theres a commercial I’ve seen dfor castrol motor oil with a scottish man running around hitting people with a dipstick yelling"thats thinking with your dipstick, Jimmy!’. I don’t get it. Is it just a silly kind of commercial or does it have a background of some kind?
I dislike the “just for men” commercial where the guy basically dyes his hair so he can get a good job in order to put his son in college. Its the message it sends out, basically. If you don’t look like this we won’t employ you kinda thing.
But then I also chuckled coldly at Hyundai’s “we have your back if you buy a car from us and lose your job in the current economic crisis” commercials. Maybe I’m just twisted.
The ones that I truly dislike are the VW commercial with Brooke Shields and the Geico money saved.
The first is insulting to most of the targeted market’s intelligence. Yeesh! You’d think that in this economy they’d want to blow a little smoke up their potential customer’s back sides.
The second is dumb on a creepy level and not nearly as clever or entertaining as the ones with the gecko.
I haven’t seen one in recent memory that I just didn’t get, though.
Time Warner cable has been running ads talking about how they’re better than satellite TV because “they don’t charge extra” for HD. I’m in the process of switching from TWC to DirecTV, and I did notice that if I get a HD receiver DirecTV charges me an extra ten dollars a month. My TWC receiver does include HD channels, but I can’t watch them unless I upgrade my service, which would cost me - guess what!! - ten dollars a month. So how is this “not charging extra” for HD?
“They say a man should always dress for the job he wants,
So why’m I dressed up like a pirate in this restaurant?
It’s all because some hacker stole my identity,
Now I’m in here every evening serving chowder and iced tea
Shoulda gone to freecreditreport.com
I coulda seen this coming at me like an atom bomb”
etc.
Sooo many things wrong with this commercial. Let’s start from the beginning:
Nothing’s stopping you from dressing for the job you want, unless the hacker also stole all your good work clothes and replaced them with pirate outfits.
I find it interesting though rather implausible that having your identity stolen also causes you to lose your current job and keeps you from being employed anywhere but in a pirate themed restaurant. How convenient, considering that all your clothes have just been replaced with pirate outfits!
Freecreditreport.com does not prevent identity theft, it only notifies you that there have been changes in your credit report; so even if you’d gone there, you still would have had all your clothes replaced with pirate outfits and lost your job anyway. You just would have known it was going to happen.
Apparently, you already knew #3, because you sing a line about it! So you’re knowingly promoting a useless service.
Freecreditreport.com is not free! It charges you $12.95 a month for a service that emails you if there’s a change in your credit report. The government already guarantees you a free credit report once a year, so the only unique thing you get from the service is the monitoring. So the name of the company is misleading - it should be 1295monthlycreditreportmonitoring.com 'cause that’s what they’re really selling. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue I guess.
I was able to type the lyrics above from memory, because that commercial is on all the fucking time arrrgh froth twitch twitch
I am really feeling this Hillshire commercial, lately. The look he gives after saying, “She’ll have brown sugar baked ham” makes me laugh so hard. I actually hate to admit it, but I like commercials. I also like to believe they don’t really work on me. I am probably just kidding myself about that, though.
Nzinga, that’s exactly the commercial I came to mention! It shouldn’t work at all, but it totally does. I think I actually like it more each time I see it. My favorite part is the guy saying, “Then slice it up! It’s money!” I’ve seen it dozens of times, but it never fails to crack me up.
I also really like the T-Mobile Blackberry Pearl “butt-dialing” commercial. I mean, the premise collapses if you think about it for more than 2 seconds (keypad lock?), but I really like the actors in it. I think the actress’s mannerisms in particular are spot on.
As far as commercials I hate? The Charmin ads are the only ones that have convinced me to not buy the product sold. An oldie but a baddie.
I agree that the Brooke Shields ad for VW is both confusing and horrifying.
There’s a current Alltel ad that features a garbage truck driver holding a van full of “other cell phone company representatives” up in the air with his truck’s forklift, threatening to drop the van for some reason. I think this is incredibly over-the-top violent for a commercial.
I also think I am applying Pit Rules to my everyday life - everything is cool until you wish death on someone else. I think that’s why the commercial freaks me out
I love this commercial. My favorite part is the 'Bang bang, choo choo train, eat lunch meat on the aeroplane" part. Every time I see that commercial I think that maybe the funny has worn off, but when it gets to the end I crack up all over again.
On the other hand I absolutely hate those damn Charmin bears - I hated them already but the newer ‘butt-lint’ ads bring a whole new (and disgusting) level to the campaign. Also, is butt-lint an actual problem that real people have?
A woman is talking on the phone with a friend about her diet, revealing that she’s been eating Boston cream pie, apple turnovers, key lime pie, etc. Her husband overhears and begins rifling through the refrigerator searching for this stuff. Turns out they’re just yogurt flavors.
I always interpreted this as the asshole husband being worried that his wife is (gasp!) off her diet, and he’s looking for the evidence to confront her with, and it bugged me. I mentioned this to my wife and she said, no, he’s looking for the food so he can eat it himself, because all his wife ever buys is yogurt. So I guess he’s either a jerk or he’s too stupid to buy his own food. But which is it?
(Not to mention the fact that the woman is already stick-skinny but talks about having to lose weight anyway…)
I also interpreted it as his trying to get his hands on that delicious food, himself.
Of course he’s too stupid to buy his own food. He’s a husband on a television commercial. He also can’t wipe up spilled food by himself, spend five minutes taking care of his own kids, or do a load of laundry.
I wish I could forget ever seeing the Axe body spray commercials with the “chocolate man”, especially the scene where the woman takes a bite out of his ass. God, how I wish somebody would invent brain bleach!
And Enzyte Bob (or whatever it’s called). I don’t know if this one is still in regular rotation, but it annoys me immensely.
OK, I may be especially dense but I do not get the point of the AT&T ad where one guy is showing his friend (roommate?) all the features of his AT&T DVR and how it records so many programs and he can access it from his phone, etc. Instead of being impressed, the other guy’s response is “Waaaah! You like AT&T better than me!” in a really annoying, crybaby wail.
Am I expected to want to switch to this cable system now?
There’s a commercial where a kid spills his drink and instead of rushing to clean it up, he and his dad have a conversation first as they watch the liquid drain towards the beige carpet:
Son: “I think it’s a three towel spill.”
Dad: “That’s a four towel spill”.
Mom: “We use Bounty, the quicker picker upper so it’s just a one towel spill”.
She looks so smug and self-satisfied as she wipes up the spill that amazingly didn’t stain the carpet. She’s so damn proud of her ninja-spill-wiping-skill.
Those eyeballs atop those dollar bills are just strange/stupid. (I do like the way the Asian man yells “Geico” the second time.) Is the woman supposed to be flirting with the eyeballs atop those dollar bills?
I kind of like the Brooke Shields VW ads.
I think the gist of the ad is customer sees a VW mini-van and thinks “That’s cool, I gotta have one.”
But society is saying to them “You can’t have a mini-van! Mini-vans are for people with kids.”
And the customer in turn is so desperate to have the mini-van that they will have children just to get one.
And Brooke Shields is there to report on this shocking behavior.
Grrr. I hate those ads not only for all the reasons you do, but also because the guy in the commercials who sings them doesn’t actually sing them. He just lip-synchs, and he doesn’t even speak English in real life! (he’s either French or French Canadian, I can’t remember which) They’re recorded by someone else.
