Sunday, February 5, 2017
"What's Important" according to PNC Insurance....
Turns out that ninety percent of this advertisement is dad's fantasy of what his daughter's wedding will look like (and cost.) He's daydreaming about his little girl's wedding day as he stares at her sitting on her bed. The little girl looks to to be around six or so, meaning that wedding date is a little while off, but considering the scope of the wedding he's imagining I guess it makes sense for him to start saving now.
So when this guy looks at his little daughter and thinks of the future, he doesn't imagine his little girl graduating from Law School or starting her own business or traveling the world or writing the Great American Novel. Nope. Today she's his daughter, but someday she'll be somebody's wife, and she'll be out of his house (maybe he's just fantasizing about what he can do with the room once she's been handed off?) That day of transition will come with a big, beautiful and very expensive party, but it will come. And when it does, it will include all the stupid stereotypical showy frilly bells and whistles dad can afford. So if he wants to show well to his neighbors and the family of the Appropriately Male and White Groom, he'd better open that investment account right now.
College? Meh, whatever. Maybe later, if he's got time and money and if he ever gets around to seeing his daughter as something more than a princess in a fairy story getting whisked off by her Prince Charming. Hell, I'll be happy if he just stops staring at her and imagining her on her wedding night. Stop that, creepy dad!
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You nailed it again. Dear Old Dad, more worried about how to pay for the tuxedoed boy band and the hummingbirds who'll be holding up his daughter's wedding train than about how to pay for her college education.
ReplyDeleteThis is a classic example of what I like to think of as Ad Agencies Getting Carried Away With Themselves. I.e., the agency that had to make this ad knew it was stuck having to make yet another boring bank ad whose message is "Save today for your kids' future." Yawn. How to make that interesting? Well, obviously just another ad showing a kid getting married or graduating from college while a proud parent looked on wasn't going to cut it. They needed to do something really FUNNY that would include SPECIAL EFFECTS. And, sure enough, they figured out how to do it. But they spent so much time figuring out how to do something funny that would require special effects that they forgot that at heart, they were just making another stupid sexist ad.
I expect at some point we will see the little-boy equivalent in which a hilarious ad incorporates special effects to imply Dear Old Dad paid for his son's college education and this resulted in his becoming another Einstein and solving the world's problems. Blargh.
I'm absolutely positive that if we ever see a version of this ad featuring a father gazing at his little son and imaging the future it will not include the son's wedding day. It will probably include the things you mention- he'll be in a lab making some great discovery, or on the moon, or doing something else extraordinary. But his little girl? Her greatest moment will be her wedding day. Ugh.
Deleteasd
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