Ok, take a deep breath, and meet Canadian television's newest mascot, "Global Water Cooler Guy". I wish I was kidding. Read the description too, I love the part about "...he'll be expecting you to gather and discuss...". Yeah, he can expect all he wants, but I don't think we'll be doing that any time soon...I'll might just eat my own blog before that happens.
Yup, pretty sad. This idea is not clever, funny, interesting, or worth-while. Some suit's idea of getting in touch with viewers. "Well Johnson, how can we create buzz this season?" If that's the idea that stuck, I'd like to see the ones that fell to the floor:
"Meet Global-G!" (We see a man-sized Red Letter "G" costume, with a turntable strapped to his chest, and the requisite 'bling'). "Global-G is a real playa playa...he gots all the 411's on Global's supersized off-the-hook Fall lineup...count on Global-G...he'll hook you up witz entertainment, fo' shizzle!"
These are the kind of ideas that happen in top-level executive-style meetings, where out of touch people with nice suits and bad ideas come together to vibrate at the same frequency, or at least close enough to create harmonic distortion. If anything, why isn't he just a big TV?! Perhaps CTV already rented that costume?
I get that they want to promote their shows, as they should...but, let's look closer. First of all, FOX's "Family Guy" is hardly a Global production. Pretty much Canada's entire broadcast business model relies on rebroadcasting, or "simulcasting" shows from the USA, but disguising them to look like local productions. Like I've harped on previously, just open up the iTunes TV Store floodgates in Canada, simulcasting makes no sense in today's world, except for people with dialup and rabbit ears.
If we'd stop the simulcasting and start producing our own shows, then maybe Global Water Cooler Guy would be a little cooler, perhaps even relevant...however, it is what it is. The point is to advertise the shows.
Perhaps another point to quickly touch on is the "guy in big costume" approach to marketing. From the "Fruit of the Loom" guys, to the "Listerine" Hero guy, to chickens selling chicken wings...there's plenty of examples of this tired approach. On the other hand, they're basically the same as those Apple vs PC ads that I like, just that Apple wisely chose to fore go the giant costumes and just use humans in normal clothes...or maybe nobody's thin enough to fit in an iMac costume? No, it was probably rented out already, Halloween's in just a couple weeks after all.
Anyways, I don't wanna get into a big thing here, I just thought I'd share the laugh(s), if there were any to be had.
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