The Dumber They Think You Are
As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, politics isn’t the only thing that moves me. I can get quite worked up, thank you very much, by other trivialities…such as loud and obnoxious radio and television commercials.
Time to take a huge bite out of the hand that feeds me.
I’ve been in radio since my senior year in high school. This means that I’ve been deriving income—sometimes meager, sometimes not so meager—from radio advertising for more than half my life. So I’ve developed a feeling for what kinds of ads work, what types don’t—and what kinds of ads I absolutely detest.
Loud commercials. Screaming commercials. Commercials with explosions, with announcers reading over loud, drumming, raucous music.
HATE ’EM. Ohhhhh…I just can’t tell you how much I hate ’em.
Here’s the thing: The louder the commercial, the dumber the advertisers think their customers are. Think about it—those loud, screaming commercials, with their thumps, bangs, and heavy metal music, are almost always hawking cheap products to people with, let’s just say, limited judgment about how they spend their money.
Take car commercials as an example. Listen closely to those car ads, and you’ll soon recognize a universal truth: the louder the commercial, the cheaper the car. You never hear a Rolls-Royce spokesman screaming at the top of his lungs about inventory overstock, do you? The screamers are always trying to sell you something at the bottom of the automobile price range.
Okay, Neal, you say. Point taken. But how do you get from there to “The louder the commercial, the dumber they think you are?”
Here’s where I step into it yet again. The truth hurts, and the truth is that the smarter you are, the less likely it is that you’re going to be buying a car in the lowest price range. If you’re smart, chances are you’ve parlayed that intelligence into a better-than-average living. And if you’re making a decent living, why would you be interested in the cheapest, most underpowered, most bell-and-whistle-less cars on the market?
Conversely, the less sharp you are, the more you’re likely to be in a low-paying job with barely enough money to buy a new car in the first place.
These auto dealers aren’t stupid. (Trust me on this—in my lawyering days I represented quite a few.1) These dealers spend huge amounts of money on ad agencies and focus groups trying to figure out how to target the very socioeconomic group that’s most likely to buy their cars. What they’ve learned is that higher-income consumers not only tune out those loud, screaming car ads, they’re actively offended by them. Those with lower incomes, on the other hand, respond to them.
’Nuff said?
Much to the distress of our advertising sales weasels, who are constantly out there trying to sign these folks up to big-money advertising contracts, I’ve been complaining about these dealers’ tactics for years. If I’ll willingly suffer the slings and arrows for saying them on the air, I might as well repeat them here for you to ponder.
Advertising volume and noise aren’t the only signs that a car dealer thinks you’re an idiot. The promises they make in their commercials are another dead giveaway.
Screaming announcer: “We’ll pay off your old car no matter how much you owe!” Yeah, sure they will. And they’ll take the difference between what you owed on that car and whatever trade-in allowance they’ve given you, and add it to the amount of your new car loan. Come on, now—you didn’t really think they were going to pay off your old balance just to be nice, did you?
Oh…you did? I’ll bet you still have a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on your old beater, don’t you?
Screaming announcer: “All credit applications accepted!” How wonderful! “Hey, Gloria! Blivet Motors is going to give us credit! Let’s go get a new car!” Think again, hotshot! They just said they’d accept your application. That is, they’ll allow you to apply. They didn’t promise to grant you credit. Sure, they know how it sounds…but that little come-on is just a way to get you unsuspecting rubes in the door.
Know this: No truly reputable automobile dealer will ever use either of those two phrases in an ad—just as no truly reputable attorney would ever advertise on television.
One more thing before I quit picking on auto dealers:
Would you, the consumer, please tell me why you allow your local car dealer to slap an ad on the trunk of your new car before you drive it off the showroom floor? Why do you pay all that money to turn your $30,000 car into a car commercial on wheels?
I actually had one woman tell me she thought it was illegal to remove those stickers—much like the label on her mattress.
What was it I said about dumb customers?