You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
White Owl cigars

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
We’re gonna get you!
… okay, we know that sounds a little sinister, but it’ll seem a lot less threatening coming out of Bill Cosby.
… right?

I joked about it in the title and in the The Pitch above, but I actually wanna ignore the Cosbyness of this ad.

Like, put aside what we now know about Bill Cosby’s sexual predations. And put aside how Bill Cosby in the 1970’s looks uncannily like what a cartoon of “Bill Cosby in the 1970’s” would look like.

Pretend you know nothing at all about the guy doing the sales pitch – even then, the sales pitch itself is audacious enough to marvel at.

When you’re selling a deadly and addictive product (and folks in the 70’s absolutely knew that’s what cigars were) using the slogan “We’re gonna get you!” is astoundingly tone deaf.

Their whole pitch is that, at some point, you’re going to try a White Owl cigar, and once you do, you’ll be hooked. Sure, a lot of ads claim that, once you’ve tried their product, you’ll never want to go without it again. But that carries different baggage when the product in question literally contains addictive chemicals. And when it also contains chemicals that will slowly poison you, the whole “we’re gonna get you” slogan goes from a playful faux-threat to a genuine threat with a veneer of faux-playfulness.

To prove this ad concept can be just as messed up even without the Cosby of it all, check out this other ad, using the same pitch, but instead delivered by Santa Claus … who does a legit Evil Laugh! You cannot make this shit up.