College Times

Issue date: 3/26/09 Section: Blogs

Media Credit: Hector Gabino

Screw journalism. After I graduate, I'm going into a career in marketing.

You might ask why. Well, the reason is simple. It seems fun and apparently anyone that can come up with a catch phrase can be part of it.

Watching television commercials reminds me that human beings are still basically primitive. Those primitive principles come out in ads. The need for sex, food and success to get sex and food are the most basic foundations of human psychology.

But, like many in psychology would suggest, the human brain is prone to verbal Freudian slips.

What do you get when the worlds of Freudian psychology and marketing collide? Bad slogans.

They're easily recognizable, but yet they're all over the place. They're on my television. They're on the billboards I see while I ride the light rail to school. They're in the magazine I'm reading once I get there.

Watching television mid-day will make anyone feel like a loser. Advertisements for payday loans, lawyers looking to get you out of your DUI and technical schools are all over the screen.

I don't know if it's because I'm a bad person, but I feel like the words used in these kinds of advertisements could easily be misconstrued. In fact, I spend hours on end some Friday afternoons snickering at TV ads.

The one that always gets me is for Gateway Community College. Now, I'm no education elitist. I go to ASU, but hold that against me as I tell you this. To me, it seems obvious. This GCC slogan is bad:

"You can't afford to go anywhere else."

Right, right. I get it. It would be a bad idea if you went anywhere else. But generally, people go to community college because they're lacking the funds to go to a four-year university. This slogan is absolutely awful. GCC made a Freudian slip.

Another ad I've seen recently, but has been pulled since, is one for TrueNorth nuts. I really don't know how this one made it to air.

An "extraordinary nut snack?" Really?

So consider this my official resignation from the journalism career. I'm off to make accidental double entendres.

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