Whoops — it’s a hoax. Barska denies having anything to do with these ads.
Original post below the fold.
If this were a Mad Magazine parody, or in The Onion, I’d find it funny. But it appears to be real, and that’s just fucking creepy.
It’s a series of three ads for Barska binoculars. Each ad shows a portrait shot of a narrator — a middle-aged working-class looking white guy, an office-looking white woman, and a young, I’m-not-sure-of-his-ethnicity-but-possibly-not-white guy — and contains text below talking about how great the binoculars are. Here’s the text from the working-class-white-guy ad:
Love can be tough. That’s why I’m so lucky I met my Lucy. She only knows me as Bert, the guy from the flower shop. But my BARSKA Point ‘n View binoculars have brought us closer. Much, much closer than she’ll ever know. Sure, some may call me a stalker, but I prefer to think of myself as a stranger enthusiast.
I love the way she smiles. The way she brushes her hair in the morning. The way she gets all nervous in underground parking lots when she thinks that someone’s watching. You know what? Deep down, she knows she really loves me too. And if she could only see herself the way I see her (with my BARSKA) she would know that we were meant to be together.
Oh, you should have seen the look on her face when she opened her present the other day. I don’t think anyoen’s ever given her a real live scorpion before. Fortunately, I could record the moment on the SD card in my BARSKA Point ‘n View with video record function. Let’s just say it now has pride of place in what I like to call my Lucy-Library. Yes, love can be tough. But that’s why you can’t ever give up. Not ever.
There’s a caption to a photo of binoculars which says “Putting the KING back into stalking.”
Having typed that in, I’m wondering if this is a fake ad that someone is pretending came from Barska. On the other hand, the comment writers on the website — a website for folks in advertising — seem to mostly think it’s a real ad campaign, and to mostly think it’s a great ad campaign.
I think it’s fairly common for aspiring advertisers to put together ads for real products in an attempt to either get the company to buy their ad (or hire them), or just to draw attention to their skill. These ads smell like such a project.
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