Not everybody that reads this blog is in the advertising business, so I want to start out with something that might blow your mind.  Really big companies, like Kimberly-Clark, who owns Cottonelle, spend a completely mind blowing amount of money on advertising… every, frickin’, year.

Seriously, you think you might have an idea of what their ad budget is, but if you took that number in your head and multiplied it times 10 or 20, you would probably still come up a little short. Put it this way, if you had the amount of money they spend on their campaigns for just one year and you lost 90% of it in a bet to see who could down a whole shaker of salt like my buddy Sean did back in high school, you would still never have to work another day in your life to get by quite nicely.

That. Fucking. Much.

So, when I see really big damn ads like this one that you can find outside of L.A. Live in Los Angeles, I just have to wonder if K-C is just spending money to spend money or if the return on investment is just that damn good.

How do you roll?

First, let me apologize for that horrible photo.  I took it with my phone as I was stumbling out of a Clipper game the other night. You may ask why I didn’t have my good camera with me, but what you should really be asking yourself is, who the hell goes to Clipper games?

Anyway, if you can’t tell, that ad is on the side of three very large buildings and is part of a massive campaign Cottonelle has going right now for that they call “The Great Debate. The Cottonelle Roll Poll.”  You can’t see the text on the middle building at all, but it honestly says, “Tell us how you roll.”

Holy crap, where to start…

First, the answer is “over”… always, always, always.  I know they have a bunch of people on the site that claim they go under, but they’re being paid to do so.  Plus, the poll on the site may have about 22% of the voters saying they go under, but they’re just idiots who probably don’t use toilet paper anyway.  Trust me, my dad owned a maid service when I was a kid and I worked for a hotel for three years… it always goes over.

Second, did they blow their whole fucking budget on getting that ad on the side of the building? Because they certainly didn’t spend it on a quality graphic designer.  What are those pictures, PowerPoint clip art?  I’ve seen instructions for Ikea furniture with better graphics.

Third, just because you CAN use mobile in your advertising, doesn’t mean you need to use mobile in your advertising. This kind of crap reminds me of the early days of the net when CEOs would scream down hallways to make sure we put the URL in the print ads so they could jack up their stock price by looking internet savvy.  Mobile and social media are the new URLs of the dead tree media world and while sometimes they hit their mark, most of the time they just look like the resident advisor at a dorm party… awkward and out of place.

My good friend, Cindy Krum of Rank Mobile, who is perhaps one of the best mobile marketing experts around, would probably think this ad was great because it incorporates a mobile marketing strategy.  But then I would reminder her that the ad sucked ass, then she would tell me to stop being such a dick, and I would smile and agree because she’s a ginger and they have a strange power over me.

Anyway, now that you realize just how sucky that ad is to start with, you should be even more pissed off at how much it cost to put it all together.  They had to rent the space, create the ad (it’s either painted on or it’s three really large pieces of printed plastic), hire a crew to put it up, and work with a company to manage the mobile campaign attached to the ad.  That’s a lot of damn money to advertise a product that is used to wipe your ass.

Honestly, if Cottonelle just put out a small ad in the local newspaper that read, “Hey, instead of spending an ass load of money on a really big damn ad on the side of a building, we’re going to put all the kids that graduate from high school in East LA through college. Now, please use our product.” I would promise my ass would see nothing but Cottonelle for the rest of my life.

J.

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