Hair Club can help…
It’s not nice to mock the afflicted, so my focus will be on the company offering ‘hope’ to those who are losing their hair.
Their ads appear every week night on Fox 29 Buffalo, sometime between 5 and 6 pm, during the repeats of Family Feud.
Hair and Scalp Analysis
I seem to be someone who can observe patterns in almost everything, so it’s no surprise to me to see something strange about this segment in all the most recent TV spots. It started out with the men’s portion. When the Hair Club employee puts the microscope up to the top of the man’s head, an image appears on the monitor in front of them. It always seemed that the hair pattern was sparser than it should have been. Alright, I thought, let’s keep an eye open for this part.
But it wasn’t until a Hair Club for Women was shown later that I spotted what was bothering me: instead of one shot of this analysis being carried out, there were two; and the image on the monitor was identical to each other AND to the one used in the men’s sequence! Oops…
CALL NOW!
The rule of three comes into play with all advertising. If you have a specific message, you need to repeat it three times for the viewer to retain it. That’s usually why, towards the end of a commercial, the announcer will say the telephone number three times.
But recent Hair Club ads have gone one step further: we are being firmly instructed to “call now!” several times. In fact, the final words lately are exactly that: CALL NOW!
Bald Lies?
Hair loss is a touchy point for everyone. My hairdresser in the UK, Julie Benham, used to tease me about my bald spot. She never showed me it, and when my hair was finished being styled, there was nothing missing, as far as I could see in the handheld mirror. But then, recently, my wife noted, while we were getting our hair cut, that there were times during the process that she could clearly see my scalp.
My full head of hair is a point of pride. If I felt insecure about it, I’m sure I would be a sucker for Hair Club’s individual solutions. But they never tell you how much it will cost, nor how long it will take to achieve results, and that makes me suspicious. Sometimes, the first 50 callers are promised $250. off their chosen solution, so we’re not talking about cheap, here. And a little research will yield some very ugly images of head equipment that look like medieval torture devices.
No thank you, very much…
And in conclusion…
Of all the talking heads in their TV ads, only one stands out. His voice sounds like Kenny Rogers’ and he has white hair. Perhaps, he is the best advertisement of what a great result looks like. Anyway, here he is:
But I still won’t ever CALL NOW!
