I work in a call center, so I get particularly irritated when I see the commercial for American Express where the guy literally spends all day on the phone with one agent asking her questions about using his points for travel. If I were the one taking a call where I was on the phone from morning until evening I’d have finally hung up on the guy, gone out to the street and waited for the next bus to come by so I could run out in front of it. I certainly would not have the patience to stay on the line with one guy for nearly that long. Since it shows him talking to her before and after his work time we can assume he has spent at least ten hours talking to her. Most, if not all call centers hold their agents to certain standards such as maintaining an average handle time (average length of call), so her stats for that day would be shot to hell and then some. I can only imagine how postal she went on her colleagues after she finally got off the phone.
I know the commercial is ridiculously unrealistic as many of them are, but still…
Let me also add any commercial with Billy Mayes (Mays, who cares?) in it pitching some amazing product you can’t buy in stores talking at 110 dB at an octave that leaves one to question the presence of testosterone in his body. Hey Billy, switch to decaf!
The one that gets me is a Dairy Queen spot where this little girl (10? 11?) uses her feminine wiles to coerce a boy to buy her a sundae. At the end she looks at her mom and says “it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”
It just seems so, I don’t know, off, that a girl so young already knows how to manipulate boys and that it’s something she’s proud of. She’s going to have some poor fella pussy-whipped by the time she’s out of high school. Her mom must be so proud.
Speaking of gross–what about when Domino’s was selling those brownie things? And they had one in the ad, and it was basically a cube of…brownness, with arms and legs that got chocolate EVERYWEHRE? UGH!
Kia radio commericals: “COM-PARE TO KIA, COM-PARE TO KIA” sung in the tune of Hallaleuja. It grates on my nerves and bothers me even though I’m not religious.
It’s one of those baffling FDA rules. If you make a claim about what the drug does, then the ad has to list the possible side effects, usually in a hushed, high-speed voice. If you don’t say what the drug does, and just say “ask your doctor,” you don’t have to talk about side effects. That’s why you see TV ads that say, “HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead,” and the one with a guy hollering, “Zyrtec!” from a rocky crag. Neither one claims the drug does anything, so there’s no ‘splainin’ to do.
From what I hear, HeadOn works just as well against forehead pimples as it does against headaches. That is, not at all. It’s still a legal ad, because they don’t claim it does anything. Even in the second round of ads, where users say, “I hate your ads, but I love your product,” they never tell you it does anything. Absolutely honest, right? :rolleyes:
During the late 1980s, the City of El Paso was plagued by a mysterious figure who turned up from time to time on the local airwaves. “Crazy Rick” was a spokesman for an auto dealership, and his near-psychotic style of presentation led many a TV viewer to switch off their sets entirely during commercial breaks rather than face the trauma of witnessing another hysterical, shrieking tirade. Whether the man ever actually sold any cars (and, if so, how?) is a puzzle. What is certain, however, is that I wasn’t the only one who blew a fuse each time Crazy Rick came on the air. A few weeks after these orgies of obnoxiousness were removed from rotation it was revealed in the local press that the man had pulled up stakes and left town after receiving death threats.
I hate commercials that tell you to buy your loved one a brand new car for Christmas. It’s so insulting. How many people can afford something like that as a gift?
I wince from that commercial too, but I think it’s pretty obvious that after the “fish in a barrel” line the mother gets a shocked look on her face and is aghast that her daughter actually said that. (here’s the commercial - http://youtube.com/watch?v=xDiASRHDtiI)
I would hope that shortly “after” the commercial ends the daughter would get a talking to, but what with all the anti-disciplinarian helicopter parents these days, the mom probably folded like a lawnchair.
I don’t want you to write me a love song, Sara Bareilles, I want you to shut up and get the hell off my TV. That song just does not bear repeated listenings.
The other one in this series has mom accompanied by her young, sleeping daughter. Mom tells the Enterprise guy that her daughter ‘didn’t even wake up’ when Mom hit whatever she hit w/ the vehicle that’s now in the shop. HELLO!?! Do you NOT know the signs of concussion?? That’s all I think of when I see that commercial, Enterprise - a little girl slumbering off into a coma.
But why is it legal to advertise like that? Shouldn’t a doctor be deciding which drugs a person should take and not the patient who is being driven through advertising by a pharmaceutical company?
Everyone in my group of friends in high school (the theatre kids, a group containing exactly one Axe user- who was rather unpopular with the rest of us) knew what “bow chick a wow wow” meant. We used it to make fun of/humorously praise PDA, good-looking outfits, and unintentional sexual innuendo. High school for me was 2002-2006, when that ad was running, but at least most of us knew bow chick a wow wow from other sources.
Pedisure. Mom is grocery shopping while lil’ brat keeps saying “I don’t like…” I never hit my kid, but I want to slap that one! Or maybe the mom for allowing the behavior.
There’s an in-cinema advertisement at NZ’s Village/Skycity cinema chain that, despite only seeing it very infrequently (as I don’t get to the movies often), never fails to annoy.
It’s an ad for their “Gold Class” service: (“Gold Class Cinemas are luxury cinemas… separate specialised auditorium… cloakroom facilities, butlered refreshments, finger food and reclining seats”. – courtesy of Wiki).
The ad visuals show the various aspects of Gold Class (all well and good), while a husky female voiceover says something along the lines of: “Guys, is this a special occasion? A first date with someone? Well, it must be pretty casual, otherwise you’d be in Gold Class”. There’s a 2nd version that starts “Girls” and ends with the advice to turn to your date and ask: “Why aren’t we in Gold Class”. :mad:
Bear in mind that this is being shown to cinema audiences who have already paid $15 a freakin’ ticket to get into the normal cinema… so your cunning marketing plan is to make them feel bad about that and humiliate people into buying your luxury option?! Gahhhh.
