Awful Like a Fox
 |
 |
| :30 Red Devil spot #1, @ 1 MB |
Creating an ad that is bad, corny, or low-budget looking can be one of the trickiest things to pull off. Red Devil Games of Red Bank, New Jersey pulled off the low budget thing relatively well in this first spot which spoofs an old school anti-drug advertisement. Of course they most likely had a small budget to work with, as it is apparently a local advertisement. I’ve re-encoded the ads they had on the web site and placed them on my site just for ease of download, you can check them out at a higher size on their site, though at least two of them are over 20 MB to download.
The link to watch the spots locally are located below each still frame.
The first spot is over the top and completely corny and it works really well. The editing is snappy and the actors are into what they are doing. It comes off really well, and it’s something I think a lot of advertising firms could throw thousands of dollars at to recreate and never come anywhere close to anything this good.
 |
|
| :30 Red Devil spot #2, @ 1 MB |
This second ad isn’t quite as good. It seems more shocking than anything. They’ve paid homage to some of the more obnoxious production techniques of yesterday, including the cut to another camera that the host follows over, followed by the telescopic zoom in to punctuate the point.
Mentioning crabs and having a woman in stirrups at the end seemed more juvenile than clever.
 |
|
| :30 Red Devil spot #3, @ 1 MB |
The last spot for Red Devil spoofs the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veteran ads from the 2004 election. Being a local ad, I think they can get away with spoofing something so timely. Were it a national ad I might say it would be a terrible idea.
It does a good job getting a viewer’s attention, and the inside joke about the Contra cheat codes should hit a home run with their intended demographic.
All of the spots are cheap, but don’t try to be anything else. The ads pulled off something that is rarely done correctly.
The ads, as always, belong to their owners, and I present them for editorial purposes only.
Comment // June 4th, 2005 // 2:22 pm
Thanks for the kind words on the spot.
“of course they most likely had a small budget to work with, as it is apparently a local advertisement.”
I think in total I spent 30 dollars, so it was a REALLY small budget. Also the order is different- Promise #36 (the crabs spot) was the first one i did, the swift boat spoof was 2nd, and the last one was the PSA. There’s a new one as well being posted shortly.
Comment // June 29th, 2005 // 2:44 am
Awesome! Keep them up, I look forward to the next one.
The small budget is definitely what made them gold.
Comment // July 4th, 2005 // 9:53 pm
Thanks- the new one was posted- Avaiable here
I also got a copy of Sorenson 4 so the file sizes are a lot smaller.