Okay, I don’t see an active thread (one posted to in a while), so I’m starting a new thread on bad commercials.
Take the new commercials for some car talking about how “and” is better than “or”, and then take a common “and” phrase and “or” it, with a visual example.
First up: Bed and Breakfast, better than Bed or Breakfast. Shows couple coming down from staying in bed upstairs, seeing people sleeping in chairs with their faces in their food. Um, okay. I guess they’re using the breakfast as an alternative to bed? Because I’m pretty sure there are plenty of places that offer either a bed or a breakfast. One is a hotel, the other is restaurant. They don’t have to do both to be successful.
Second up: Police and Protect and Serve, better than Protect *or *Serve. Shows theives robbing a house, cops burst in with guns drawn, start talking about menu items and specials of the day, and sea bass. WTF? I’m pretty certain that cops don’t go around serving food as part of their standard “Protect and Serve”, it’s a different kind of serve, so why would they suddenly start serving food if they made it or? And why did the cops burst into the home with the robbers with their guns drawn if they weren’t protecting?
Mine is one for, I think DirecTV. An old guy is sitting on the porch watching a baseball game on a tablet. Then the weather cycles through all four seasons in the space of a few seconds before returning to normal. Then a younger guy comes out and says “That sure was a weird 15 seconds of weather”
Maybe I’m trying too hard, but I can make no sense of this commercial. Can anyone explain it to me?
It’s a metafictional joke: usually when you see a sequence like that, it signifies that a year has passed (note that it goes from summer, to fall, to winter, to spring). The guy coming back plays on audiences expectations and the conventions of film and movie.
Those Old Spice commercials where a guy is in the shower at the gym then get’s a basketball thrown at him. Then he cuts the basketball in half with a knife and it’s a watermelon inside. Then he sticks his hand in the watermelon and pulls out a bar of soap. All the while the narrator is singing this is a commercial for soap, nope it’s a commercial for fruit, it’s a commercial for soap after all. There’s another when the guy is shown getting rained on in the shower, getting dressed, in the office, and on a date. Oh and I saw the commercials for the first time so naturally I didn’t even realize they were real. :smack:
These haven’t been on for a while, but: the Bing commercials (before the current “Challenge” theme) were nonsensical. The protagonist would ask a question of a friend or family member, and the friend or family member would go into robotic mode and spout monotonic verbiage, taking off from some word or phrase in the protagonist’s question.
Clearly they were going for “the established search engines don’t give you the information you want, so try us.” But that didn’t come across. What came across was more like “when you think of Bing, think of family and friends suffering some ghastly calamity—brain damage or alien takeover, perhaps–such that they stop responding to you and go into a fugue state.”
For me this ad falls into the category of "telling you the awful things about the competition, which is only convincing to people who have no experience with the competition. In other words, in my experience Google is generally fairly good ad giving me what I’m looking for, and not making me wade through a bunch of shit I’m not.
Christ I’m sick of those old spice commercials. The whole series of ads is the very definition in nonsense. They are 30 seconds of the most bizarre, random gibberish, each more pointless than the last. As if the entire ad department was at the whim of a raving madman, his idiotic will bent on sharing his terrifying hallucinations with the rest of humanity. There isn’t even an attempt at trying to sell the damn product. No grossly veiled message of “Buy our soap so you don’t smell of rancid skunk ape!” Nothing. Just gibbering insanity with a can of old spice somewhere in the shot.
The American express ad on HULU drives me crazy… this crazy looking hipster chick is talking about being into vinyl and then BITES INTO THE RECORD? Who the hell does that at a record store. I love vinyl… and it makes no sense to me. she bites into a blue album disc…
I’m not a big fan of the “Challenge” ones either. Mainly because the host says something like “Ok, let’s search for ‘coffee’ and you tell me which one is better…”
“Coffee”? I’ve never searched for “coffee” in my life. I suppose something like “Catholic population in Germany 1939” or “Tick brown white stripes Illinois” doesn’t lend itself as well to pretty image results but it’s more likely to be something I’d search for.
All of the featured characters in the spot are played by the same person, Carrie Brownstein. (She introduces herself near the end.) She was formerly a guitarist/singer for the band Sleater-Kinney, and now costars in the show “Portlandia,” plus she used to cohost on the NPR radio show “All Songs Considered.”
I assumed the characters in the commercial were related to “Portlandia” (which I haven’t seen, but which apparently tends to mock those types), or were otherwise intended to be a quirky, attention-grabbing way of expressing that this card is suitable for lots of different people’s needs.
Yeah, a character who solemnly explains to you that the best way to judge the value of a record is to bite it would totally fit in in the world of Portlandia. I mean, these are the people who brought us “Put a bird on it!”
What amazes me is that they’ve apparently successfully revived the Old Spice brand. I graduated from college 25 years ago and as long as I remember, Old Spice was the brand of aftershave your father or your grandfather used. It was really, really uncool.
As usual, I have to point out that there’s no reason for a commercial to make sense. The point of any commercial is to make you remember the product. The fact that this thread exists, and people know exactly which these “nonsensical” commercials are advertising, shows that they are working admirable effectiveness.
I was going to post about that car commercial with Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me to Moon” because if you listen to the lyrics of the song it doesn’t even come close to making sense. I guess that’s the song’s fault and not the commercial’s, but it still annoys me.
