I had never heard of the drink Bai (or at least never noticed it before) until a Super Bowl ad last year. Afterwards I saw it in a store and decided to try it and now I drink it often.
When I was very young there was a Fritos commercial where a kid about my age wouldn’t eat his sandwich until his mom poured Fritos onto the plate. For a long time after I made my Mom give me Fritos with my sandwiches and to this day is is one of my favorite snack chips (along with Dipsy Doodles which are the same thing).
Once I was driving home from a camping trip in Michigan’s U.P. It was around lunchtime, I was tired from the road, starving, and just getting into St. Ignace (right before the bridge).
A Hardee’s commercial came on the radio, extolling the virtues of some new burger (mushroom & Swiss?). It sounded delicious, and lo and behold a Hardee’s happened to be right up ahead.
I never eat at Hardee’s. partly because there are none around where I live, but mostly because it’s Hardee’s. But this rare alignment of events seemed like destiny.
It was disappointing. Any belief in destiny that I had died on that day.
There is a company called Permaseal in the Chicago area that advertises all the time on the radio, with the necessary catchy jingle. They do building foundation repair. When I noticed very slght leaks in my basement at home, I called them because because I thought of them first. (They did a wonderful job, 10 or 12 years ago, no trouble thereafter and I’m glad I went with them.)
I recall falling for one of the McDonald’s McRib sandwich commercials. I had eaten one before but couldn’t quite remember, I thought I remembered liking it. It was awful, I’ll never forget again.
The KFC Georgia Gold didn’t really work on me so much as, I decided to try it since I was there anyway. Won’t do that again either.
I needed to replace some carpeting in a rental unit once. I needed it right away, no time to horse around. Recalling the phone number from the jingle, I called Empire.
And I fall for fast food commercials all the time. “Shamrock shake! I gotta get me one of those!”
I consider advertising’s best function is making the consumer aware of new things, so in that sense, yes, advertising works on me. But, I don’t buy the product because it was advertised, but I give it a try because I am now aware of it.
Whataburger runs a lot of ads during Diamondbacks games, and they had one for a patty melt. I’ve never had a patty melt in my life, but damn if it didn’t look good. I decided I wanted one. And by gum, someday I’ll actually make it there and try one (I sure wasn’t going to get up and leave home and miss half the game for a sandwich!). Still haven’t stopped in, but someday they’ll get their money’s worth out of me from that ad. Unless they stop making it…
OTOH, I’m never going to Jack in the Box. Not even if I get a a CRAVING!!!
I was once sitting on the couch with my wife when a commercial came on for Mounds candy flavored coffee creamer. I said “Welp, I’ll see you in about 15 minutes” and headed for the store.
This last Christmas I kept seeing a Facebook ad for some children’s book where you give them the name of your kid and the book is all about how they lost their name and find it one letter at a time by meeting various mythological things or animals (so Tim might meet a Troll, an Ibex and a Mermaid). Finally, I clicked it and was sold on a copy. It’s actually nicely put together all around; art, story and physical condition and my son likes it a lot. Funny thing was, I posted about it on Facebook like “Well, a Facebook ad finally got me” and three other friends reported having bought it with similar positive responses.
An amusing one, from back in the days when Altavista was the king of internet search engines: There was a piece of software that we used at the office, and I wondered about maybe getting a copy of it for myself, so I did a search for the name of the program. Altavista itself couldn’t find any hits… but the sponsored ad on the page was for exactly the product I was searching for.
(I didn’t end up buying it, because, like many pieces of professional software, it cost a few grand a copy. But the ad did get me to their page to look at buying it.)
I was about six years old. There was a commercial at the time for Dial soap that claimed if you used it, you would for the first time in your life feel really clean.
So we were visiting my aunt’s. And she had Dial! I immediately begged to take a bath with this great soap. (Also, my aunt had a pink bathtub, and a pink toilet. That was special, too.)
My mother was, to say the least, surprised, but she wasn’t going to turn down a chance to get her dirty girl into a tub. So into the tub I went, along with Dial! soap!
And…it was just soap. I was bitterly disappointed. Clean, but, you know, not really clean, for the first time in my life.
When cigarette advertising was still on TV, Marlboro ads showed the smokers going to “Marlboro country”, which was seen to be this awesome place out west in the Rockies with open sky and beautiful scenery. Well, since my mom smoked Marlboros, I thought if I stood next to her when she lit up, that I, too, could travel to this wondrous land. It was probably like using a ST transporter, I figured. I wasn’t sure how we got back, but I knew we would.
Hey, I was 6.
In first grade, I used to “smoke” candy cigarettes, and affected the classic posture. Don’t know where I got that. I probably subconsciously wanted to be James Dean, and I’d never even seen one of his films.
But I never took up smoking. So much for the power of advertising, and getting them while they are young. But, it almost worked!
GetGo, a local gas station/convenience store chain with food counters, was advertising these Thanksgiving-themed sandwiches. They were made with stuffing-flavored bread, turkey, cheese, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. I decided that sounded like an awesome combo on a sandwich and I NEEDED to try one. So I went to my closest GetGo but they were OUT of the parts for the sandwich! Boo! The next closest one was like a 20 minute drive. So I went there, kind of late at night and in the rain. And got my sandwich. Brought it home and it was only so-so. There was just too much of it and I don’t actually like Thanksgiving dinner that much.
I still see ads for it every year (and now Subway is making a very similar sandwich) and still try one every year and still am disappointed every year. But I am swayed.
When Apple first released its Powerbooks (1990-ish), one of the ads was a poster of some attractive young lady using her laptop on top of some cliff – probably in Yosemite or some place like that. If you’d been programming for years in small cubicles, the idea of taking your computer outside and actually being useful was just enormously appealing. Now that we all have tiny computers with us everywhere, it’s hard to believe just how freeing it was to just be able to go outside under a tree and do some writing. I did buy a Powerbook 100 (probably mostly because it was discontinued quickly and was relatively cheap) and I still regard it as one of the best little laptops ever.
Weirdly, I can’t find a reproduction of the poster on-line – possibly because this was several years before scanners and digital photography became available.
The one that sticks in my mind is the Dairy Queen ad with the river of chocolate flowing through a landscape of sweet things. I can’t count how many times that ad got me to grab my purse and keys and make a trip to my nearby Dairy Queen.
Was I satisfied? Hey, it was Dairy Queen, what’s not to like?
