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Pet Store Ads: Not Enough Animal Magnetism Petstore.com has a subliminal masterpiece. Petopia, PetsMart, and Petstore.com miss the mark In the e-ad genre, hipness is the Holy Grail. A lot of ad campaigns rely on shock value for that. But pet store e-tailers tend to rely on cuteness, with a twist of humor, to get their messages across. Take Petopia's ad featuring hundreds of dogs converging to drink from an enormous toilet bowl set in a field of grass. I, my significant other Hal, and our three cats were unmoved. "It's trying too hard, it's like a bad TV sitcom," muttered Hal after watching a third spot in which cats rub against a field full of giant mannequin legs to insipid music. Allie, Bob, and Isabella -- the cats -- seemed to agree. We all perked up, though, when the Pets.com spotted-dog puppet appeared, microphone in hand, to interview people who had given their pets Christmas presents. Definitely a hip campaign. My favorite is the one in which the puppet puts a shiny package in front of an iguana and jumps up and down excitedly saying "Open it, Iguana! Come on! Open it, Iguana! I can't wait!" The iguana stares, unblinking. CAT-THUMBS DOWN. Still, when we got to the ad with a hostile-looking preteen playing a computer game and refusing her cat's offers to trade her self-cleaning litter box for a Gameboy, we knew these were not pet people. The tag line -- "Pets.com: Because pets can't drive," is obtuse at best. The ads were memorable for their humor, but told us little about what the Web site had to offer. By this time, Bob and Allie were chasing each other up and down the hall and Isabella was asleep. We counted their votes as thumbs down and moved on. PetsMart.com had the clearest ad in terms of explaining what its Web site actually does. The store's trusty rep, in crisp shirt and shorts, makes PetsMart deliveries from his van. Every time its doors open, gleaming aisles full of pet food and pet provisions appear. The joke was the earnestness of the delivery man, who, of course, knew all the cats and dogs by name. Too cute. Not hip. Bob was now asleep under the desk, Isabella hadn't moved in what seemed like forever, and we could hear Allie scratching in the litter box. Next. The ad starts with snoring. Then a bare foot appears. The camera pans up the leg of a man wrapped in a flannel shirt, sleeping on the floor. He isn't handsome. His breath is probably bad. For a second, I thought I had stumbled onto an independent film. Then the camera pans to the bed, where three large dogs luxuriate on the sheets. As the logo for Petstore.com appears you hear "Petstore.com -- We get it," then the sound of a door creaking open, a bell tinkling, and the avuncular voice of a merchant welcoming you. It was a masterpiece of the subliminal. Not only did the image of the dogs remind us of how our cats converge to recline on any human, but those few sounds at the end transported us to the pet store of old. We were entranced. Bob was kneading Hal's lap. Allie was swatting at my ear, and Isabella yawned and sat up. It was a unanimous vote. Of course, it was also 8 p.m. -- time for din-din. By Margaret Popper New York _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
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