Facebook Chairs Have No Point
The new Facebook Chairs ad doesn’t tell me anything about the social media site or their one billion user milestone.
What is this spot telling me? Facebook has a place for everyone? I wasn’t aware that was a concern. “Gee, I hope Facebook has room for my account.”
The whole spot seems like a last-minute idea-by-committee concept that an Art Director approved because he liked the way it made him feel. According to the agency, Wieden + Kennedy, they were working on this for more than a year and “spent months meeting with Facebook staffers and getting to know the company”. Months of research resulted in chairs, doorbells, airplanes, and basketball games. Not a good sign.
But my problems with the spot go beyond the items used. How about knowing the difference between a chair and a bench? In their chair-oriented segment, they show a bench three times. A bench isn’t a chair. But it would have been a better analogy because benches are meant for more than one person, like a social media site. A chair is intended for one. Alone. Separated.
By far, the most perplexing item included is “the universe“. Something so vast, empty, and unknown to us that we will can’t traverse it in the next 10 generations of humanity. I’m not sure how this makes us feel connected.
Wieden + Kennedy have made some amazing spots in the past for a variety of great clients. But Facebook Chairs should not go in the portfolio. It poorly communicates a strange message from a recently beleaguered client grasping for positive PR. There are plenty of people at the agency and Facebook who should have said, “we need to start over”.
What do you think of the new commercial? Share a comment below.
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