I’ve been in Los Angeles for the past couple of days, on a work trip. With the events of the past day or so regarding Christopher Dorner, outside of LA at Big Bear Lake, the local TV stations were pretty much covering the story full-time. This morning, I was watching one of the local stations (I think it was channel 7) at my hotel; they took a break from the coverage for some ads. The first ad which ran was for…Big Bear Lake Ski Area.
Have you seen other inappropriate (or unintentionally hilarious) ad placements?
Back in the late 90’s I was watching a show all about airplane “black boxes.” There were crash re-enactments and playback of recordings from crashed planes. Then a commercial came on…for an airline. Umm, no.
I never saw it myself, but I think I read somewhere that during 1978’s miniseries Holocaust, a scene depicting the crematoriums faded to commercial…and immediately cut to an ad for oven cleaner.
I think it’s more “annoying” then truly inappropriate, but I’d nominate any commercial on the digital network Antenna TV. You’ll be watching reruns of silly old shows like “The Monkees” or “Gidget” and then you break to medical malpractice ads (defective pelvic meshes and birth defects mostly), ads that try to scare old people into getting Life Alert, and cancer treatment centers. Totally kills the mood.
I heard that the show cut from a line about a German officer saying that a place “smelled like Jews” to an ad for air freshener. Read this in Time magazine, so it’s not a FOEF.
The recent Daily Show episodes railing against the gun lobby, filled with commercials for movies like Bullet to the Head and **A Good Day to Die Hard. ** I think there was even an episode a few weeks back where they had Bob Costas on and he made a crack about Bullet to the Head, a commercial for which had just aired during the previous break.
I remember watching a program a little while ago about the meteorite that landed around the Yucatan peninsula and may have killed the dinosaurs. Sure enough, a commercial break starts with an ad for Mexican tourism
This was on the internet instead of TV, but I saw a news story titled something like “Toddler killed in house fire”. The nearby advertisement for a hard drive or suchlike said “Burn, baby, burn”.
Years ago, I remember seeing a profile of Judy Garland on “60 Minutes” that dealt with her addiction to and death from barbiturates. This was immediately followed during the commercial break by an ad for Nytol.
Add to this Antenna’s recently been running those terrible hurt animal commercials too. Oh, and african kids with the deformed faces… come on, sure those kids need help, but I do NOT want to see that when I’m trying to eat dinner and watch some old timey TV.
One of the first ads I saw after the 9/11 attacks – my recollection that it was the very first is probably unreliable – was for resilient eyeglass frames. It showed a skyscraper ducking out of the way of an oncoming plane.
I remember reading on this MB about someone watching a program about the SA, when an ad bug came on in the corner of the screen for UPS: what can Brown [del]shirts[/del] do for you?
Not quite the topic, but I remember watching “The Day After” and at the climactic scene where you draw away from the city in ruins, the station ID flashed on the screen like it was a caption: “Albany, NY.”
Right before an episode of In Living Color, there was an ad for Colt 45, followed by a fake ad parodying that exact ad (down to the same pose and lighting.) Although that’s more of a “uncannily appropriate combination” than an inappropriate one.
Didn’t Ford pull the commercials for their newly redesigned aerodynamic Aerostar vans shortly after the Challenger shuttle exploded? If I recall correctly, it showed the van’s outline with a space shuttle in the background, showing how similar they are to each other. Can’t have that comparison in a commercial that runs while the news is focusing on the explosion.
Saw one the other night. I was watching music videos on OnDemand and came across Rooster by Alice In Chains (via Havoc OnDemand). It was sponsored by the Army. Huh???
Either someone wasn’t paying attention or has a sick sense of humor to pair those two. The video is full of horrors of war imagery from the vietnam era, some real footage, some reinacted.
The absolute kicker was a little goarmy.com bug popping up in the lower right as a ticker reads “There’s strong and there’s Army Strong”. What was the video showing at this exact point? An incredibly graphic scene where a soldier is getting his legs blown off by (what I think is) a land mine. At least it wasn’t real footage being shown there.
There was a recruiting ad after the video, featuring a soldier giving a testimonial about how the Army was right for him, but I doubt it’s going to be very effective…
[sub][sup]I’m not intending to be critical of the video, btw, just that there’s something incredibly off about mixing it with Army ads.[/sup][/sub]
During the SARS outbreak in 2003, there was the unfortunate Hong Kong: It Will Take Your Breath Away campaign for tourism. I don’t know that it fits the OP, but the ad could have appeared during a news report about the epidemic, so it’s possible.
The classic was a TV dramatization on the Nuremberg trials after the war. The sponsor was a gas stove company or Gas itself as a household fuel. Every time the judge or a witness mentioned the death camps and said “gas ovens”, the sound was cut and you could only read their lips. I can just imagine the meeting where that decision was made.
Not so much ‘inappropriately tasteless’ than just a big head-scratcher - every once in a while I happen to flip around the dial and occasionally when I see re-runs of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ on the Chiller network, I watch a little bit of it. I’ve noticed though that one of the most popular sponsors for the program is ChristianSingles.Com, a “match.com” type site for Christians.
While not overtly anti-Christian, ‘Buffy’ is a show that depicts numerous young, unmarried people having casual sex (in high school no less), depicts lesbianism and Wiccanism (witch-craft) in a positive light, has numerous supernatural (i.e. Satanic) characters, many of whom are depicted sympathetically. Isn’t all of this particularly anethema to Christian values? Why would ChristianSingles.com choose to advertise during such a heathen / secular program? FTM, why are they advertising on “Chiller” at all, given the subject matter of the network? (shlocky low-brow direct-to-DVD horror movie fare.)
I don’t know if these commercials actually made it to the air, but I remember that the week Princess Diana died, Weight Watchers were set to air ad spots featuring the former princess Fergie glibly saying 'Weight Watchers is easier than out-running the paparazzi!"
