Much cheapness

I often find myself thinking about advertising in my spare time, I must have mental deficiencies I'm sure. Something I often ponder relates to the cheapness of advertising, let me expand on that before all the media buyers out there have a coronary.

I was watching an advertising campaign on tv for a company that sells sofas and the quality of all aspects of their advert was shockingly bad (filming, acting, sound, cameras etc....). I started getting angry with the level of awfulness as I have worked making tv and film and also know how much it costs to buy the space the advert would appear in. The cost of making the advert look and feel acceptable is a fraction of the cost of the space so why would they do it? I then started to think about all those brands that intentionally set out to make themselves look cheap so as not to scare any customers away at the prospect of high prices, using primary colours - gaudy and aesthetically unpleasing - and how they know exactly what they are doing when appealing to their target market (I know this very well as I designed and developed a few of them myself!). To cut a long story short this advert and brand has kept springing back into my head all the time over the christmas period and into January and I have been thinking of this advert in depth for weeks now (creating more memories linked between myself and this brand).

Ultimately I have started to question now whether this is the best advertising campaign I have ever seen as no matter how beautiful, subversive, exciting or entrancing a good advert can be none of them have ever lead me to think in such detail and depth about them as this advert has managed to!