Advertising through a recession – Guest Clack
Julia Hass is back Guest Clacking for us again after her great five-parter last month:
Like every other family in America, my family will, when asked what the best part about our relatively new acquisition of a DVR (yeah, we’re behind the times) is, answer “we get to fast forward through commercials.” Commercials have been the bane of any television watcher’s life, the scourge of their existence. They are the meaningless fodder stuck in between the tensest moments when you very desperately need to know what happens on the other end of the commercial break.
I don’t know. Call me crazy, but I kind of miss them.
I hate deceiving promos – Open Letters
Hey TNT –
Following last week’s episode of Leverage, you were airing a promo for this past Tuesday’s episode, “The 12-Step Job,” which looked pretty damn impressive. Every so often the ad would run, and I’d think, “Damn! The next episode looks killer!” Maybe you’ve got nothing to do with the promo department, so here’s part of it for you again, embedded below.
Doritos Super Bowl commercial: kind of rapey and weird?
Last night, I settled in front of my TV, excited to spend three joy-filled hours fast-forwarding through the Super Bowl to get to the commercials. Even though a few had popped up online in the days before the game, I avoided them to make sure I could have the “proper” viewing experience. I even made sure to have my 3-D glasses ready to go. I was all set for an evening full of awesome and needlessly expensive new ads, but then something weird happened: they all kind of sucked.
I honestly don’t even remember most of what I watched, since they were just so relentlessly mediocre. A few, however, stood out. The Alec Baldwin Hulu commercial, for instance, was hilarious. It, in fact, was the only ad I truly loved. I’m not here to talk about that though. What I want to talk about is the really messed up Doritos commercial that aired in which a man uses the power of Doritos to take off a woman’s clothes in the middle of a busy public street.
Fred Dryer has a new series! Oh … wait….
I was flipping through the channels the other day when I saw what I assumed was a promo for a new show that had somehow slipped under my television radar. Right there on the big screen was TV’s Hunter himself, Mr. Fred Dryer. He was asking all kinds of questions to a cute girl. It was all very strange, but in the good way. It looked like Fred had landed himself some sort of a cable series. After all, if we’ve learned one thing from cable, characters are welcome. The web address flashed at the end of the episode and I made for the internet, only to have my hopes crushed.
I don’t care how cheap your footlong is, I’m still not eating it
I have nothing against Subway; really I don’t. In this economy, I think it’s great that there is an outfit offering cheap food in large quantities. What I do have a problem with is those incredibly annoying commercials with the incredibly annoying “five dollar footlong” song. People or characters (in one spot it’s actually Godzilla) sing about five dollar footlong sandwiches while holding up five fingers and then indicating a foot in length with their hands. I don’t know if this is supposed to be catchy or endearing, or something else.
Clearly someone had an idea with these ads, and clearly I’m not understanding it, because the only thing I can think is how fracking annoying they are.
5-hour energy drink commercials piss me off!
It’s bad enough that my children are exposed to beer commercials if they happen to watch anything during prime time. Victoria’s Secret ads are mildly amusing with three teenage/pre-teen boys in the room. Everybody wants an iPod: we get it. But the commercials that are driving me the craziest this season are the ones for 5-hour Energy drink. I watched CSI re-runs on SPIKE television today while folding laundry and getting ready for a ten-day trip out of town. All day, I was subjected to those ads.
The worst is the one with race car driver Steven Wallace, son of race car legend Rusty Wallace. The commercial shows Steven dressed in his racing jumpsuit, and he is talking, in his good-ol’-boy, Sarah-Palin, regular-Joe-the-plumber accent about him and his buddies going fishing.
How does Apple pick such a catchy song for EVERY iPod commercial?
Like many people, I usually have a song stuck in my head. For some reason these songs, more often than not, come from television commercials. It probably has more than a little to do with the fact that I watch a lot of TV.
I swear, though, advertisers have some mad scientists writing these songs. I’m convinced there are subliminal messages in them to make sure they get burned into your memory cells. It’s evil, and sometimes I am afraid I’m going to get triggered and enter Machurian Candidate mode and try to kill someone. That’s probably just me, though, right?
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