Monday, November 16, 2009
Sloppy copy from Venables Bell bedevils an otherwise decent Intel ad

I kinda like the "Sponsors of Tomorrow" campaign that Venables Bell & Partners put together for Intel. For reasons yet to be explained, Geek Chic remains a popular trend, and VBP has capitalized on it -- humorously, cleverly, and in a visually distinctive way.

That said, the script for the spot embedded below drives me nuts. It features two nerds talking about the best way to cut a cake-cum-microchip (or maybe it's supposed to be a motherboard, which wouldn't make sense, but whatever). Eventually, a fed-up, presumably hungry fellow employee zips around the pair, lops off a corner of the cake, and walks off with a "Was that so hard?" expression.

By my thinking, the nerds' response to this act of heresy should be hilariously geekified -- like, "Fine. You explain to management how it's supposed to work without a logic gate", or, "I hope you enjoy the taste of that gallium arsenide core", or anything that continues the nerds' earlier conversation, wherein they discuss the cake as if it's an actual microchip. (I'm not always a great copywriter myself, but I'm okay at spotting problems.)

Instead, the folks at VBP decided that one of the nerds should just look after the douchebag in question and shout, "Why don't you just pop all the balloons and spit in the punch?" Which is fine in terms of cadence and consonance, but entirely misses the boat on continuity.

Of course, underlying all this is a far more important question: AM I THE ONLY IDIOT WHO OBSESSES ABOUT THESE THINGS? Take a look for yourselves and see if it's as bad as I'm making out:

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