photo by matt.hintsa via flickr
“Imagine more shoes than you could ever imagine.”
…rewind…
“Imagine more shoes than you could ever imagine.”
OK, that’s what I thought it said. That’s some of the worst copywriting I’ve ever heard. This was the lead-in line to a TV advertisement for Off Broadway Shoes. I’ll concede that perhaps the copywriters were trying to get attention by having this very confusing line. But, I think it’s simply not a good line. How do I imagine more shoes than I could ever imagine? I tried. I couldn’t do it. No matter how many shoes I imagined, I could never imagine more than I could ever imagine.
Bad line.
Off Broadway Shoes doesn’t have a version of this ad available to embed here on the blog. But they have it here on their website or here on Facebook.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think this is a bad line? Anyone think it’s a good line?
Mike My Words - from the brain of Mike McDowell 
Donnie said,
March 27, 2010 @ 8:36 am
First things first: I am not a member of the target audience, so my opinion doesn’t really matter.
Notwithstanding that I am a man that buys about 1 pair of shoes pr year, I think this is a bad ad. Bad line, bad commercial.
The commercial undermines the “headline” by telling your how many shoes you can find in the store: 40,000. See? Now you can imagine it….
Imagine advertising with creative copywriting. That would be something, huh?
I’m usually not big on commercials, but I thnk the newer U.S. Army commercial are very powerful. Whoever produces those know what they are doing.
Wolfy said,
March 28, 2010 @ 8:26 am
Think about it. The copy and the paradox got you thinking about expanding your world view of how many shoes could be in one place. “More shoes than you can imagine” isn’t enough. And “imagine more shoes” isn’t enough. Imagining more shoes than you can imagine tells me that a huge infinite collection of shoes might somewhere in the universe exist, but not at broadway shoes. Broadway shoes just has more shoes than you can imagine, not more than you imagine you could imagine. I imagine most people would have a problem with conducting a thought experiment within a thought experiment.
-M
a. Van Winkle said,
November 21, 2011 @ 9:48 am
I run the advertising agency that made the ad. I can assure you that our copywriters did not write that ad. It was a line that the client saw on a billboard and forced us to put it in the ad. I agree that it makes no sense at all.
Mike McDowell said,
November 21, 2011 @ 2:51 pm
Hahaha. Thanks for the clarification, Alex. That helps me understand what happened.