Try to find the Navy Seals in this ad:
Good luck. Cause you won’t. We had an art director blow this up digitally down to the dot and she couldn’t find a single Navy Seal or Navy Seal part. Bad move by the Navy on a number of counts.
For this ad to be effective for, say, a guy flipping through a mag waiting for a haircut, its gotta capture his imagination. This guy, say he’s pretty smart, but he’s been laid off twice in the last five months. Had the economy been going okay, he’d never in a million years consider the armed forces, not with what its been stuck doing these past six years. But now he’s a bit more predisposed. Maybe. So, he bites and plays the ‘Where’s Waldo’ thing, seeing how long it’ll take to make out a camouflaged limb or a mud-covered forehead. And as he does, he’s thinking that maybe if he had the skills to hang out here barely noticed, while not being skeezed out by the snakes, maybe that could be cool. Certainly a helluva lot more impressive on his resume than Assistant Dept. Manager at Office Depot, which just shut down and is the reason he’s even bothering to look at the ad in the first place.
But wait. He can’t find ANY faces or bodies. Looks like they just took a photo of a swamp. No Seals at all. Not cool.
The idea isn’t bad, but the execution was a strategic mistake and a plain dumb decision. Even if technically there are Navy Seals in this photo hidden behind a tree or completely submerged underwater, so what?! We could get the same shot with a bunch of fifth graders. ‘Okay kids, on three everyone hide like we practiced. Johnny behind the tree, Amie and Tom go under the water and hold your breath and count to 20.’
In our opinion, the U.S. Navy loses out on authenticity and honesty and a chance to actually get their ad passed around. ‘Hey, try to find the five Navy Seals in this ad. They’re there, I promise.’ If that was the case their audience would be ready for the next ad, maybe in the dessert this time. They’d take time with the ad and search for the dudes. And they’d probably even remember Navy Seals. Cool.
That’s our take. What’s yours?
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