Gareth Edel Presents

Crazy People's Candy Bars:

"Two for Me, None for You"

The Twix candy bar is two candy bars in one package. Two cookie bars with caramel on top of each each wrapped in chocolate. As I remember it, in the early eighties when I was a child they started selling Twix bars for the first time. Twix was a new candy bar in a field of candy we had all had before so we noticed them. Their wrappers were bland. It was not as brightly colored as the Nestle Crunch bar. Its contents were average, since there were no nuts and it lacked the dynamic textures of the classic Baby Ruth.

What the Twix bar did, was allow you to share. It's advertisements had a theme, the theme was this is the bar which brings people together and allows you to share with your friend, or your brother, or anyone else you were around. The idea of a candy bar advertisement with a progressive message is silly, the company simply thought that the ad would sell candy. Fair enough since it probably worked, they sold the Twix bar to millions of sugar-crazed kids, and the ads ran for years. The important part of the story comes later.

Twix changed its ads while I was in college; they were an updated version with faster more edgy visual style and a new message. This message was a ploy off of the older slogan, in each add a person would expect their friend (sibling etc...) to share a Twix bar with them and with some flourish the owner of the Twix bar would deny them the candy. This action would be followed by loud anonymous commentator's cry of "two for me, none for you." I do not know why in the middle of my life and worries about far more important issues I became so offended and fixated on the new Twix commercials. Why did I not obsess over a Kit Kat bar commercial? Their slogan: "give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar," wasn't used in adds anymore, their message had changed, but not as drastically. They also shifted more slowly and I was never as aware of the press of ads for Kit Kat. Twix was the bar that had started selling while I was young and it had always been the bar to get if you wanted to share.

In all this, I am reminded of a movie called Crazy People staring the comic actor Dudley Moore. This movie is about an advertising executive who has a nervous breakdown and is sent to a mental institution for rest. While there, he enlists the other inmates and they write radical new ad campaigns for Dudley's old firm. The new ads start from the idea of absolute and frequently cynical honesty. These ads are wildly popular and the firm is happy with the now acceptable Moore, who leaves the institution, blah blah blah... the important part is the idea of honesty and where it crosses over into sarcasm and cynicism.

In Crazy People the executives left behind after Moore leaves cannot find the right balance in their attempts at honest advertising. However, is this really about honesty? Is the balance that the advertising executives in the movie cannot have, without the help of the insane, a balance between honesty and falsity? Alternatively, is it a balance between the saccharine, which usually fills advertising and a bitter edge of Cynicism? Everyone who watches ads on TV knows that they all strive to make us believe our lives will be better with the product they wish to sell. However, are the new ads for Twix really any different? If they think they can sell to us (the consumer) with more success with cynicism, is it different? I suggest that they are.

Today there is a noticeable trend toward a less flowery advertising style. Advertisers are avoiding the positive, not following thirty-year-old advertising traditions. Advertisers seem to be spinning towards the people in younger generations that are an important consumer demographic by assuming the guise of cynicism. In an effort to suggest a similarity of mindset to their audience the advertisers avoid the sort of slogans you see towards parents and have shown the way they see our generations.

What scares me most about this change is not the scheming methods of the advertising industry, but instead, I am scared of the world as it will be, with a generation of cynics coming into their own. I am not in a position to complain as I am as pessimistic as the next twenty something about the world to come is. However, in my own defense, at least I still believe in optimistic candy bar commercials.

So once again I state that the Twix candy bar is two candy bars in one package, can you share it? Yes, you can, but should you? That is a personal decision that you must make for yourself, but for me the answer is yes. I mean for God's sake if you don't want to share buy a freaking snickers bar you cynical bastard.