TV commercials during the Super Bowl earlier this month continued to attract nearly as much attention as the game itself, and one of the most popular of the entries had an unintentional local flavor.
The ad, featuring heavily-accented Arnold Schwarzenegger, was built around the actor’s inability (like many a Rhode Islander) to pronounce that final “r” in the company’s slogan, “Like a good neighbor.”
The punch line came when Danny DeVito, Schwarzenegger’s co-star in the 1988 film “Twins,” rushed in to deliver the line with perfect elocution, saving the day.
It didn’t make the Super Bowl, but one of my favorite ads around here is the Rhode Island Airport Corporation’s dig at Boston’s Logan Airport, citing “soul-crushing” traffic on the way and urging potential travelers to “Forget about the B.S. at BOS.”
So, what makes a commercial work, in or out of the Super Bowl?
That’s something ad execs always ponder, and well they should – because inattention has produced some clunkers in the past.
Speaking of flying right, in 1987 Braniff Airlines, touting the leather seats it had installed on planes, urged its Hispanic market in Miami to sit “en cuero” – on leather. But the phrase was nearly identical to Spanish slang for what might be translated, “Sit buck-naked.”
This produced a nationwide spate of jocular headlines, including one in the Los Angeles Times asserting that the ads “Inadvertently Make Skies Sound More Than Friendly.”
When Ford began marketing its Pinto in Brazil, it soon learned that “pinto” in Portuguese slang can refer to a male body part. So customers there soon found themselves buying not Pintos, but re-branded Corcels – stallions.
Nothing says “chicken wings” like the Super Bowl – it’s estimated that Americans consumed more than a billion on game day – and this recalls Kentucky Fried Chicken’s expansion into China in the 1980s. The company arrived with its famous tagline, “Finger-lickin’ good” – but when its first restaurant opened there, the translated motto came out, “Eat your fingers off.”
Chicken man Frank Perdue also ran afowl of language when his slogan on Mexican billboards, “It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken” seemed to say in Spanish, “It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.”
Language across borders has always presented challenges in advertising. In the 1970s, Swedish vacuum cleaner company Electrolux, marketing in England, poetically pushed its product with the catch line, “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”
Given how language evolves, that would hardly be an endorsement today.
When it comes to car ads shown during Super Bowls, you’ve got to hand it to Fiat, whose 2015 commercial managed to be both praised and faulted. Set in Italy, it showed an aging village Casanova accidentally dropping a Viagra pill that bounces out a window and into the gas tank of a Fiat 500. The little car suddenly grows “bigger, more powerful, and ready for action.”
Some called it one of the funniest game commercials ever, while others said it made them uncomfortable.
Whatever your take on it, it was tame compared to a currently running TV ad in which a woman gives herself a weight-loss shot and exclaims of the injection: “I’m not quite sure how something that’s just a little tiny pr***k can be so powerful.”
You’ll never convince me that the double entendre was accidental, but there’s a commercial that would light up any Super Bowl – and that’s the buck-naked truth.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.