Our media column tends to get lost in the shuffle here on the website, so I thought I’d draw a little attention to this week’s installment: the story behind those so-perfectly-terrible Arkansas Cash for Gold ads featuring the rubber chicken. Some things I did not realize about the ads: 1) The man who says, “This is a rubber chicken,” is not the owner, but a paid actor; 2) The local guys had nothing to do with the concept of the commercial. It was farmed out to an ad agency in Buffalo, NY; and 3) Jeff Fuller, who owns Arkansas Cash for Gold, gets tons of threatening emails and phone calls as a result of the ads.
Fuller says around 100 percent of customers that walk through the door say they saw the ad on TV. I talked with Dr. Karen Hood, assistant professor of marketing and advertising at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, about the line between effective advertising and annoying the hell out of everybody. “My response is when it comes on and he says, ‘This is a rubber chicken.’ I say back to the TV, ‘This is my remote control.’ And I change the channel,” Hood said.
UPDATE: For those who haven’t been exposed: