2004: The Year in Advertising

The ad that was everywhere in 2004: the iPod campaign. Photo by Matthew Welch. Courtesy Apple

The North American ad business didn’t start out the year on the best footing. An onslaught of lousy luck had taken its toll on the industry, including, in order of appearance (more or less): media fragmentation, competition from the internet, TiVo, corporate scandals, dot-com meltdown, recession, Sept. 11th, the war in Iraq, SARS and BSE. That meant creative departments had to live up to their name as margins were squeezed and competition stiffened. Was 2004 the year that would turn things around?

There were auspicious signs when, during the Super Bowl – advertising’s holy grail – viewers were treated to three erectile-dysfunction drug campaigns: a metaphor for renewed vigor in the advertising world? Primogenitor Viagra found itself with two new competitors – Cialis and Levitra – angling for a piece of its billion-dollar action. Cialis, the new kid on the block, offered “non-indicated” spots, meaning they didn’t come out and say what the pill was for, but instead dropped a few hints – trains going into tunnels, late-boomer men taking post-coital showers, that kind of thing. Why non-indicator? In the pharmaceutical world, if you don’t actually say what the product is for, you don’t have to recite those nasty potential side effects at the end of the ad.

Advertising hasn’t been the only industry in crisis mode. SARS and the war in Iraq took their toll on Canada’s tourism industry. In response, the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) debuted its “I Can” series. The spots featured Joe and Jane Anybody rhyming off all the possibilities available to tourists in Canada – from ice climbing to dining at four-star regional restaurants.

The CTC wasn’t the only institution draping itself in the red and white. Tim Hortons also got patriotic with its “True Stories” campaign: a narrative about an all-Canadian backpacker who connects with fellow Canucks at European train stations, courtesy of the Timmy’s mug dangling from his pack. In voiceover, he reads letters home to his parents, which include a rather self-indulgent pre-return request that his dad meet him at the airport with a double-double.

Ahh the Timmy’s double double. Is there anything more Canadian? Actually, yes. There’s hockey. And when it exited our lives this past year, it took some key ad revenue with it. But in the face of adversity, Molson Canadian agency Bensimon Bryne soldiered on, exploiting hoser cachet with a spot featuring a parade of your average urban sports bar-dwelling hockey fans singing Culture Club’s Do You Really Want To Hurt Me – a yearning, angst-y plea to the NHL to bring back the national game. But Bensimon might just as well have been singing the same lament to Molson, which dumped it in the fall in favour of parvenu agency ZiG, even after Bensimon had given them their momentous, award-winning “I am Canadian” series. Molson decided to look for a replacement after five years with Bensimon when the creative team dedicated to Canadian left the agency and took on Labatt Blue.

Jerry Seinfeld meets the Man of Steel in a webisode for American Express. Courtesy Unplugged Studio

South of the border, Canadians had a thumbprint on one of the biggest marketing stories of the year. The Toronto-based Unplugged agency provided the groundbreaking animation for Jerry Seinfeld’s “webisode,” a series of American Express spots available only online featuring the comedian hanging with Superman. Though touted as a first, BMW did something similar back in 2001 with its Web-only series of films directed by, among others, John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee and Guy Ritchie (who cast his wife Madonna in a completely out-of-character turn as a self-absorbed, demanding and impetuous drama queen/diva/celebrity). The main difference? With their edgy camera work, the BMW spots were more auteur-de-force, while Seinfeld’s web commercials were comic bits mostly carried by the comedian’s star power and deft kibitzing with the curiously vulnerable Man of Steel.

As always, advertisers demonstrated they were hip to our inside jokes and goofy cultural artifacts by referencing them in ad campaigns. Travelocity trotted out the French garden gnome kidnapping caper with spots featuring a ceramic bearded squirt photographed in various destinations around the world. Honda Civic, meanwhile, hijacked two cultural phenomena: the bobblehead and the tuner subculture (the 21st century answer to 1950s hot-rodding: city kids with a fetish for sleek, high-revving compacts with extensive bodywork, buffed to an inch of their lives). Their spots featured people computer re-engineered as bobblehead dolls cruising the boulevard in their souped-up rides.

Though it actually launched in late 2003, Apple’s iPod was among the more memorable – and visible – campaigns of 2004. This dazzling tableau of award-winning spots, created by TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles, featured dancers in silhouette – females in biker boots, crinoline skirts and ponytails, dudes in Airwalk skater sneakers and cropped cargo pants – rocking out against solid neon backgrounds. The ads didn’t sit well with everybody. Culture jamming spoofs of the print version began appearing around New York, depicting not the sexy outlines of hipsters and fly girls but that unnervingly pathetic figure from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos – hooded, on that god-awful podium, wires running from his fingers. Instead of iPod, the ads read “iRaq” and though the message may have been a tad muddled – what does iPod have to do with torture, degradation and military incompetence? – the incendiary posters hinted at the coming electoral clash between a young generation of iPod users and Bush administration fuddy-duds.

Which brings us to the elections, here and in the U.S. Moveon.org got the ball rolling early in March. The nexus of anti-globalists, environmentalists and all-round Bush haters launched their “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest. Marketers were invited to create ads showing why Bush should be bounced. A vast celebrity panel, which included actor Jack Black, comedian-turned-liberal-commentator Janeane Garofalo, filmmaker Michael Moore and Gore/Lieberman strategist Donna Brazile, selected the winner: a spot called “Child’s Play,” which featured children at various factory jobs – welding, assembly line, etc. – with a final text scrolling across the bottom that read “guess who will pay Bush’s one-trillion-dollar deficit.” The message – that today’s children would inherit a debt amassed through a controversial war – wasn’t so much damning as it was confusing, suggesting, as it did, that Bush would use child labour to balance the budget. The Republicans, meanwhile, were pretty clear with their message. First, the Swift Boat Veterans argued that John Kerry was a flip-flopper and life-endangering nincompoop. Though Bush disavowed the ads, his party had no compunction about painting their opponent as being soft on terror. And speaking of terror, here in Canada, Liberal ads tried to put the fear of God in voters by saying the Tories would dismantle medicare and ban abortion. Then came the Alberta coronation, er, election. Comparing it to the American election, Norma Ramage commented in Marketing magazine that, advertising-wise, it was “like going from roller derby to croquet,” so tame were the halcyon spots depicting “hard-working doctors and happy children” in Alberta’s oil-rich utopia.

So was 2004 the banner year the ad industry was looking for – the year in which it had adjusted to increased competition and technological advances? Hardly. It was more of a “wait and see” year. A time when battling politicos and warring pharmaceuticals became the merciful pills that kept the industry from sagging altogether.

Liz Hodgson writes about the arts for CBC.ca.