Bad Advertising?

A popular theory among advertisers seems to be that if you make your product as visible as possible, people will try it out, and you'll get to sit at the popular kids table. So in the thick of Fall TV, every show wants people to tune in and give 'em a shot, which means lots and lots of advertising.

I've been spending a lot of time in a big city, one with billboards stacked on billboards, so every day I see ads for new TV shows. Perhaps the most prevalent ad is for 666 Park Avenue. They even have devoted a method of public transportation to this by decorating the seats and interior to look, I dunno, classier, I guess, in honor of this show.

The tagline for 666 Park Avenue is "New York's most seductive address."

Like I said, I see ads for this every day. But do these ads tell me about? Not even remotely. Here are the things I've gleaned from such ads:

-It has that dude who played Locke in Lost
-It has fancy beautiful people, so they must be wealthy
-There will probably be kissing.

And, oh yes- there will be stairs.

Also, I'm not sure how their tagline ties into their show. "Seduction" seems like a really huge understatement after "666." You can't tie The Devil's Number, Sign of Vicious Evil into mere seduction and tell me it's not a stretch.

I caught the last few seconds of a commercial for this show once. It looked like something supernatural was going on. Uh...what?

Finally, I read a blurb about the show. Here it is, from  TV.com:

Combine the eeriness of Lost with the ruthlessness of Desperate Housewives and you get this adaptation of Gabrielle Pierce's book series. A melting pot of ABC alums, the supernatural drama stars Dave Annable (Brothers & Sisters) and Rachael Taylor (Charlie's Angels) as an innocent Midwestern couple who get hired as resident managers of The Drake, a tony Upper East Side apartment building owned by Lost's Terry O'Quinn and his wife, Housewives's Vanessa Williams. The catch: The residents have all made deals with The Devil to have their deepest desires fulfilled.

Dang. Now that told me more than any of their advertisements did. And hey, deepest desires? Maybe some reference to The 7 Deadly Sins? I'm interested. But I would not have gotten that from seeing the same people on all the billboards try to stare into my soul.



So yeah, I know the name of the show from all the advertisers' efforts. But did that make me want to watch it more than the shows that had fewer, but clearer, advertisements? Not really. It might be an unpopular opinion, but I personally don't think that if you slam people with the same thing over and over that will automatically make them like it.

Have you seen the show? What are you watching this Fall? (It seems like everything I watch is in its Farewell Season...)

Let me know!
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