Overly Friendly Emails and other marketing pet peeves

So the other day, Adrian, I bought some extremely ordinary pants that were plain navy chinos from J.

They were not going to win any awards for novelty.

Yeah. J. Crew's slogan is heritage made modern. And so it surprised me that when my order arrived, I got this email, subject line, best news ever. Your order has arrived.

Check your mailbox, doorstep, wherever. And there are three exclamation marks here. We hope you really, really love it.

It would make sense if it was, like, selling ice cream or something, but it was just kind of incongruous to what I thought the brand was about.

So brand strategist Joe Burns thinks J. Crew is part of a wider plague.

And I'm Darian Woods. Also your friend. Questionable, though, whether I'm cool. The pervasiveness of your cool friend TM is starting to grind Joe Burns gears, and maybe yours, too. That's why today on the show, we are looking at three pet peeves in advertising.

So advertising rant number one. Every brand speaking like it's your cool best friend, Joe Burns is the strategy lead at the ad agency. Quality meets creative.

Now back to me.

Yeah. So like, a customer would tweet, is it shameful to be eating Wendy's food while sitting. Sitting in a McDonald's parking lot? And Wendy's would tweet back, you're probably raising the property value. Tbh.

It's snarky and cool.

Well, thank you, Joe Burns. And next we have our second marketing gripe. This one is from a legend inside the advertising industry, Sir John Hegarty.

Nike to Ikea, and among his many marketing gripes, generational labels.

In fact, John doesn't think there is such a thing as a Gen Z or a baby boomer. He says this is just a marketing invention.

I've seen You've written that generational labels are just horoscopes for marketers.

And now for our final marketing frustration. Our guest Katie Keating is creative director at an ad agency called Fancy. And for her, this is more than a bugbear. She feels really strongly about the advertising gatekeepers at digital platforms like Meta, Google and TikTok. She says they won't allow brands to talk about women's bodies in a straightforward way.

And what really irks Katie is that she thinks there are double standards for men.

This year, six women health related companies in the UK and Europe called for an investigation by the European Commission into the digital platforms for this alleged discrimination.

So maybe your dweebish friend might be the next thing. What do you think, Adrian?

I can certainly play to type there.

episode was produced by Angel Carreras with engineering by Patrick Murray and Neil Rauch. It was fact checked by Sarah Juarez. Kate Kirkannon edits the show, and the indicator is a production of NPR.