This commercial doesn’t annoy me but it has the opposite effect of what I think they were going for. I think the lying, pimple-faced girl is much more engaging than the confident, clear-faced girl she becomes after using the anti-acne medication.
The Subaru (?) commercial in which the bratty, seat-kicking child so thoroughly distracts her parents that her father nearly runs into the back of a stopped car is aggravating on so many levels. Is this supposed to be considered “normal” or “cute” now?
This weird commercial for a Cheetos-flavored KFC sandwich almost seems like self-parody, with the description of the sandwich having “two logos in every bite”.
Linky?
oh BTW I got to try acqua Panna water (what there advertising in the boy follows girl to Tuscany via clues she left him on water bottles that was mentioned upthread) nestle gave me a couple of bottles as a sample the other day and well i guess it taste like water … if they were trying to make it special well… Tuscany failed …
So if you wanted to follow sort of cute girls to italy well its not gonna be for the water …
And Tuscany is a big place to follow a cute girl you never even spoke with. The chance of him finding her is infinitesimal.
Possibly the biggest swing and a miss in commercial history is the current State Farm “don’t mess with my discount” safe driver commercial. Basically, insurance companies have been itching to get these GPS dongles in your car that monitor your driving habits and reward you if you drive safely. But it’s obvious to just about everyone that this is the thin edge of the Big Brother wedge and the ultimate goal is to allow insurance companies to screw people over for minor infractions, because let’s face it, even the sweetest old lady who only drives to church on Sunday has occasionally exceeded the speed limit, and most people regularly drive the regulation speed limit +5 mph.
So, with this in mind, here’s a commercial with a woman with one of these monitoring systems in her car and the mantra “don’t mess with my discount”.
a. Late for a meeting. “Don’t mess with my discount”. Yeah, OK.
b. Kid (and parent) desperately have to pee. “Don’t mess with my discount.” Oooh, edgy. Let’s risk a bladder infection to save a few bucks. Not as OK. Granted, speeding isn’t a great alternative, but Mythbusters demonstrated that driving with a full bladder is essentially distracted driving.
c. Mom about to give birth. “Don’t mess with my discount!”. Literally, WTF?
So, thanks, State Farm, for illustrating graphically why one of those monitors is never going into any car I own. Because there’s absolutely no chance that they are going to be used only for good and not for evil.
The online savings account commercial, from a company I refuse to mention.
The first commercial featured a guy who has failed disastrously at everything he tries, including trying to solder a side car onto his motorcycle. The second is a horribly self-centered woman who failed economics in high school. These are people I should listen to?
Regards,
Shodan
While I don’t entirely disagree with you regarding the Big Brother aspects of these insurance monitoring programs, State Farm’s program specifically indicates that they do not compare your speed to posted speed limits in any given location. They do monitor speed, and consider going over 80 MPH to be “unsafe” in terms of getting a discount. The devices do monitor and report on acceleration, braking, cornering, time of day, miles driven and overall speed (but not comparing to speed limits).
Again, I wouldn’t sign up for one of these programs because I don’t trust insurance companies any more than I do the government, but it doesn’t have anything to do with posted speed limits. They say you get at least a five percent discount and can get more. My insurance company doesn’t use these devices, but it looks like they are expanding. According to the internet, they are now being used by State Farm, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, Safeco, Nationwide, Progressive, Root and Metromile. I’ve never even heard of those last two.
^^ Nice user-name/post match. 
Finagle, the first time I saw that “don’t mess with my discount” commercial, I thought it was trying to convey the message that it would suck to have a company monitor you like that.
Not as far as I can tell. And the implication of the commercial is absolutely that they’ll know if you’re speeding and that do so will have an effect on your discount. If State Farm promises that they won’t check, then that just increases the level of fail in the commercial.
I believe that self-parody is the only reasonable explanation. Twenty-somethings skateboarding and getting excited about Cheetos was the tip-off for me. 
At least that series is more subtle than the first round of “get the idiots to put monitoring devices on their vehicles” attempt, which was broadcast a few years back for an insurance company I don’t recall. Could have been State Farm, but I’m not sure.
That attempt centered on the human tendency to resent “free riders”—it dramatized all the unsafe drivers that drive up your premiums, in the form of people jumping onto the hood of the car of the “safe” driver. The pitch was that if you had the insurance company’s device installed, you’d get the premium you deserved, instead of having your premium increased by averaging in all the unsafe drivers.
It was a bad pitch. All the people jumping on the hood didn’t really evoke “free riders,” but instead some sort of post-apocalyptic zombie attack.
Also, the idea that you’d benefit from having the device installed was pretty dubious, as has been discussed in the last few posts. Of course the company is going to cite data from the device in denying claims of those hapless enough to have it on their vehicles!
The latestiphone ad with eyeball recognition just galls me.
The guy is not only too lazy to even sit up by himself (note the hydraulically powered chair) but he can’t even be bothered to actually move and touch the phone?
You know those science fiction dystopias, where everyone has got so sedentary that they become permanently attached to their chairs? THIS is how that started.
Progressive’s commercials are going downhill. Fast.
Bring back Flo!
[Woman in drugstore aisle] “Aleve is blah blah blah blah blah. So why am I still thinking about this?”
[Me] “I don’t know, bitch, but I sure wish you’d keep it to yourself. You’ve gone over it twelve times in the last hour.”
There’s a spot for Red Bull commemorating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. As “Armstrong” descends the ladder and utters his famous line, he begins floating above the surface as wings have sprouted from his backpack. He reports to Houston “We have a problem!” Houston responds, “Aw, Geez, you drank a Red Bull. Red Bull gives you wings. Just come back to Earth and we’ll shoot the whole thing in a studio.” I couldn’t help but think, the moon has no atmosphere. How are you going to fly if there’s no air to give you lift?
There’s an AARP commercial where a lady is telling the camera why she’s taking care of her mom (cuz she did the same for her), but the way the actress reads her lines is horrible. She speaks too fast and the whole thing sounds like bad slam poetry (aka…slam poetry)
The moon does have an extremely thin atmosphere, so thin that it’s treated as nonexistent.