Advertising is one of those fields I considered using as a stepping stone toward my dream job as head writer and Weekend Update anchor at Saturday Night Live. Agency positions are hard to get without the right connections, though, and I suppose managers are less than eager to hire someone who would expressly rather be somewhere else. Nevertheless, I know I could write better ad copy than much of what’s been on TV over the last decade or so.
As an adult boomerang kid of Boomer parents who still have cable, I probably see more commercials on a daily basis than most people in the tail-end Millennial/elderly Gen Z bubble. My tolerance for repetition is quite high—one joy of being on the spectrum—so an ad has to be pretty damn irritating for me to dislike it. The ones that irk me the most tend to contain egregious grammatical errors, bad acting that’s not bad enough to be funny, and extremely clunky rhymes. For some reason, there’s been a recent uptick in the last of these.
I recall one campaign for an irritable bowel syndrome treatment—I thought it was Linzess, and spent more time than I care to admit combing fruitlessly through old ads. (As a rule, if people remember the ad but not the product, the mission has failed.) Anyway, these commercials featured utterly meterless rhyming narration about a person struggling with IBS with constipation, until they visited their doctor. “And so it came to be/That [character’s name] was diagnosed with IBS-C.”
I’m not sure why anyone thought debilitating digestive issues merited such a baffling attempt at whimsy, but I suspect the people behind these commercials have wiped their hands of them, given my inability to find a single upload. Plus, every time this type of ad aired, the part of my brain that never matured past age 12 would autofill the line after the word “to” with “pass,” which was just too easy to match with thematically relevant words. “And so it came to pass…like gas…from an ass.”
As for campaigns that are still on the air, the animated Puffs Tissues ads continue to test my patience. They always start out with rhyming poems, albeit rather arrhythmic ones. However, instead of allowing themselves additional lines to describe the product’s attributes, they cram everything into one line that completely breaks whatever meager pattern there was. Each commercial ends with a tacked-on slogan, “A nose in need deserves Puffs indeed,” as if that single intra-line rhyme turns the rest of the mess into something cohesive.
Then there are those TV spots that take things a step further and put their mediocre poems to music. For example, newer Jardiance commercials show flash mobs lip-syncing to an original song extolling the pill’s virtues. The lyrics leave a lot to be desired—e.g., “As time went on it was easy to see/I’m lowering my A1C.” Besides the jarring shift in tense, this bit stands out as particularly lazy since “C” is phonetically identical to the word “see.” It’s not as if there’s a dearth of words to complete that rhyme, either. “As time goes on it’s clear to me/I’m lowering my A1C.” There, I fixed both issues.
Now it’s time to address the shit in the box. Cologuard ads are notorious for 1) their annoying anthropomorphic box mascot who’s way too eager for people to imbue him with their fecal samples, and 2) featuring horrific parodies of the classic song “My Way” with lyrics discussing colon cancer screening. I imagine these commercials make Frank Sinatra turn in his grave, and probably haunt the dreams of still-living songwriter Paul Anka.
Cologuard’s copywriters seem determined to come up with progressively crappy and unwieldy—yet fewer—rhymes as the campaign drags on. An early “My Way” ad, possibly the very first, features these lyrics: “I’m over 45, I realize I’m no spring chicken/I know what’s right for me, I’ve got a plan to which I’m stickin’/My doc wrote me the script, box came by mail, showed up on Friday/I screened with Cologuard and did it my way.” Sure, it’s a desecration of a beloved tune, but at least it’s straightforward and fits the original meter.
A more recent ad, however, goes as follows: “One thing we know is true no matter race, gender, ethnicity/The need to screen when due for colon cancer’s a priority.” That’s where the song stops, except for background instrumentals and the unaltered lyric “I did it my way” at the conclusion. Why would they go to the trouble of finding a rhyme for “ethnicity,” but not “way”—and a lousy rhyme, at that? They couldn’t have ended the line with a more rhymable word? Or at least shoehorned in a better match, like “authenticity”?
Rhyming ads are nothing new—the cultural impact of the Burma-Shave billboards far outlasted the product itself—but if modern copywriters are going to half-ass their poetry, they might as well ditch the poems altogether. Plenty of commercials with little or no attempted rhyming get stuck in people’s heads. Just ask the company that gives you a lump sum for your annuity or structured settlement. (“Call J.G. Wentworth! 877-CASH NOW!”)
All that said, the best rhyming ad I’ve ever encountered is 100% auditory, and I’m delighted somebody managed to archive and post it online. It’s a holiday promotion for Central Market based on “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” the perennial yuletide poem most people know by its opening line, “‘Twas the night before Christmas.” It starts out cheesy, but fun enough; the narrator really puts his all into it. As the ad goes on, the voiceover grows more excitable, and a well-timed subverted rhyme transforms the whole thing from cutesy kitsch to absolute genius. I hardly even remember most radio ads, but this one has stuck with me over the years for reasons you’ll soon understand.
My advice to the copywriters behind the current slew of bad ad poems? If you can’t take the time to make a rhyme that doesn’t suck, toss that draft, refine your craft, and you’ll have better luck.
Media Shower 