Look, we’ll be the first to admit we’re biased here. When someone brings their dog to the office, productivity plummets to someone-put-ambien-in-the-water-supply levels. So in this week’s trends discussion, it’s no wonder that our tails were wagging for this Milk-Bone commercial.
It’s like the old advertising adage goes: if you don’t have a competitive advantage, then use humor. If you can make the humor on-brand? So much the better. Anyone familiar with dogs is familiar with Milk-Bone. And Milk-Bone knows that we dog people are loyal to our pups to a fault. So this new spot is really Pavlovian in how it got us responding.
As Dave said in our meeting, it’s old school and over the top, sure. But dogs are old school, and their affection for their owners is nothing if not over-the-top. And that’s why we love them. In this day of irony and disaffected attitudes (read: cat owners) and hyper-individuality (read: owners of pets you never knew were even domesticated), it just feels good sometimes to run around like an idiot in a park without worrying about what the world has to say.