By MARK ROTH
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
So, doing our best Howie Mandel impression, we ask you, America:
The Discover Card "scissors" commercial _ Creepy? Or Not Creepy?
If you haven't seen it, the advertising campaign, now entering its second phase, features hundreds of orange-handled scissors, hopping around on city streets and leaping up to devour consumers' credit cards, as part of an effort to get them to switch to the friendlier Discover Card.
Not long after the initial 60-second spot debuted during the Emmy Awards in August, the blogosphere began buzzing with comments about how much the hungry scissors make some people cringe.
The ad "features thousands of scissors walking and jumping along _ with their sharp ends up!" wrote Bob Sassone, editor of the Web magazine Professor Barnhardt's Journal. "It's like someone at an ad agency got inside my head and picked a nightmare and decided to make a credit card commercial based on it."
Costa Tsiokos, a New York City marketing consultant, wrote on his blog that the ad reminded him of the "creepy Zuni doll" that came to life and attacked Karen Black with his miniature spear in the 1975 TV horror movie "Trilogy of Terror."
And the blog of Thirdway Brand Trainers in New York City concluded: "Destined to become a milestone in the 'What Were They Thinking?' hall of fame ... (the ad is) a brand disaster for Discover. And we thought running with scissors was dangerous!"
Of course, not everyone agrees with that sentiment _ particularly not the folks at Discover.
Consumer focus groups viewing the ad had positive responses, and thought that when the computer-animated scissors cut up credit cards, it "turned a very frustrating moment into a very empowering moment," said Mark Hosbein, senior vice president of advertising and brand management at Discover.
The scissors ad isn't the first or last ad that will generate a debate over whether it had an unintended negative impact.
One recent campaign that triggered especially unfavorable reactions in women was the Burger King ads that featured the plasticized "King Burger" character waking up in bed with a customer or peering in through a window.
During January's Super Bowl, FedEx showed an ad in which a caveman was stomped to death by a dinosaur at the end of the spot. That ad created a surge of fear, according to brain scans of people watching the ad, said FKF Applied Research in Washington, D.C.
The potential for turning off consumers with ads that are perceived to be creepy or distasteful can be a much bigger deal these days than it was decades ago, when most TV viewers watched one of three channels during prime time hours.
"The idea then was, 'We have the whole nation in front of the TV between 7 and 10 and if we bang them over the head, they will remember this product even if they don't like the ad,' " said David Vinjamuri, president of Thirdway Brand Trainers.
Between 1994 and 2004, though, the prime time viewing audience in the United States dropped from 12 million to 6 million, so it costs much more today to reach each viewer than it once did.
In this new climate, Vinjamuri said, "You can't beat consumers over the head with a stick and expect that to work."
In the case of the Discover Card ad, one local expert on anxiety disorders said he can easily understand how the scissors generate an adverse reaction in some people.
Dr. Rolf Jacob, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said that in some people, the ad would "elicit feelings of disgust because of imagined body-envelope violation, because the scissors seem to follow the person. There's a sense you can't get rid of them."
That taps into the same aversion some people felt in watching the 1990 movie "Edward Scissorhands," in which Johnny Depp's character had scissors on his hands instead of fingers, Jacob said.
"I think people with vivid imaginations might associate with the scissors in a negative way," he said, "and that wouldn't necessarily be pathological."
Suzanne Fanning thinks she has a vivid imagination, and she doesn't see anything negative about the scissors ads.
Of course, as the public relations manager for Fiskars, which uses the orange-handled scissors as its trademark, she is inclined to see the Discover Card ad as free publicity for her signature product.
Fiskars makes 5 million to 6 million of the orange-handled scissors each year, she said, so if Discover wants to "make an iconic scissor walk around, I'm thrilled to death that they look like our scissors."
Ty Harper, who created the new Discover ad for The Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., is surprised that some people cower at the sight of his cute little dancing scissors.
"I'm sorry some people looked at them that way," he said, "but at the end of the day, it's just a commercial."
