Is Liberty Mutual abusing struggling actors, Emus, or Millennials ? Hard to tell…
The Liberty Biberty guy (actor Tanner Novlan) is such a toasty mimbo that it’s hard not to love him. Clearly the butt of the joke, Novlan’s character is a nitwit model trying to break into acting but can’t even remember his few lines. Hey – that gives us actors a bad name! Where’s the outrage from SAG and AFTRA !?
And as an animal rights activist, I want reassurance that Emu’s are not being harmed during the filming of ANY LiMu and Doug ad.
But Millennials – have you no outrage for the latest twist in Liberty’s campaign!? They are, literally, spoofing ad campaigns which were aimed AT YOU for the better part of the last decade. They admit it. “Research shows that people remember ads with young people having a good time”, the spot claims, right before rolling footage which mocks planning departments everywhere. “Young People having a good time with insurance!”. The irony is palpable.
This Spot is perhaps the sum and summary of what Bob Hoffman called the Millennial Hustle. There was a time when all the discourse in Adland centered around the advanced new civilization inhabited by Millennials, “those poor bastards born between 1980-2000 who have been credited with and blamed for everything that’s right and wrong in contemporary society” as Hoffman put it. They were ‘Digital Natives’ who were immune to outdated marketing tactics and could care less about status and materialism. Excuse me while I barf. Ask any of the advertisers who just spent $7 Million for :30 during the Superbowl what they think of outdated marketing tactics.
The proprietary knowledge and expertise anyone claimed to have about Millennials turned out to be a comical farce. To think that millions of people are motivated and attracted by the same things and delt with in the same way is, shall we say, too broad a brush stroke. “There are a million factors that go into determining the kind of person you are when you grow up, and this arbitrary 20-year-long age bracket is not one of them… characteristics often attributed to Millennials are merely attributes of various life stages”, says Jennifer Kriegle, author of Unfairly Labeled.
Millennials were told, via every commercial that ever targeted them, that they were Different, Unique, Special, and totes understood by the mega corporations that were trying to sell them stuff. And they believed it. Mm – The Power of Television. ..
Every decade or so a new generation is invented that’s completely different from the last. The oldest Millennials are now in their early 40’s, or as marketers would categorize them ……. decrepit old zombie corpses. It’s time to focus on the Z’s.
