The Ideating commercial below takes the innovation-management buzzword to a laughable extreme, yet the affected response of “Thanks” of the Millennial (this time a woman) to the sarcastic retort of the manager’s “Good Luck” in the technology-marketing clip subtly emphasizes how easily people can really be taken in by their own beliefs.
Notice that the Millennial is always the brunt of the joke, or at least doesn’t offer an alternative. However, we’ll see this repeating scenario get turned on its head in a later technology ad.
In the Social Networking ad below, the Millennial appears a bit of an introvert as he apathetically boasts that he has 826 friends. The manager shows her amazement in a rather gee-whiz way, but like a good sucker punch, she then clobbers him with the detailed profile of the expert team she is looking to put together quickly to successfuly implement innovation-management efforts. To which, the Millennial can’t deliver.
Quite narcissisticly and cluelessly, the Millennial proffers that getting so many friends isn’t so hard, belying the point that the definition of friends in the Facebook age is not the same as it was before social networking came along. The cartoonish music used in the technology marketing that whimpers along, and then scurries away at the end after the crescendo buildup, fits the vignette to a T as the promise of real work tapping into Web 2.0 deflates as an overhyped benefit.
In the Innovation Island spot below, more fun is poked at social media – this time the technology ad focuses on avatars. The simple point being that innovation is great, but, in a business context, one has to stay focused on the goal of making money to justify the effort of innovation management.
In the Globalization advertisement below, the manager does his own bit of technology marketing by overselling IT integration to his Asian hosts. The plodding music gets carried away by the condemning sounds of the tuba brass in the technology ad as the delegation leaves the manager alone to rethink his sales pitch.
