A while back – unsurprisingly, at Cannes Scam Ad time – an agency made a plate that they said absorbed the grease from food to reduce the calories.
Of course, I’ve not seen this plate anywhere since they entered it into an award … but the reason I bring it up is because I recently saw a real, live, genuine product that frankly, is an embarrassment to that piece of scam.
Worse, it’s an embarrassment to the whole ad industry.
Here is it …
Yep, it’s another plate.
Except this plate doesn’t have mini-holes to “supposedly” drain a small proportion of the bad stuff from your dinner.
No, this one is shaped to reflect the size, shape and capacity of the average human stomach.
That’s it.
At a glance, you can see the quantity of food that should be going down your mouth.
Now of course what food you put on the plate has a huge impact on the effect it will have on your body, but given so many of the obesity issues are caused by quantity, this could have a real impact on your overall health in an instant.
No questionable ‘technology’.
No ads telling you to eat healthier.
Just a product that actually helps you help yourself … albeit in an ingenious, guilt-tripping/educational way.
I’ve said this before, but I genuinely believe designers are currently solving problems in better and more powerful ways than adland. Of course we still do brilliant things, but in our quest to try and make ourselves look good … we seem to be focusing our energies on chasing hype rather than doing something that proves how genuinely smart we can be.
And if you need any more evidence of that, just look at the recent Super Bowl.
An event that should be the best ad for the industry but ends up being the worst … mainly because for all the talk we spout about being innovative and focused on solving problems, we end up making TV spots that sell bad humour, brand ego or z-grade self-help manifestos.
Sure there’s the odd one or two every year who do something genuinely interesting [but rarely as good as this], but at a time where we have a chance to show how good we can really be, they still end up being the exception rather than the rule.
Or said another way.
A bunch of ads that cost millions of dollars are less effective, creative and insightful than an £18 bowl from fullstopbowl.com