INN TROUBLE

I wasn’t really paying attention when the new LaQuinta ad came on. I was doing other things. So it wasn’t the ad that sucked me in, it was the awfulness that compelled me to look. It was like MST3000 decided to go into the advertising business, but forgot to bring the funny.

It boggles the mind that someone, somewhere convinced a CD to approve this, an Account Director to sell it and a client to sign off on it. This spot—this entire campaign—couldn’t have been the agency’s best idea. It couldn’t have even been the agency’s 12th best idea. With the exception of ads for natural male enhancement and trucking schools, this honestly has to be the worst spot I’ve seen in recent memory. In fact, I can’t even think of a way to improve upon it short of starting over. So…

Here’s what I would do:

1) Fire the copywriter. 30 seconds to play with and all he or she could come up with is 20+ seconds of cornpone humor? This spot ostensibly announces a nationwide redesign of the chain’s rooms, but that barely gets a mention. It’s a shame, too. The rooms actually look much nicer than I would expect, but this direction makes the entire brand look cheap. 

2) Fire the art director. I’m not really sure this spot had an art director. Because no self-respecting art director would use the crappiest footage he or she could find for a national ad. But if someone with a visual eye was tasked to this spot, let the axe drop. Because the only future he or she has is making commercials like these (un-ironically, of course).

3) Fire the CD. He or she obviously can’t evaluate good creative and has no right to be pulling down six figures—which, incidentally, is roughly 600 times what was spent on the production of this spot.

4) Fire the Account Director. Why? Because he or she didn’t say no when it needed to be said. Sometimes, it’s good for the creative people to hear “no.”

5) Fire the client. If the CMO was willing to pin LaQuinta’s newly refurbished properties to a bunch of stale ideas and old B&W footage, he or she won’t be too long for this world. And when a new CMO comes in, the agency is going to have to justify why they did them—and no argument in defense of these ads will save the business. So it’s better just to cut the agency’s losses now and start fresh with a new team and account. Any more spots in this direction would just damage the rep of the agency and the brand.