Disclaimer:
The opinions blogged herein represently only those of Rick E. Bruner and do not reflect those of his employer, persons or companies mentioned herein, or anyone else.
Click pic for amazing, short video
And as for products targeted at teens, is every teen really either a skateboarder or a basketball fan (or, God forbid, a Britney Spears fan)? That's not how I recall my high school years. I was a nerd. Sadly, not even the good, smart kind of nerd, just the socially retarded type. But I certainly identified with the smart nerds and aspired to be one of theirs more than one of the aweful popular jocks, most of whom, let's face it, peaked in high school and are now selling vacuum cleaners or the like.
All of which is to say, with all the ills of Hollywood and mindless consumerism in our society, wouldn't it be wise of marketers at least to celebrate something wholesome in their ads, like being smart?
To wit, an ad for a soft drink or fashion label or whatever that I'd love to see would be something along the lines of this scene: in a classroom, after school, three kids are lounging on the desks while one works the blackboard. They're dressed authentically teen hip. Two or more are black or Latino, just to buck stereotypes. The one at the blackboard scratches away at a fantastically complicated-looking calculus math problem, while the others watch. Finally, he snaps his chalk meaningfully with the solution to the problem, and folds his arms in hip-hop fashion as the others also turn to look into the camera with in-your-face confidence, and the narrator intones "Nerds Rule!" while the logo for Sprite or whatever flashes on the screen.
Similarly, a group sit around somewhere, perhaps a living room with a couple battling on a computer game in the background, while our nerd hero fiddles with a Rubik's Cube, solving it withing the 30 seconds of the commercial spot, to the same "Nerds Rule!" coda. Like this guy.
(Thanks to my cool-nerdy 15-year-old nephew Patrick for the link to this clip)
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