I am a big fan of all-copy ads that feature nothing more than a quick headline alongside a logo, or a product, or simply the brand colors. Like the Tide campaign from several years ago (eg, Escape from Thousand Island).
Of course, if the line isn’t terribly inspired or clever or short, then you wind up with the Snickers campaign. Oops, wrong crappy ads. I meant the Snickers campaign. Shit, dammit. I mean, it’s really bad. But now I’m actually talking about… Lloyd’s Barbeque.
Before I get to the rather tepid headlines, I just first have to point out the body copy, which, to Lloyd’s credit, is nice and concise. Bravo. Too bad the sentence is:
“Ready to heat and eat right out of your grocer’s refrigerated meat case.”
Aside from the vaguely Dahmeresque aura surrounding that sentence, it seems like they’re omitting an important step: bringing the meat home and putting it in your refrigerator. Did they want us to just pocket-nuke the meat on the spot and eat it at the store? Were they afraid we wouldn’t know to look for it at our grocer’s? Did they just really want to say “meat case?”
Anyway, to the headline. “Feeds five. Unless we’re talking teenagers.”
Methinks they forgot to add “nyuk nyuk nyuk.” In fact, if they could do an insert, with an elbow that pops out of the magazine and pokes you in the ribs, that’d be even better. It’s a good joke though, because of the truth at its essence: Everybody knows teenagers eat tons of bucket meat.
Other lines in the campaign include:
“Makes five hearty sandwiches. That’s four for you, one for someone else."
Get it? Cuz after you’re done chugging your third helping of high fructose corn syrup, you’ll still be peckish. So you’ll cram four chubby fistfuls of freshly disinterred meat into your piehole, and your wife and kids can fight to the death for that last sandwich.
“My recipe for perfect BBQ: First heat, then eat.”
Delicious sounding, right? I mean, Lloyd knows it’s hard to resist thrusting some gelatinized pork byproduct directly from a plastic tub into your slavering maw. But if you’d just be patient for, say, 45 seconds of microwavey goodness, then that meat will glisten with sweat like Richard Simmons’ dayglo orange cankles.
In retrospect, Lloyd has definitely covered gluttony and sloth. I’m looking forward to his fresh take on lust and wrath.
Bonus joke: If you eat a bunch of this stuff, and then at night, when you’re trying to sleep, but you can’t, because you’re lying in your own bucket-pork-induced flop sweat, you can sing to yourself softly, in your best Phil Collins voice: “I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lloyd, oh Lloyd. And I’ve been waiting for this moment since haaaalf past fiiive, oh Lloyd, oh Lloyd…”
Hey-o! How’s your bucket pork this evening?!
And Lloyd even writes his own headlines! And signs them! No big-shot agency writing for Lloyd, no sirree...
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