I wasn’t sure how to title this, but I mean commercials that don’t work for some of the area that they are aired in. I just saw a commercial for something (unbundling channels, or something cell phone related or something, I didn’t really notice) where the first line was “If you only want one slice of pizza, you don’t buy the whole pie.” Well, yes, you do. I realize that there are parts of the country were pizza is regularly sold by the slice, but this isn’t one of them–if you want a slice of pizza, almost everywhere here you have to buy the whole damn thing. And nobody here calls it a “pie.”
So, other commercials that don’t fit/get the market they are being aired in?
It’s not really what you’re looking for, but we get lots of commercials that air nationally about store and food chains that we don’t have anywhere near us.
There’s only one Long John Silvers in Massachusetts, for instance* (although there’s another in Salem, NH). I’ve never seen either one.
- It’s in west Roxbury
Commercial for stores that don’t exist in your area are fair game. (In a somewhat related area, yesterday I saw a “Christmas holidays sale” theme commercial still being aired.)
For many years, Sonic Drive-In was a classic example of this. They’re now apparently in 46 states, but ten or fifteen years ago, they were a regional chain, mostly in the south and west. Despite this, they ran national advertising (largely on cable channels) – part of the reason for this was that it was actually cheaper for them to do a national cable buy than it was to buy ads market-by-market in the areas where they were operating.
But, part of this also was to build brand awareness (and interest) to support their expansion plans. Thanks to years of advertising, when they opened up new restaurants in new markets, they already had lots of potential customers who had heard of them, and were eager to give them a try.
For years we were subjected to Sonic commercials without the reality. There’s now a Sonic up Route 1 from us. I’ve tried it, and I’m unimpressed.
I’m still waiting to be unimpressed by In ‘n’ Out Burger and Carl’s, Jr.
I see commercials for restaurants that are like 100 miles away. As if going to drive to another state to go to Applebee’s. :rolleyes:
At the same time, we get commercials for local businesses, such as a car dealer I could walk to, if it weren’t out on the state highway.
Cal Worthington was primarily a Pacific Coast phenomenon, though he did own dealerships in Phoenix and Houston. I live in southern New Mexico. Nonetheless, “It’s Cal Worthington, and his dog Spot!” was a part of my childhood television experience.
I know local stations broadcast to a large area, but I couldn’t help scratching my head about an ad for a restaurant that had to be at least a two hour drive for anyone listening.
:shrug: We don’t get delivery of anything. Even mail.
We used to get commercials here in central Florida for Red Robin for like a year before they finally built one in Daytona (I think there are a few in Orlando now, too). It probably was to build brand awareness before expanding into the area.
This is not about a commercial, but I think it is sorta kinda tangentially related:
In the 1970s, Sesame Street would have sketches which tried to teach Spanish words and phrases. They never pronounced things the way that my neighbors did. I don’t know if it is the difference between a northern Mexican accent and a Puerto Rican accent, or if they just hired gringo actors to read the lines, but they always sounded wrong to me.
Carl’s Jr is Hardee’s.
Then there are the ones that actually are for a business in your area, but loudly proclaim, “NOW OPEN in East Bumfugger!”
Am I supposed to drive over to East Bumfugger to see that store has the candy bars on the left side of the checkout aisle and the tabloid magazines on the right side?
That fits right into the theme for me–kids learning some Spanish in certain parts of the country may have been a practical skill in the 1970s, but in my area they might as well have been teaching Swahili because there was nobody to use it on.
Up until New Years I was still seeing specifically Christmas themed commercials from major ad companies, and I was still seeing generic “holiday” commercials until mid-January. Wonder if it’s one of those things where they just bought up a whole month/month and a half and never bothered to give them replacement ads for after the holidays.
What is more likely happening there is that the networks on which they bought time didn’t deliver as many placements (or as many viewers) as contracted, and the networks were running “make-good” placements after Christmas.
Another tangentially related observation - when I was growing up, the cinema in town would run very local ads for local businesses. I presume that in order to advertise like this you had to contact a specialist company, send them a script and some photos of your business for captioning, and they would produce the add for you (this was quite some time ago, you understand). And I guess these local ads were very widespread, so the company was knocking them out by the thousand.
Thing is, I grew up in the remote north of England, where the accent is strong and obscure; and from the sound of them, these ads must have been made somewhere in the south. The result was that (a) the voiceover sounded absurdly plummy for a local business; and (b) they could never pronounce the place names correctly. For example, there was one for a car dealership a couple of miles down the road in Distington. If you’ve never heard of it, you pronounce that Dist-ing-ton; in fact it’s Diss-ing-tun.The ad sounded so wrong that even now, many (many) years later, it still jars.
j
I actually want to challenge this premise, because national pizza chains are nearly everywhere, and in order to stay relevant during lunch hours where people don’t want to consume whole pizzas, will sell slices. Little Caesars does, Jet’s does, Hungry Howie’s does, and probably others do as well.
I wonder if that’s changed in the past decade or so. I’ve never seen individual to-go slices available at a non-food-court nationwide chain pizza place. I’ve only been in one of them a handful of times in the past decade, though, which is why I’m wondering.
Same company, maybe, but I’ve never seen a “Carl’s Jr.” by that name anywhere near where I live.
It’s like saying that Best Foods is Hellman’s. Maybe. But I’ve never seen a Best Foods Mayonnaise here on the East Coast.