Cut, Color, Clarity and Cliché Commercials

It’s the holiday season and now is the time when jewelry companies like to crawl up out of the sewers and bombard us with their newest brood of wretched commercials.

I’m looking at you, Kay, Jared, Zales, and others of your ilk. I’m sure you guys run your businesses well, take care of your customers, and make boat-loads of money. That’s great. But your commercials suck.

They all share the same main ingredients. Equating material goods, especially jewelry, with love. Old-fashioned gender roles out the ying-yang (the man is the clueless breadwinner, the woman is the always-right soccer-mom). Awful catch-phrases (Every Kiss Begins with Kay, He Went to Jared!).

How come these ads are never funny, surprising, or clever? They’re always sticky-sweet, groan-inducing , sap fests. Take a look at this one:

They’re so bad, you can’t help but start to hate diamonds a little bit after watching. How bad does something have to be to make you hate diamonds? By definition, they’re beautiful. But these days, they have this connotation attached to them. This stench. You see a diamond ring and you think of a human Ken doll proposing to his girlfriend on a wind-swept beach then uttering some witless one-liner. Yuck.

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!!!

All it takes is one brave creative team to buck the trend. People said a lot of the same things about romantic-comedies before 500 Days of Summer came along. They said you couldn’t make a movie about pirates unless it involved Peter Pan, then Pirates of the Caribbean came along and, literally, blew everyone out of the water. The diamond industry must believe that you can’t make a jewelry commercial without soap-opera lighting and at least one person wearing a woolen sweater.

Until one of these companies decides to spare us from more of these atrocious ads, it looks like we’re stuck with spots like this one:

The fact is, jewelry can be a beautiful gift, and it can be a great way to express your love to the people that are important to you. There has to be a better way to communicate this message.

So, as a plea to jewelry companies everywhere – can you please start putting a little thought into your ads? Can you try to surprise us? Connect with us? Entertain us? Will you stop insulting our intelligence and give us ads that educate or inspire? Just, please, give us anything besides the same gooey garbage you’ve been peddling for as long as I can remember.

We’re begging you!