Apparently ads deliberately targeting the stupid is a thing, to get best returns on advertising budget.
I’m reminded of a “Judge Dredd” story “Stupid Pills”: A huckster gets around Mega City One’s strict fraud laws by airing commercials that only the most droolingly idiotic people could possibly fall for; which in Mega City One is a substantial customer base.
No! My sister told me it was that Austin James kid. Now I’ll never trust her again. 
Actually they look alike to me…scrawny little guys with scraggly hair.
Googling, there appears to be more than one person named Austin James. One is an actor who might charitably be said to look a bit like the star of the Elvis movie. The other (the guy in the diabetes commercial) looks different.
No doubt it goes way back, but so does patriarchy and misogyny in many forms and manifestations.
Is that like the scam emails that have misspellings, weird grammar, etc.?
Not just ads. Phone phishers put little errors in their rap that a non-idiot will spot and hang up on them. They make the errors fairly early on so that they get cut off quickly enough that less time is wasted on a bad mark. Sometimes a sharp mark will fuck with them and even manage to burn them, but most people who spot the scam just want to get away.
I just noticed in the ad they had “testimonials” from people with “actual customer, not paid” and it occurred to me, is there any regulation on ad content? If you put up a blatant lie of that sort (not that I am actually claiming that they are lying), is there any mechanism by which the company might suffer for it, other than the “invisible hand”?
FWIW, in German the genital regions of both men and women are called “Schambereich” (shame region). There’s even a pelvis bone called “Schambein”.
"The disinclination to treat women’s bodily functions [in a reasonable manner]
goes way back."
It took me a minute.
Specifically: Danny DeVito in the Jersey Mike’s commercials. I like him, but I really hate those commercials. I can’t even say why. They’re kinda’ creepy.
In general: Any commercial that shows close-ups of people cramming food in their mouths. Ugh! Right now Taco Bell is doing a lot of this, but there are other offenders. Gross.
Something about food-out-of-place completely disgusts me. I hate the commercial where the person dips the melty cheese thing in the marinara and pushes it out of the cup. On purpose! 
There was one a few years ago that showed a very attractive spokesmodel absolutely ecstatically cramming a juicy dripping monster-sized hamburger in her face. I think it was Burger King, but I can’t now say for sure. Definitely one of the big national burger chains.
Anyhow it was utterly fascinating to watch. The combination of her over-the-top acting and the sheer incongruity of a slender spokes-babe and a ginormous hamburger was … eye-catching. My wife hated it.
Are you referring to Paris Hilton and (IIRC) Hardees?
You’re right it was/is Hardee’s / Carl’s Junior. But they did not use Paris Hilton as their only sexy eater. And to me, she’s not sexy at all. So that wasn’t the specific ad I was thinking of
Here’s a compendium of those ads. I can’t say it’s all such ads, but it’s quite a collection. As you can see from the teaser still, that’s not Paris Hilton.
This one is also rather eye-catching & no Hiltons in sight.
Here’s the Paris Hilton ad (one of the first of that campaign, IIRC), from way back in 2005.
How do you know when the show’s back on if you don’t watch for it? At least if you leave the sound on you can do something else for a couple of minutes and be able to hear when the show comes on. If you mute the sound you have to keep watching the screen.
Questionable TP advertising isn’t new. I’m in a vintage ads group on Facebook, and somebody once shared a print ad featuring a middle school aged girl who fidgets at her desk. Why? Because the cheap toilet paper her family uses doesn’t get her – ah – hindquarters clean – er – through and through. And ergo she suffers from itchy butt syndrome.
I don’t watch shows that are interrupted by commercials.
I don’t watch shows in real time. They’re all recorded on a DVR or cloud-based equivalent and have been for ballpark the last 15+ years. The instant a commercial appears I tap the “skip ahead 30 seconds” button on the remote and repeat that as needed until the show returns.
Or, as @Pleonast said just above, don’t watch shows that even have commercials. Which means get them off streaming or DVDs or whatever.
Regardless of what I’m watching via whatever means the “pause” button works whenever I need a break for whatever reason.
Being forced to sit through a TV commercial is literally something from the previous century.
I have a Comcast/Xfinity cable box and for the major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and maybe Fox), there is a system where the recording is marked with the beginnings and ends of commercial breaks, so in theory, I can just press fast forward (at speeds of 1x, 2x, 3x or 4x) and stop paying attention, knowing that the recording will start playing again at the end of the commercial break. So for those few moments I can do something else. It’s a nice thing but given that Comcast owns the NBC broadcast network, it’s weird that they offer this.
I ran programs to develop cable set tops and streaming services (including for Comcast) and we had to implement systems to disable FFWD on certain content, so it is surprising to hear that change.
That said, I also was eventually asked to integrate Netflix connectivity through the STB, though it was initially considered direct competition.