So I get easily annoyed with commercials, but I do occasionally crack a smile with the GEICO cavemen’s exploits. The gecko is irksome, but he does have the occasional one-liner of note. But the latest campaign makes no fucking sense.
The pile of money with googly eyes. Your money is watching you. Okay, got it. But your money is a stalker with bad intent. The song, “Somebody’s Watching Me,” is a worry about surveillance. You’d want to get the hell away from that money, not embrace it.
In essence, nothing about this commercial campaign makes any sense.
What other ad campaigns are as poorly conceived as this one? I’m not counting “random” ones, like Skittles or Quizno’s. I’m thinking about ones where the ad execs are slapping themselves on the back about how clever their ads are, while the consumer scratches his or her head and says, “WTF?”
There’s a commercial for cat litter that’s been running for a few years now where the gist is that the litter is so good at covering the smell that your cat won’t be able to find the litter box.
Which means, as any cat owner (the target demographic of the commercial) will tell you, that he’s going to eventually shit on the floor somewhere.
Ooh, good one. Axe seems to be selling “douchebag” in their ads. Surely they understand that only the most naive 13 year old boys buy into the miracle of their aromatic properties. Everybody else, of course, is laughing or gagging at you.
The Axe ads are genius, regardless of how irritating they are. On some level, they appeal to the caveman in all of us; even though we know the stuff smells terrible, we almost want to believe that it truly is some sort of “Spanish Fly.”
See, I actually think this campaign works. The King is a somewhat creepy, but benevolent force. Just eat his food and there won’t be any trouble. Now if the King had some random song as his theme (say, Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana”) it would approach the GEICO level of stupid.
I feel this way about any cross-promotion ads, such as when a cell phone is cross-promoted with a movie. There was a completely bizarre three-way movie/summer olympics/recording artist promo that was airing in movie theaters about a year ago that left me scratching my head. It ended with something to the effect of, “Go see The Terminator, buy the new Black-Eyed Peas on iTunes, and watch the Olympics.”
I nominate any food commercial where the food gets all over someone. I recall some Sloppy Joe commercial not too long ago where the jingle actually sang something about people “not minding wearing a little on their face”. Or the A-1 Steak sauce commercial where the guy had a drop on his cheek and the woman wiped it off with her finger and ate it. I’m fucking gagging, not thinking about buying your product. Ever!
