The Ideating commercial below takes the innovation buzzword to a laughable extreme, yet the affected response “Thanks” of the Millennial (this time a woman) to the sarcastic retort of the manager’s “Good Luck” 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 later this repeating scenario get turned on its head.
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 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 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 at 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.
In the Globalization advertisement below, the manager does his own bit of overselling IT integration to his Asian hosts. The plodding music gets carried away by the condemning sounds of the tuba brass as the delegation leaves the manager alone to rethink his sales pitch.
