Posted on 12/19/2013 10:28:05 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Yep, says Megan McArdle. A little, says me.
"Pajama Boy is not a good ad. Whatever you think about progressives, they are in most ways perfectly normal people. Normal people do not, at the age of 26 or so, want to spend their holiday in footy pajamas, listening to their parents harangue them about fiscal responsibility. Good ads usually do one of three things: they make you want to be more like the person in the ad; they make you want to date the person in the ad; or they engage you and the maker of the ad as knowing co-conspirators in laughing at that terrible person in the ad, whom you are not at all like in any way.
Who is going to look at this ad and aspire to be more like Pajama Boy? Or to date a man more like Pajama Boy . . . you know, the kind of guy you can bring home to Mom to talk about buying health insurance?…
So, why was this ad made? Well, Pajama Boy doesn’t seem well designed to get people to sign up for health insurance. But it seems tailor-made to get conservatives talking about Pajama Boy. And naturally, once they did, liberals jumped in to defend what is, objectively, a pretty stupid advertisement. Suddenly, lots of people love Pajama Boy — the sort of people who give money to OFA and retweet their ads for Obamacare."
She’s assuming that OFA deliberately went maximum dork on Pajama Boy to bait righties, but that’s the great unsolved mystery of this episode. Did they? How often does a political shop stoop to mocking its own side by embracing its opponents’ stereotypes about it in the name of igniting a flame war online? Have you ever seen FreedomWorks, say, run an ad with a guy in a Gadsden flag hat holding a gun and wearing a t-shirt that says “Love It or Leave It”? No, and there’s a reason for that — it’s too easy for a strategy like that to backfire. Just look at what these poor bastards have been reduced to in the name of defending this. Someone at MSNBC actually argued today that Pajama Boy, who’s so white that it’s dangerous to your eyes to look directly at him, is allegedly an “emblem of an increasingly non-white electorate” to conservatives. Is this helping OFA sell insurance? If you were a normal, relatively apolitical twentysomething thinking of enrolling in O-Care and watching this episode play out online, which side would you would feel more at home with? Conservatives? Or people who think it’s racist and “heteronormative” or whatever to tease a 30-year-old man for wearing a onesie? Let’s face it: If you’re leaning towards the latter group, you already signed up for ObamaCare. On the first day.
Beyond that, I’m still not sure that OFA looked at this and saw something obviously mockworthy:
To you and me it’s obvious, but remember, they featured this same guy in other ads where he dressed and acted perfectly normally. He played the son in OFA’s Thanksgiving video about ObamaCare; it was the parents in that case who were the comic relief, not him. He’s been featured in other Twitter images by OFA wearing nothing cornier than a Christmas sweater. It seems unlikely, after all that, that the OFA brain trust would have looked at him and realized “You know what? If we put you in a onesie and gave you a cup of cocoa, you’d be the Platonic form of the right’s stereotype of infantilized urban lefty hipster douches.” I think the thought process was more like this: “We need an ad about talking about insurance at Christmas. Let’s make it cute and homey, with jammies and cocoa. Take our star and dress him in something that’s really obviously pajamas so everyone gets it right away.” And then the creative director, himself an urban lefty hipster/hipster-sympathizer, looked at the shot and thought, “Yeah, cool.” No irony intended. My hunch is that, if they really wanted people mocking him, they would have been careful to show that he was indeed wearing footies. That’s how ad people think — you only get one chance, so don’t be too subtle or else the viewer might miss your point. They didn’t show the footies, though, did they? Why? Because they meant this unironically. Dude, Pajama Boy is on the level.
They were serious, hence the outrage at us rightfully mocking the ad.
I think they were trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
No, they really are that two dimensional. Their other ads are even more dimwitted.
Oh, I get it, the ad is a metaphor for 0bamaCare. It was a stupid thing to do everybody knows it was a stupid thing to do but it will get right-wingers to say it was a stupid thing to do so left-wingnuts will then support the stupid thing.
Nothing wrong was seen by the homo/metrosexual d0uchebags at OFA because they're a bunch of homo/metrosexual d0uchebags.
People in our camp claiming that the buzz created is somehow exactly what was desired don't get it: The Internet isn't like television AT ALL. It's an interactive medium, and when you have literally millions of people viciously mocking your product, the old rules about "anything that get's 'em talking," don't apply anymore.
0'care isn't cathing on with Millenials and other previously voluntary uninsured/underinsured healthy people for ONE REASON and ONE REASON ONLY: It's not free.. You can't fix the fact that it's not free with any amount of advertising. At the end of the commercial, it's still not free.
The history of this administration from the handling of the BP oil spill right at the beginning and on down through every single crises and opportunity both foreign and domestic has been nothing but one -- and here, for perhaps the first time it's ever really been true and not hyperbole in the history of the Internet -- EPIC FAIL.
These people could not find their @sses if they had as many arms as a school of octopi. And now we're suddenly to believe that the latest, obvious, dismal, craptastic failure is a success? For crying out in a bucket! Thank Gawd I'm typing because I'm literally speechless that any conservative could believe such hogwash.
Agree to what?
They wish OFA was that smart.
Nope, it was just THAT bad. O’Breezy does not have his finger on the pulse of the nation after all.
“Get it cause its hot” applies to burgers, phones, apparel outside of onesies... Not health insurance.
EXACTLY!!!! People are not going to buy an overpriced item-period.
Agree.
Like the Life of Julia ads, they intend the Pajama Boy ads to shore up a segment of their big-government-dependent customer base, in this case beta males of a young age who are economically shaky and too stupid to figure out that it's because of Obama (and themselves, of course).
Because it is laughed at does not mean liberals are "clever".
It shows how stupid they are, and what they REALLY think of their brain-dead followers.
Even the dopiest OFA Obamanut laughs at this ad.
And as is the case with the ridiculous ads for kegstands and sluts holding a box of birth control pills, "publicity" is NOT always a good thing.
You get people talking about Obamacare alright, but NOT in a good way.
They simply held up a mirror. And saw themselves. Then built the characaturization around what their sincerely held self-image is. Of a bunch of p*ssies (when it comes to the weakling men at least). But there you have it. It’s reality. OFA. Nobody can tell me that dude with the cup of “deLISH” cocoa ever let off a full clip of rounds in an AR-15 on the practice range with the guys, or voted GOP in his life.
To me, they went after the gay voters who are outraged at Duck Dynasty. Come on, the gaydar is hitting 500 with this picture.
Some have a hard time accepting the pathetic reality of this regime. So they render ingenious schemes to rout their disbelief.
Next they’ll claim that “New Coke” was a brilliant marketing strategy...
Just a question...as a female myself...do 20 something females really think Pajama boy is the man of their dreams?? Seriously??
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