Briefly then... an Odd Pitch is a new series of articles drawing upon, commenting on and shedding some additional light on, TV, Print and Radio commercials that by virtue of the product and the (often music business) celebrity protagonist... might just be disconcerting enough at first blush to get you to haul your finger off the FF>> button on your non-branded dvr remote controller long enough to check it out.
For the artists whose heyday was back in the 1960s, those stalwarts who quite admirably resist the lure of the filthy lucre lest some product(TM) get in the way of the crystallized vision their fans supposedly keep in their heads, of woodstock or wherever, well, it's fair to say the boomer bands and beyond are having no truck with that.
Some of these celebrity/product endorsements might seem possibly a little odd, but someone somewhere on what passes for Madison Avenue these days thought it a great idea at some point. And let's face it, whether your records aren't selling so well any longer, or are just beginning to sell, an extra paycheck always comes in handy.
And we're big fans of advertisers, although they tend to be maligned, (mainly by the nannies of adultescent parents, I mean, c'mon, you can make your kid look the other way occasionally). Imagine if you will, ten years ago, the brainstorming, the barnstorming the burning of the candle at both ends and in the middle all at once at the agency Arnold Worldwide in Boston, imagine the monumental effort brought forth to give the world...
'Drivers Wanted'.
I always imagine the creative executives at the end of that, lying prostrate on the boardroom table, perspiration pouring from their temples, so redolent of Ali in that memorable scene from When We Were Kings, exhausted on those concrete slabs in Zaire, as he gave everything in training to face and beat the supposedly lethal George Foreman. I mean, Drivers Wanted is that Epic, isn't it?
While most of these ads in this series will require little extrapolation on our part, oh well, sometimes we just won't be able to resist.
And we welcome and encourage all reader contributions... Except, please, no Badly Drawn Boy. We can only guess that Mrs. Drawn-Boy must be thrashing Badly's platinum card so badly - it's a blessed relief to see a new commercial that doesn't feature his music, so we don't want to hear about it. Contact us to contribute your ads Here.
