Macy's new campaign

+ Bob G reviews Macy's new star filled spots by JWT.

Yo, Peter, first of all, no TV viewer will notice/care about the direction and cinematography of the commercial (both, incidentally, unexceptional) much less be impressed by the Hollywood talent behind it. Bringing in big guns was a waste of money. Secondly, there is a huge unanswered question as to whether Macy's has any "heritage" or relevance at all in markets in which familiar old logos have disappeared only to be replaced by a name evoking little more than a 60-year-old movie and a Thanksgiving Day parade.

Consumers don't like having the familiar wrenched from their hands. Does nobody in your organization remember New Coke? And, by the way, Peter, "epic"??? No. "Doctor Zhivago" is an epic. Macy's is a place that lies about jewelry sales.

So, yeah, the strategy is dubious, and we suspect this will wind up as a Harvard Business School case about faulty assumptions on a grand scale. But that's not JWT's fault. Under the circumstances, the debut is a more than satisfactory.