Saatchi & Saatchi’s The Breakfast Club campaign for JCPenney has been crapped by everyone on since it launched. Today, it’s Rebecca Cullers’ turn. On AdFreak, Rebecca does the math, writing, “I was 3 years old when The Breakfast Club came out in 1985. I didn’t know the film existed until I was in college, where it was included in a class on culturally significant movies for Gen X. Now, there’s more or less a decade separating me from today’s incoming high-school students. Does anyone really think they will get the reference?”
She is absolutely correct in her analysis of the problem and for anyone at Saatchi or JCPenney not to have realized this is further confirmation far too many advertisers and their agencies, despite believing the contrary, are completely out of touch with reality.
Yes, The Breakfast Club is a great movie. But, the direction Saatchi took has to be one of the most idiotically anachronistic moves an agency/marketer could have ever made. It is a total disconnect with the people they are trying to reach. Sure, the movies speaks to teens but it speaks to mid-eighties teens! That’s over 20 fucking years ago!
Granted, teens of today, in a large sense, do face the same issues teens of the eighties – or any decade – face. The big issues never change. Self-esteem. Peer pressure. Cliquishness. Authority. Relationships. But the cultural foundation surrounding those issues changes dramatically about every ten years. The actors in The Breakfast Club are now the age of the parents of the very teens JCPenney is attempting to attract. Who really wants to dance in a school library with their parents?
I’d like to know who at Saathchi actually thought this was a good idea. I’d love to hear the rationale behind it. I can’t believe the client went for it. Just do the math It makes no sense. Even I, someone archaically old enough to have seen the movie as a teen knows this. It was most certainly relevant to me at the time. Extremely so. But to a teen of today. No way. Total FAIL.
Each day this campaign airs lends increasing support to the notion that fake Speed Dressing ad was spot on strategy and should have bee n approved by JCPenney in place of the idiotic The Breakfast Club campaign.
