CSotD: Vy a duck? Vy not a gecko?
Skip to comments
Today's Rhymes With Orange raises a frightening question: I wonder if all those years of listening to Tony the Tiger and the Cheerios Kid were simply programming us to accept empty promises from friendly, two-dimensional characters?
And I wonder if getting a few more days between myself and the New Hampshire Primary would ease that feeling a little?
Truth be told, my first New Hampshire Primary was much less of a circus than I thought it would be. A couple of candidates made some appearances at Dartmouth, and Jon Huntsman was around a bit, but most of the action was over in Manchester and Concord (the NH Concord, Michelle, not the one with the Minutemen).
Living in New Hampshire is like living in New York on dollhouse scale: Everything seems to center around The Big City while those of us elsewhere in the state are kind of a footnote. The difference being that our Big City of Manchester would barely be considered a crossroads if it were located between Albany and Gotham, and most of us can get there in an hour.
One of the channels turned itself over entirely to primary coverage last night, and, in their chit-chat between updates, they were saying that perhaps the days of "retail campaigning" are over, that candidates used to go door-to-door, dropping by and "offering to clean out your litter box," but now they just show up at auditoriums, make speeches and move on.
A couple of candidates didn't even stick around to make concession speeches last night; they were already in South Carolina. Hey, a little cuddle afterwards would be nice, y'know?
Still, with that smaller scale, both here and in Iowa, there is the potential for some face time, if only in the sense of more average people getting to ask questions at those venues. A candidate making a speech in Cedar Rapids or Concord is more available to the Common Man than one speaking in New York or Boston, simply because the crowd will be smaller.
And there are still those fading "retail" events at which you can have a conversation rather than simply ask a question from the floor and get a canned response.
It's not just the presidential campaign. When I was living in rural Maine, I fell in love with Town Meetings, which was good because we had to cover a lot of them. I liked the idea of local residents coming together and talking about the highway department budget, going back and forth, not just among each other but with the highway superintendant and the town manager, and making adjustments in that line item by amendments from the floor before voting in an amount everyone could live with.
Then I moved here and found that, in the more populous areas of New England, they've pretty well abolished Town Meeting in favor of ballot voting, supposedly because it increases participation, which is a crock.
There was a proposal in Wilton, Maine, a few years ago to go to a ballot method because more people would participate, and the people at Town Meeting asked why a vote of a lot of people who didn't know what the hell they were voting on was more valuable than a vote by a smaller group who cared enough to take two or three hours to hash it over and understand the issues?
What going to a ballot does is to increase the power of the town board to jam a budget down your throat with an up-or-down vote in which most of the people voting have no idea how the figures were arrived at or what they represent.
Which has little to do with the Geico Gecko, except that we seem to be moving further and further away from an exchange of ideas and more and more into an exchange of logos and slogans and images.
I don't know that insurance ads were ever terribly detailed in terms of explaining what they would do for you and why one company was better than another, but they did appear to take the subject seriously. Whether you were in good hands or relying on a company with the strength and permanence of Gibraltar, there was a sense of solidity to the subject.
Even State Farm's jingle-driven ads emphasized their safe-driver discounts, and "Think of saving $10, $20, 30 or more on car insurance! For careful drivers, it's State Farm Insurance!" was part of a longer commercial that contained some information.
At least Flo mostly exists to encourage you to check out Progressive's rates, though she doesn't say a whole lot about whether they'll actually cover you if you get in an accident.
The gecko, meanwhile, has become so cute that Geico's spots have become virtually content-free, with the only real value in a gecko spot being that they're using the gecko this time and not that stupid caveman, whose commercials are not only distressingly, squirmingly unfunny but now employ an uncharismatic jock-spokesman who is so obscure that the caveman has to explain who he is at the beginning of each spot.
AllState continues to rely on the "dependability" mantra, with that tall guy with the deep voice assuring you that you're in good hands. They've banked on that concept for years (see below), though they now have a different tall guy.
And there's that campaign in which the sort of human crash dummy guy shows you all sorts of horrible scenarios and assures you that, if you use one of the cut-rate insurance companies, they may not cover you, but that his company will. The commercials are attention-getting, but there is some consumer information embedded in there.
The only problem is, I don't remember what company puts on those commercials.
They need some kind of a duck or lizard or something, as a mascot.
Comments
Comments are closed.