim Kardashian? She's a social media powerhouse. This isn't just a TV commercial. This isn't just a 30-second spot. This is a social media event."


OK. I get it. She has 28 million Twitter followers and 25 million followers on Instagram.


I can't be the only one who wouldn't buy ice-cream from her on a hot day in August. She has all the class of a used-car salesman with a prosthetic ass. She's over-exposed, under-clothed and in-my-face and I don't like it, or her, or any brand that drafts off her caboose.


I get T-Mobile's point, and Kardashian's spot makes it.


But I hate it.


When we were kids in college, there was always a sign on the bulletin board in the student center that said in huge type "SEX!"


Then underneath that, "Now that I have your attention, I need a ride to Poughkeepsie for the long weekend."


It was weak then.


In our steroidal, hyperbolic era, it's even weaker now.





No comments: