Weirdos and criminals count on NBC New York for the best news
Posted on Fri Aug 14 2009
A washed-up, junk-food-addicted runway model. An embezzling CFO. A shady real-estate broker. No, they don't walk into a bar. They appear in new ads from Mother in New York for local NBC Web sites. Liz, a faded beauty turned agoraphobe; Ron, a former CFO who's now doing grunt work in a restaurant kitchen; and Ted, a real-estate broker on house arrest in a fabulous pad—from the looks of it, they're sad, disgraced and unrepentant, respectively, and they all rely on NBC's crack Web sites to make it through the day. Is this supposed to boost traffic? (The campaign is running in 10 cities, via print and TV.) Could be I'm missing something here, or that the philosophy behind the spots—everybody needs information, especially when their lives are disintegrating!—isn't working for me. They're just too bleak, and kind of mean. Sure, having a laugh at how the mighty have fallen is zeitgeist-y at the moment. But wouldn't the ads have to be funny to serve that purpose?
—Posted by T.L. Stanley
