“Can you hear me? Good.”
Oh, fer cryin’ out loud, you only moved 10 frickin’ feet from when you last asked that stupid question…
How about the one for Swanson’s Hungry Man dinners? Two guys are in the middle of a raging storm working among severel other people on putting up a levee stacking up sandbags. The first guy asks his partner (shouting over the noise), “What did you have for supper?” His partner describes the contents of his Hungry Man dinner and then asks the first guy what he had. He answers, “a sliver of trout, a spritz of lemon and baby carrots!” As he says “carrots” he gets whisked away by the fierce storm up into the clouds. I mean, come on, the last thing any two guys should be talking about during a ravaging flood is what each of them had for dinner! :rolleyes: I realize that commercials often will use this device, having people act in ways they never would in real life while touting a particular product, but still…
There’s a paper towel commercial with the country singer Lee Ann Womack talking to a housewife/soccer mom in her kitchen about the towels. Womack is so wooden as she is obviously reading her lines from cue cards, that she sounds like one of the animatronic figures from the Hall of Presidents at Disneyworld. If that’s the line reading they decided to use, I’d like to see the ones they didn’t.
Those Gateway Country ads with Michael J. Fox and his wife that used to come on always seemed odd to me. Is his wife British, or was she affecting a British accent? If so, why? Also, one of the ads repeated a clip of Fox shaking his head after his wife was nagging him. The second time they showed it, in slow-motion for some reason, it made him look like he was twitching. I know he is living with Parkinson’s disease, so showing that clip that way seemed strange…maybe even tasteless.
Doesn’t matter whose commercials they are–I hate the ads where they have a brief ad, then immediately run another brief ad for the same product/company. Geico comes to mind.
vivalostwages: That car ad is one of my two pet-peeve ads right now. The other shows groups of people driving around at night, singing “One Week” from The Barenaked Ladies. That doesn’t make me want to buy a car; it makes me want to buy that CD.
Ditto, also, the ad for that female incontinence product. I hate that jingle. “Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go right now; gotta go, gotta go, gotta go …”
The thing that bugs me about the Hungry Man commercial is the implication that a REAL MAN[sup]TM[/sup] must eat a pound of food (or whatever amount it is that the Hungry Man dinner contains) in order to not blow away while doing Manly[sup]TM[/sup] physical labor. Apparently, Real Men Don’t Believe in Portion Control[sup]TM[/sup]*
*Over use of [sup]TM[/sup] due to the fact that I just learned the [ sup ] tag.
Where on earth have you been working?
I can’t imagine not being able to drink from an open container near my computer.
Where on earth have you been working?
I can’t imagine not being able to drink from an open container near my computer.
You and I must be from different planets. A pound of food seems like a ridiculously skimpy meal to me 
I find the new “where’s the cheese at?” pizza commercial incredibily annoying. Wherever the damned cheese is, it should be behind the preposition.
Those Sierra Mist commercials piss me off. The one with the dog and the airconditioner is pretty funny, but the others all suck.
Oxy and Clearysil commercials with cartoony mosters representing dirt and grime in pores…it’s just stupid.
The one I hate is on radio, its for McDonalds. Actually, I think its more than one, but they all star Mindy in the morning, who I guess is supposed to be some sort of made up radio host, but has the most annoying voice I’ve ever heard.
The one that drives me absolutely nuts is a voice messaging commercial from Qwest (Though, thankfully, I haven’t seen it recently).
The scene:
A couple is sitting in the kitchen. The woman asks her husband “Has your parents’ flight come in yet?” The man looks at the answering machine and confirms that there are no messages; then after discussing that it was supposed to have come in 45 minutes ago, they give each other meaningful looks then run upstairs to find their son browsing the internet (tying up the phone line). The scene then changes to an irritated older couple listening to a busy signal at the airport. A voiceover then tells you that this wouldn’t be happening with their wonderful voice messaging service.
AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!
I want to scream at the television. The service that they are promoting as a solution would have done NOTHING! Unless the voice messaging service could reach out of the computer screen and smack the kid on the head, he’s still still surfing and the old folks are still waiting at the airport, having left the voice message 45 minutes ago.
So I want to ask the advertising agency, with all the possible scenarios you could come up with to hawk your service, couldn’t the ratty, moth eaten, cliche ridden, gluon sized remnant of that thing you laughingly call your brain come up with one that your service would actually help?
(pant, pant)
OK. Rant over. Hey, I feel better now!
I’m not a father, but even so, the recent ads for some department store (JCPenney, I think) annoy the hell out of me. All of them involve a baby/toddler raising hell, throwing food around, screaming, etc. Dad sits there like an idiot, helpless do do anything about his child’s behavior. He just says, “Where’s your mother?”
(Why, she’s run off to the 18-hour Mega-Sale!)
This, of course, is humorous because everybody knows that without Mom around, Dad is helpless and completely incapable of dealing with a small child. Heck, Dad is pretty much a grown-up infant himself without Mom around. :rolleyes: This is the latest of many incarnations of this gender stereotype.
Three words: Jamie Lee Curtis
The most annoying commercial for me is for Glad Fresh Protect Bags.
This is the one with the Marine Sergeant, who is tough and mad about his rotten tomatoes. Glad lady goes up to him and says: “Sarge…”
And he CORRECTS her by saying: “That’s Sir.”
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO. There’s not a military NCO who would EVER correct someone and demand to be called “sir.” “Sir and Ma’am” is for civilians, or for commissioned officers…not NCOs.
If anything, if she called him “sir,” he should correct her and say “that’s Sergeant.” In fact, some senior NCOs I know would be UPSET at being called “sir.” They’re rightfully proud of their status as an NCO, and don’t want to be mixed up with officers.
It bugs me to no end.
The most annoying commercial for me is for Glad Fresh Protect Bags.
This is the one with the Marine Sergeant, who is tough and mad about his rotten tomatoes. Glad lady goes up to him and says: “Sarge…”
And he CORRECTS her by saying: “That’s Sir.”
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO. There’s not a military NCO who would EVER correct someone and demand to be called “sir.” “Sir and Ma’am” is for civilians, or for commissioned officers…not NCOs.
If anything, if she called him “sir,” he should correct her and say “that’s Sergeant.” In fact, some senior NCOs I know would be UPSET at being called “sir.” They’re rightfully proud of their status as an NCO, and don’t want to be mixed up with officers.
It bugs me to no end.
(hope this didn’t double or triple post, I kept getting “connection refused” errors)
My least favorite ad is on the radio, for Waypoint Bank I think. The typical announcer voice says all the great things Waypoint can do for you, and every so often this female voice cuts in saying “Closer than you think.” I guess it’s supposed to be comforting or something, but it just sounds damn creepy to me. “We’re closer than you think! BWAHAHAHAHA!” It sounds like the tagline for a stupid movie.
And, everyone also knows that no female can resist an 18-hour mega sale!!! :rolleyes:
What also bugs me are the commercials that show women simply overcome with joy because of the new mop, spray cleaner or detergent that is being hawked. AARRGGHH!!! No wonder it’s so hard to get the SO to do any housework…according to the TV it’s all supposed to be done by women. Every once in awhile you will see the man cleaning in a commercial, but always reluctantly, then they will say something like, “Gee, I had no idea cleaning toilets could be so much fun!”