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The Ad Council

W

wadio

With unfilled spot avails and blocked ads on Internet streams we're hearing more and more radio PSAs produced by this organization, and I'm beginning to wonder about the validity of these messages.

For example, one has a woman calling a forest ranger to report sighting Smokey Bear at her front door. Her husband had been burning leaves in the yard and went inside just for a moment. Never mind that leaf burning is illegal anywhere in New York State and is highly frowned upon even where it is legal, Smokey said that her husband should have stayed outside and watched the burning leaf pile.

Then, another PSA has the voices of sweet little children reciting the alarming statistic that one out of five children in America "struggle with hunger." One out of five? I'll bet if you surveyed a bunch of kids at an average elementary school and asked, "Hey Joey, are you ever really, really hungry?" you'd get responses like, "Well, yeah ... sometimes ..." from at least one in five.

So who writes this stuff? Can we believe anything we hear from The Ad Council?
 
wadio said:
So who writes this stuff? Can we believe anything we hear from The Ad Council?
Click to expand...

The Ad Council stuff is the most intelligence-insulting drivel I have ever heard on radio. Every time I hear one, I feel dumber just because I heard it. I'm surprised that stations will even air their garbage.
 
Non-profit groups come to the Ad Council when they want to promote their good deeds, good cause or just promote themselves. Ad people volunteer their time. Often the non-profit "clients" are even more difficult to work with than paying clients, and the PSAs you see are often the result of that. Also as a result, a lot of good agency people won't volunteer their services these days.

You can believe stuff from the Ad Council as much as you believe any paid advertising.

Contrary to what you saw in the Rock Hudson - Doris Day - Tony Randall movie "Lover Come Back," the Ad Council is not a self-regulatory body for the ad industry. They just put volunteers together with non-profits to produce PSAs.
 
KeithE4 said:
wadio said:
So who writes this stuff? Can we believe anything we hear from The Ad Council?
Click to expand...

The Ad Council stuff is the most intelligence-insulting drivel I have ever heard on radio. Every time I hear one, I feel dumber just because I heard it. I'm surprised that stations will even air their garbage.
Click to expand...

the Ad Council shoot USED to be really depressing back in 2009. Someone must have notified them of this and they tried to lighten it up this time around. But still, I agree with this statement. You can almost Spot their ads just in the first ten seconds of hearing them, these things are so god danged goofy...

Don't the people who block real ads realize they are loosing ears? Back in the day, I used to like listening to ads, as some of them used real voice actors and where actually quite funny. I still remember a 'Ghost of Christmas Past' milk campaign that ran during the summer of 95 that was quite funny due to the voice over guys performance. Now the ads I hear these days are no better than the PSAs...
 
The Ad Council stuff is the most intelligence-insulting drivel I have ever heard on radio.
Click to expand...

The new spots that you need a permit to fish are awful too.
 
FredLeonard said:
Non-profit groups come to the Ad Council when they want to promote their good deeds, good cause or just promote themselves. Ad people volunteer their time. Often the non-profit "clients" are even more difficult to work with than paying clients, and the PSAs you see are often the result of that. Also as a result, a lot of good agency people won't volunteer their services these days.

You can believe stuff from the Ad Council as much as you believe any paid advertising.
Click to expand...

A huge percentage of Ad Council productions are done for governmental agencies and departments. As such, they are restricted by the bureaucratic nature of most government entities and further impeded by the committee mentality prevalent in that sector.

It's not that the spots are unbelievable. It's just that they are nowhere as good as the creative that private enterprise comes up with.
 
wadio said:
Then, another PSA has the voices of sweet little children reciting the alarming statistic that one out of five children in America "struggle with hunger."
Click to expand...

I'll bet you that line came right out of the government agency that the spot was created for. It's classic campaign rhetoric, which often transfers over to the leadership at government agencies in the form of an agenda.

In this case, the Ad Council is simply following "client dictates" which they probably would rather modify... but can't.
 
Keep in mind that from the station perspective, regardless of quality, these count as public service. There are some who believe radio stations should do even more public service than they do now, and if they did, you'd get more stuff like this.
 
The one I've been hearing lately is 550 babies have died in locked cars since 1998. Now, of course one would say that ANY deaths are terrible under such stupid circumstances. But how much money are they spending in an attempt to prevent 550 deaths in 15 years? Aren't more people killed under other more common circumstances?
 
Maybe the most annoying Ad Council ad is the one for emergency preparedness. "You wake at 6 ... you brush your teeth ... you take the train ... da DA DA da ... and on it goes for about 50 seconds before they get to the tag line.

Also it seems the Ad Council has licensed a limited number of music beds because they use the same irritating guitar-picked ditty behind several different ads, and a full instrumental version of the same tune behind others.
 
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