MCI's The Neighborhood

Admittedly, I am nowhere near MCI's target audience for their Neighborhood ads. I imagine the target to be:

• Old
  
• Homeowners
  
• Dual-income households
  

Fair enough. I'm not there.

Even so, I think that MCI's Neighborhood ads are among the stupidest advertising I have ever seen. We have a bunch of disjointed shots of people doing lovey-dovey saccharine things while someone takes photos. Then we cut to some old white guys singing really old top 40 songs.

Let me digress for a moment here. I fully recognize that a good ad campaign can rocket launch the music careers of many an artist. It happened with countless Volkswagon ads, and with Mitsubishi's ads featuring a fun little tune called "Start the Commotion." When catchy but obscure songs are exposed to consumers, great things can happen.

This does not work when you force it. When you tell audiences point blank the name of the artist doing the song in your ad, they feel like they're watching a music video. Which then distracts from your product.

For MCI's ads, they intercut their pitches for The Neighborhood with pitches for the CD's of old white dudes singing covers of songs no one is interested in hearing anymore. Initially this confused me. Now it annoys me. Especially the ads where a particularly obese white guy sings classic Motown songs. That's just insulting.

MCI isn't alone in this gaffe. The other day I saw a teaser for the new Scoobie Doo movie. I won't even comment on the innate stupidity involved in that particular greenlight. This teaser was different in that rather than focus on enticing me to see their movie, they spent half their time cutting to a video from dime-a-dozen alternative rock group A Simple Plan. Again, I found this initially confusing and ultimately annoying. If I want to see remanufactured pop rubbish, I turn on MTV.

Alas, without painful banality, the shining stars of modern advertisement might not be so bright.