Monkey-see, monkey-do. Or something like that.

 

OK, some of these people really should know better.

All four of these ads were taken from a single issue of Travel & Leisure. Karen looked up the rate card and the open rate for a national run is $124,000. The 18x rate of $113,000.

WTF? Do Intercontinental, Sheraton, Oceania Cruises and Virtuoso all subscribe to some sort of stock ad service? Not only is the art direction on all four of these boring, but they all look a-freaking-like. 

I don't know much about Oceania Cruises and Virtuoso in terms of who does their advertising, but my guess is that Sheraton and Intercontinental both have agencies who damn well ought to be able to do better work than this.

This crap is just sad. The fact that all four of them look so much alike tells you something. I'm not 100% sure what, but I can tell you that if my agency did any one of these, I'd be embarrassed. And if I saw that three other agencies did the same thing, I'd want to crawl under a rock.

For God's sake, it you're going to spend more than 100 G's on an ad at least get your agency to make some kind of effort to do something worthwhile.

Here's an open offer to Sheraton AND Intercontinental. We can do better than this. At half the price, I'm sure.

Then again, better than this crap is a mighty low bar.