NEW YORK – Comedians Whoopi Goldberg and Jerry Seinfeld turned the 55th Clio Awards in Cipriani Wall Street on October 1 into something of a roast of the advertising industry.
Goldberg repeatedly poked fun at the gathering of admen while calling on the industry’s elite to lighten up.
“It’s kind of like being at the Oscars — sometimes you don’t need to be to cool for school … you can smile, it’s OK! You can whoop it up! This is your night, enjoy it. You don’t have to be like the actors, you can actually have a good f—ing time. … You gotta learn to have a little fun with your industry,” said Sister Act star.
Goldberg also called out advertisers, Nike included, for giving her a miss when casting their campaigns. On the presentation of the Grand Clio for Content & Contact to Forsman & Bodenfors for Volvo Truck’s ‘Epic Split’, she quipped: “It’s nice to be celebrated for being able to spread your legs, right?”
Seinfeld, who was on hand for his honorary Clio, similarly delivered few zingers of his own.
“I love advertising because I love lying,” he deadpanned before going on to note: “… in advertising, everything is the way you wish it was. I don’t care that it won’t actually be like that when I actually get the product being advertised because in between seeing the commercial and owning the thing, I’m happy, and that’s all I want.
“Tell me how great the thing’s going to be, I want it, I don’t need to be happy all the time! I just want to enjoy the commercial. I want to get the thing — we know the product is going to stink, we know that because we live in the world and we know that everything stinks.
“We all believe, ‘Hey, maybe this one won’t stink!’ We are a hopeful species — stupid, but hopeful. … I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-earned earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.”
As the star of Ogilvy & Mather’s American Express campaigns, the comedian is very much part of the industry he roasted.
And while his bruising anti-advertising rant may have drawn plenty of laughs, like Ricky Gervais’ hosting cum skewering of the 2012 Golden Globes, it had to have pricked quite a few egos in an industry with an over-abundance of them.
photo courtesy of Clio Awards
