BigShinyThing

In a piece entitled Why Advertisers Still Don’t Get It, Business Week has confirmed our Esther Dyson nugget about good products selling themselves. According to the article:

It’s time to remember that advertising needs brands more than brands need advertising. A good product creates its own relationship.

The example of a good product is the usual one from the usual place — the Apple iPhone — but Business Week also takes the opportunity to roundly skewer advertising as good advertising for, well, ads.

Miami hot shop Crispin Porter & Bogusky’s latest marketing wheeze has been to re-animate the long-dead eponymous founder of Orville Redenbacher popcorn. Apart from being downright creepy (oh we’re sorry — we mean edgy), the campaign — like CDP’s previous Subservient Chicken — seems to have done little to actually sell popcorn.

But for all the campaign buzz and blog-talk, nobody seems to care about Redenbacher’s revival. One might even wonder if, by becoming the reborn star of his commercial, Orville might attract too much attention to himself and none to his product. The hype surrounding the communication might fail to draw new enthusiasm for the product itself. I wonder if this commercial isn’t a sort of subconscious metaphor for how we keep propping up the lifeless tool of advertising, which is no longer the inspiration it used to be.

Well golly. This isn’t some disgruntled blogger dissing a whole industry. This is Business-flippin-Week! It’s as if in the face of Apple’s success, a whole tide of ‘well we never liked you anyway’ anti-advertising antipathy has begun. Again.

[Rather important note: the Business Week article is, of course, written by one Marc Gobe, head of Desgrippes Gobe New York, a brand design firm. We think we're going to rather enjoy the forthcoming advertisers vs. designers hair-pulling.]