Hero Disillusionment: There’s an app for that

One of my favorite bloggers, Where’s My Jetpack? just reminded me of a recent T-Mobile ad featuring one of my childhood heroes, Eric Clapton:

Ok a couple of things.

  1. I’ve been a huge fan of Eric Clapton since I was a kid. I own most of his albums, I just finished reading his autobiography, hell, I wrote a 20 page term paper in college (the class was “History of the Blues”) defending the man as a “true” blues musician.
  2. This ad kind of bothers me for some reason(even though I like the song in the spot from one of his more obscure early 80s albums).  Actually, it makes me embarrassed for him…and a little bit for me, for being a fan.

At first I couldn’t figure out why.  I like parts of the ad: The music, the phone itself(i’m a sucker for anything with a sunburst finish and a Fender logo), and I even kind of got a chuckle out of the part where Buddy Guy(another blues legend and hero of mine) shows up on the caller ID.

Then Bruce pointed out exactly what bothered me:  It’s a “me too” ad.  It is basically a rip off of the iPhone ads.

So maybe what bothers me isn’t that this childhood hero is shilling a product.  It’s that he’s shilling a “me too” product in a “me too” ad.  Come on Eric, couldn’t your manager have gotten you a gig with Apple instead?

Now, this isn’t the first time ol’ Eric has done an ad that made me scratch my head.  Back in 1989, Clapton had just got sober after coming out of his second stint in rehab for alcoholism(and not only has he been sober ever since, he’s also helped others get sober through a rehab center he founded called Crossroads).  That’s why I could never understand why he agreed to do a commercial for Michelob using one of his classic songs, “After Midnight”:

Maybe I’m just over thinking it.  What do you think of the ad?  Have you ever had a similar reaction, seeing one of you favorite artists/actors etc. endorsing a product?

Written by Bruce