Commercials with the opposite effect

Cafe Society
#1

Commercials try to get you to do something, usually buy a particular item. What commercials make you want to do the exact opposite?

  1. There’s an anti-drug ad campaign out there that essentially tells parents: “You smoked pot when you were in college. Now you don’t want to prohibit your kids from doing it, because you’ll feel like a hypocrite. Well, you are a hypocrite. But do it anyway, mmmmkay?” Someone please explain to me how this encourages parents to keep their kids off drugs.

  2. Next, a Carl’s Jr. ad depicting a live chicken. The voice-over tells the chicken to do a variety of tasks, but the chicken just stands there. Then, “There’s only one thing a chicken is good for: eating.” I do not need to be reminded that the food I’m eating was once a living being, thank you!

  3. Finally, I just saw an ad showing two vending machines, one for Coke and another for Diet Pepsi. Right off the bat, you know this is going to be about the rivalry between the two, and the commercial is going to convince you that one of them is better, just like the endless Miller vs. Budweiser ads. Anyway, a truck comes and takes the Coke machine away, replacing it with an ad for some variation on Coke (Coke with Splenda, I think). Then another truck comes and replaces that one with one that says “Coke zero” or something. At this point, I honestly didn’t know if the message was “Coke keeps changing, so there’s a huge variety for you to choose from. Anything you want, Coke’s got it! Meanwhile, Pepsi just stays the same. How boring.” or “Pepsi has a flavor that hasn’t changed in a long time, because we know you like it just the way it is. Coke, on the other hand, is constantly redefining itself because they haven’t yet found a taste that people actually like. Silly old Coke. Why not pick one good flavor and stick with it?” Plus, both companies have come out with a variety of different flavors, so they’re really not distinguishing themselves very well anyway. Just as an experiment, if you have seen the ad, use spoiler boxes, and if you haven’t, guess from my description (or perhaps other Dopers’ descriptions, if I left anything out or whatever) which beverage was being advertised.

#2

Yeah, it’s a terrible ad. It just BEGS parents to say “I smoked some pot back then and turned out fine… why is this an urgent thing again?”

I saw an ad for a new Oral B toothbrush that vibrates or something, and it was just awful. They showed images of all these things that had nothing at all to do with the toothbrush… I started narrating it just to figure out how these things fit together. They didn’t. It was like those ‘Llama song’ things on the net.

#3

Any television commercial which depicts fashion models and actors pretending to play musical instruments (you can tell they’re pretending by the way they don’t even hold the instrument correctly). The products being advertised go onto my “Do Not Buy” list.

#4

I almost forgot. At the movies, when they have those slides before the trailers start, there was a slide that said, “Everything you need to make crystal meth can be found at your local drugstore.” The point being that parents should watch over their kids and make sure they’re not making meth at home. But I was probably 16 or 17 when I saw it, and I thought, “Oh, really? It’s that easy. Hm, I wonder how you do it.” Not that I wanted to run home and make some, but suddenly I knew that I could.

#5

I’m not a big watcher of television, but I have one very like the Carl’s Jr. ad that I suspect may have been a commercial–and at any rate, may we include advertisements in general, O Great OP? :slight_smile:

Our local Chick-Fil-A has a little placard by each table with a picture of a cow on it saying something like, “Save a cow. Eat a chicken.” (Or maybe it’s “eat chicken nuggets”?) Ewwwww. I could see “Save a chicken. Eat a salad”, but the other? Blah.

There’s also “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” Um, trust me, I think I know the difference between having music blaring through my fifteen-dollar piece-of-shite drugstore headphones and listening to a live band. Jerks.

#6

Er, that was not very explanatory…the point being that after those advertisements, I want to eat neither a cow nor a chicken, and I realize that I’d far rather go and listen to a live band than CDs, no matter how miraculous and Memorex-y.

#7

I dunno, but maybe they should have gone the whole hog honesty-wise and said:“Two wrongs don’t make a right. Tell ‘em to have a puff. And anyway, it’s not like pot’s any worse than cigarettes. And if you pass up the opportunity for a puff, not only will you hurt your parents’ feelings and make them feel like boring old hippie hasbeens but you’ll be damaging the economy of British Columbia.”

#8

There’s another soda commercial, for Pepsi I believe. I do not want to drink a soda for jack-asses who play loud music at 3 o’clock in the morning while I’m trying to sleep. Also they seem to be saying how cool it is to jump out windows. Although if more of the those people did that the world would be a lot quieter.

#9

I’ve actually stopped eating at Carl’s Jr, as their disgusting commercials have so grossed me out over the years, but currently that horrid Boston Market “eat steak” commercial makes me reach for the remote.

#10

You didn’t notice that everyone kept buying Diet Pepsi and ignoring the Coke machines?

Well, Coke has made more attempts at diet soda than Pepsi: Tab, Diet Coke, Diet Coke w/Splenda, and now Coke Zero. Interesting that the commercial ignored Pepsi One, though.

#11

There’s a chain of payday loan stores whose commercials feature an annoying pair of caterpillars, sitting in a tree and telling elementary school jokes, always with the same background music. Since children don’t get paychecks, I can only assume they’re targeting mentally handicapped adults. I’ve never needed to get a payday loan, but if I do, it sure won’t be from them.

Wendy’s used that caterpillar music in one of their commercials, and it almost made me not want to go there either.

#12

There’s some advertisement that uses the text line “People do stupid things…” along with:

a) a clip ripped straight from America’s “Funniest” Home Videos, such as a little kid tossing a bat through a window.
b) that eardrum-wrenching “Hoo Hoo” song from Kill Bill*

People do do stupid things. One of them is making commercials that makes the viewer lunge for the remote to mute and change the channel, so as to completely avoid the rest of the commercial.

*Yes, I know that song is by the 5, 6, 7, 8s and that they have other songs. Please communicate that fact to ad agencies so that they’ll stop using it.

#13

The day Charmin toilet tissue started showing bears shitting in the woods and gushing over the lovely sensation of Charmin on their ursine sphincters was the day I switched brands.

#14

Hey, at least they weren’t showing the bathroom habits of some kind of Catholic Pope.

#15

I’ve never had any actual desire to buy Old Navy clothes, but if I ever do, seeing one of their commercials will surely do the trick.

#16

Pepsi also has this habit of being a step behind coke in the new product department. Coke w/lemon was out before pepsi lemon. Vanilla Coke came before Vanilla Pepsi. C2 came out before whatever the low carb pepsi was. Coke Lime came before Pepsi Lime. Diet Coke with splenda before Diet Pepsi with Splenda. You get the idea.

To be accurate, the commercial should’ve shown the pepsi machine constantly changing after the coke machine.

Every Pepsi commercial has had the opposite effect on me. The point of all of their campaigns seems to be that they are younger and cooler than coke. Mountain Dew is the worst offender as far as that goes because they are X-TREME!!! :rolleyes:

#17

I’ve never felt the urge to buy an SUV, and the ad showing the reality of an SUV sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic after flashing fantasy scenes of it doing SUV-y type things wouldn’t do anything to nudge me in that direction. On the contrary, the ad sort of points out the folly of owning one of these vehicles unless you live on the fringe of the rugged frontier. Funny thing is, I do live on the fringe of the rugged frontier, and I still don’t feel like I could ever utilize the full potential of your average SUV.

They may as well have shown a montage of a majestic lion in the wild, then cut to an image of the hollow shell of the animal pacing its cage in the zoo.

#18

If a commercial shows people eating like pigs - smacking, talking with their mouths full, making a mess, licking their fingers, getting sauce on their faces, etc. - that product will not get my money. Seriously, I keep a mental list. There’s a particularly revolting series of print ads from Hidden Valley Ranch that shows ostensibly “cute” kids with dressing dribbling out of their mouths. Infuriating.

#19

Um, I am pretty sure they are not advertising Memorex brand headphones. Instead, the catch phrase was meant to advertise the high quality of Memorex brand recordable cassette tapes. How do you remember this commercial after such a long time? Tapes are not something you see advertised very often nowadays. Btw, last nights Family Guy had a parody of the commercial this phrase came from. It was the part were Lois’s dad sat down in front of his stereo, which played music at an incredible volume.

#20

That is Rally’s in a nutshell for me. They had a commercial several years ago showing a guy eating a Rally’s hamburger with crap literally gushing out all over the guy and the floor. I haven’t been back to a Rally’s since.

Not that I wouldn’t use the product if I needed it, but that little foot fungus guy that lives underneath your toenails really creeps me out, too.