Many commercials these days have the same recurrent character. There are two currently in rotation that I totally despise.
First up is the TriVaGo guy. Something about how he looks or carries himself or talks to the viewer… He just squicks me out, every time I see him. He’s obviously supposed to represent a world traveler type, who knows how to make YOUR TRIp/Vacation/GO better than ever, but I can’t get over the feeling he’s trying to get into my pants.
Wendy’s Red is the other one. When we first met her, she was stopping in at a convenience store to greet a recent acquaintance, a packaged salad she had apparently met the previous week. Then there followed a series of commercials where she mocked her “friends” for getting their fast food from someplace else “Look what I got for .99!" "You should have gone to Wendy's. Look at this photoshopped beauty that *I* got for .99!” Ha ha, got ya, you schmuck!
Though she seems to have mellowed lately, I still want to smack her in the face with a wet fish. I know a lot of the guys on the forums drool over her, but to me, she just puts the C in Red Hair.
Am I the only one who gets the wrong message from recurring characters in commercials? Who makes you shudder?
I agree about Red - I’ve never been a huge fan of Wendy’s anyway, but she certainly doesn’t make me want to go there.
The marionettes in the satellite TV ads (DirecTV??) are just stupid. So if they count as “characters” I’m definitely feeling the hate. That whole campaign is idiotic.
I can’t think of any other ad series at the moment - I guess I block most of them out of my memory.
One of the big sponsors of the Tour de France is Cadillac. They are running an add for the Escalade that starts with a couple of sexually androgenous historic characters that ride ostentatious and over blinged conveyances (a float carried by slaves and an elephant). Then it cuts to a couple pulling up in an Escalade through a gate to their mansion where a butler awaits to carry their bags. All the while, Bowie’s “Fame” plays as a soundtrack.
So what’s the message here, Cadillac? Escalade: for the ostentatious and sexually ambivalent!
Hate.
Ditto the creepy puppet campaign from Comcast/DirectTV/Whoever.
The Trivago guy mentioned in the OP is just one of a handful of ad spokesmen I’ve noticed lately who look like they were up all night drinking, overslept, and showed up late for the ad shoot without showering or shaving and wearing whatever clothes they slept in. That’s supposed to make me want to buy/use your product?
He looks like he’s got body odor. Is a smelly guy supposed to be sexy now? Same with the guys in real life who never take their baseball hats off. Their heads have to stink!
The Sonic guys I like but they are getting old. I really like those when they rotated in “Molly” but she’s been gone for a couple of years.
I hate the couples talking about the Gerber Life College Plan. Of course, I’m probably reading too much into it when the black couple says they’ve started and the woman says “How did YOU even know where to start”.
That smug green muppet in the Lending Tree commercials. Every time I see his ass (and that’s only at the workout place since I’ve dropped cable) I want to punt it out of a high-rise window.
In one version the husband is showing the father-in-law (Phil, Frank, Fred? We’ll go with Fred) to the guest room. Fred decides to start something with his son-in-law over the wires and throws his jacket off.
How does he toss his fracking jacket off with the wires connected to his arms and wrists?!? Really?!? There are effing wires in the way! Freaks me out every time.
Have you seen the latest Trivago ad, which consists entirely of out-takes of this guy messing up his lines? There’s a lot of bleeps in it–apparently he swears a lot when he makes mistakes.
Maybe this is intended to humanize him somehow, but he still comes across as a pretentious jackass even when he’s screwing up a relatively simple phrase like “a price that fits your budget.” I’ve got to admit, though, it does add credence to the “overslept and showed up late to the shoot” theory. He clearly didn’t bother to study his lines beforehand either.
As for Red, she started out WAY obnoxious. As a person who has a certain fondness for redheads, it was surprising to find how much I hated her. Her “personality” was so annoying I could never have gone out with her (were she real (and interested)). Others must also have noticed, because they’ve really toned her down lately.
Though I could never date a woman that runs into billboards!
The daydreaming Verizon XLTE guy who crafts a rope out of beef jerky to foil an armed robbery.
I don’t want to smack him for having a stupid daydream, but because he invites the entire sports bar over to watch the hockey game on his tablet when the bar loses its cable signal.
This woman. Apparently her name is Allyn Rachel, and she’s that woman who appears in more than a dozen commercials, sometimes several in a row for different products, usually as the sarcastic, incredulous observer of someone else acting strange. I can’t point to anything specific but something about her I just really hate.
I was a fan of the GEICO pig, Maxwell, until he started singing Boots & Pants. Now, I just want to shove an apple in his mouth and slow roast him over a barbecue pit.
While I had long thought that the Pillsbury Doughboy was an obsequious little moron, I throughly enjoyed him in the GEICO spot going through airport security.
His singing along with the mandolin riff makes that commercial.
