If she is so competent, why is she with such a loser?
Four syllables – Vee Hix Dot Com.
If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, then you’re one of the lucky ones. I envy you.
Glad I learned thislesson at a young age:
Aflac and Geico.
One I’ve been seeing lately that I don’t like involves a woman who, in the course of walking from her bedroom downstairs to the front door, removes one elegant outfit after another from successively later eras of fashion. Because at the end, it’s revealed that the subject is bladder control garments. It’s a real WTF moment.
I mostly hate ad campaigns that simply will not die. Geico and Apple are the worst culprits. I absolutely despise those “I’m a Mac! I’m a PC!” commercials: the campaign is stupid in the first place, but it’s been going on for YEARS. ENOUGH already, Apple. Same with Geico’s “the money you could be saving” ads. Just…gaaaah. Shut UP. And stop playing that stupid song.
I also dislike that hefty trash bag commercial where the woman in it holds her trash out to her husband (or whoever), saying “it stinks.” She stands around for at least thirty seconds saying this. Lady, if it stinks so badly, WHY ARE YOU JUST STANDING THERE? In the time it took to bitch and moan about how much your garbage smells, you could’ve just taken it out and been done with it. Christ.
Oh! And I also hate any and all commercials for cleaning products that show the mother cleaning up after her family’s spills. Now, I’d understand if she was cleaning up after a young baby, but when the kid’s older, shouldn’t you be teaching them to clean up after themselves?
Related to the above, there are ads that feature women being encased in glass boxes and told to clean up the messes inside them. I find these incredibly creepy, and just a little bit sexist.
…Wow, I have a lot of anger towards commercials.
Can I throw in a print ad?
The Rosetta Stone Farm Boy/Supermodel ad.
And a great response to it, courtesy of The New Yorker:
Chase Manhattan has an this ad where a mother and two daughters are sitting in a mall. The two daughters have this conversation:
“I just texted Chad.”
“What did you say?”
“What’s up?”
“Get outta here!”
The mom’s phone goes off and it’s a text message. One daughter asks, “Is it from Chad?” “No it’s from Chase,” answers mom. To which the other daughter says, “I’m so over Chad.”
This commercial bothers me soooo much. It makes no sense on any level. Why would daughter number one think that texting Chad is so much of a big deal that she has to announce it? Why does daughter number two get so excited about a text that says What’s up? Why would mom be getting a text from Chad? Why does daughter number one get over Chad 2 seconds after she asked him what was up? What in the hell does ANY of this have to do with Chase friggin’ Manhattan Bank?
And don’t get me started on the one where the mom is slaving over dinner and her son tells her “I don’t know what pie-ella is but I’m not eating it!” and instead of cockpunching him when he arrives home, mom orders pizza.
My fiancee didn’t get it the first few times he saw it. He said to me, “why can’t they go on vacation?” I proceeded to explain that she used all the points to buy that damned dress, and he said, “Oh, I get it.” pause “Good thing you’d never do something dumb like that.”
The commercial that is really getting to me right now is the Mary J Blige one where she’s using all these different phones and her clothes are changing every two seconds. She’s walking all annoying and exaggerated and bopping her head all dumb, the song gets stuck in my head and I don’t even know the words to that overly processed almost-techno sounding voice and song she has going on. I can’t stand it.
The one that’s getting me lately is the “Teach your 1 year-old to read” system.
You can just see them going after the uneducated-sucker-born-every-minute-gulible types with this one.
A few random demonstrations with an adult showing an infant a card to which the infant responds by tugging on his trousers, the adult turns the card toward the camera to reveal the word “pants”. AMAZING!!
More one word flash cards given to another tike who blurts out the words after which the adult shows the camera the matching word. OMG!!!
How does it work?
They then show some thrown together graphics of a brain with big words and arrows that they must have pulled out of a 1975 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. OHHHH, IMPRESSIVE!! THAT’S REAL SCIENCEY STUFF RIGHT THERE!!
I absolutely abhor the Palm Pre commercials featuring the naked woman using hypnotic, confusing metaphors to discuss how great the device is. They manage to be irritating, creepy, pretentious, and smug all at the same time. Plus their production value is really strange - her voice is clearly a close-mic’ed, proximity effect voiceover that wasn’t recorded live, which gives it an even more unsettling vibe.
This one is the worst.
I hate the commercial for the box set of The Venture Bros. on DVD, because I always think, “Hey, The Venture Bros. is on!” So it fools me into not fast-forwarding through it.
I always want to slap the kid who throws away his rollover minutes, because “They’re old.” But not as badly as I want to slap the moron who coined the tagline “Have a happy period.”
I don’t think it’s stupid at all. If you don’t add the tag line, people who know that a) phone numbers have seven digits, and b) don’t know how to spell “mattress,” might be inclined to think the number is 1-800-MATRESS.
I’d wager that this very problem is what caused them to start adding that line in the first place.
Meanwhile the dress is a little too big for her and you just know that IRL she thought she was going to be the next Julia Roberts with her big teeth and all.
I’m guessing you’re too young to remember the Colgate dip-a-piece-of-chalk-into-blue-liquid-to-show-how-toothpaste-works commercials of the 1970s.
If only we all had teeth made of chalk, it might have been a reasonable analogy.
ETA: One relatively late example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRSSwGtSff0
For myself, I just want to stab the Restasis doctor (who, apparently, really is a doctor) in both her creepy eyes.
First time I saw that one, I asked my girlfriend, “Am I supposed to know who the hell that is?”
Amusingly, 1-800-MATTRES and 1-800-MATRESS both go to the same destination. Don’t know if it was always that way, or the company finally managed to buy the second number.
Did you notice she maybe blinks once in the whole commercial? :eek:
We had a patient come in to ask about that stuff, when that actress from Northern Exposure was promoting it. (Blanking on her name.) Either he didn’t watch the commercial that well or they were vague about it, but he didn’t realize it was an immunosuppressant, and the patient in question has AIDS. My boss told him that unfortunately, though he had very dry eyes, the medication was not a good idea for him.
That vocal effect might be flanging. I like the commercial because I think the clothes are pretty. I usually mute commercials with singing in them, especially Subway and freecreditreport.com.
from here
http://www-ece.eng.uab.edu/DCallaha/courses/DSP/Projects%202001/T4/sound.htm
Flanging
Flanging has a very characteristic sound that many people refer to as a "whooshing" sound, or a sound similar to the sound of a jet plane flying overhead. Flanging is generally considered a particular type of phasing (another popular effect). Flanging is created by mixing a signal with a slightly delayed copy of itself, where the length of the delay is constantly changing.