I just spent 4 hours on hold with cable this weekend so let’s not judge DTV too harshly. They had a neighborhood wide outage but, after hours on hold, they told me I needed a new modem. Long story short - all customer service sucks.
My mom has DTV and the 3-5 second pause when you change channels is a complete deal breaker for me. I can’t live like that.
All the Rob Lowe commercials are creepy. A little funny the first couple of times, after that, annoying. Basically cool guys have DTV, losers have cable. I get it.
And yet here you all are discussing them and DirectTV, so once again advertising proves that it works. Even if you don’t want to buy DirectTV and are turned off by it, you’re still talking about it which is half the battle in marketing.
For me the commercials miss the mark because the premise is that “regular” Rob Lowe is supposed to be the epitome of handsome, normal, suave, etc. However, I find real Rob Lowe to be kinda oily and smarmy, so it just doesn’t really work for me.
Nope, me too. But I was never going to switch to DirecTV no matter how funny the commercial, so it doesn’t matter. I’m not the target audience. I have things I don’t like about my cable, but it have nothing to do with the stations it offers, nor the quality of the picture, nor the service, and I have only one TV, so wireless multiple TVs don’t appeal to me. The only thing I don’t like about my cable company is the price, and DirecTV can’t help me there.
I have the same problem with Matthew McConaughey’s car commercials.
Can we put this one to bed forever? I have a theory that ad agencies are the ones that originated that chestnut to snow clients.
In general, advertising that alienates the target audience doesn’t “work”. It’s a waste of money. But it seems no one in the business wants to accept that.
We may talk about someone’s ads all day, we may make fan websites for Flo, we may worry that the Taster’s Choice couple won’t get together, but if we never buy the product it’s just wasted money.
Except that people do also usually buy the products. Some commercials are branding, getting people to know who you are and what you have to offer, and some are more “call to action” asking people to buy something. It’s all effective.
People complaining about an ad on the Internet, especially on an obscure message board like this one, are not highly representative of the general consumer public.
Super Creepy Rob Lowe is awesome, and it needs to be a TV show. I mean, I wouldn’t watch it, because it’d be godawful and probably written by the same guys who did that GEICO caveman abomination…but I’d be happy just to know that it was out there. Somebody ought to get on that.
ETA: “Mayhem” is also great, especially if you first knew him as Oz’s Ryan O’Reilly. It’s a natural extension of the character.
See, I think this whole thing is a play on that being an acknowledged farce, that they’re having fun with that. Rob Lowe’s roles are always that of a pompous cheeseball, which makes the purported dichotomy even sweeter. I’m not sure I would enjoy these if it was any other character in the role, I think his history and willingness to go along with it make him perfect. He’s a lot like Shatner and Stamos in that regard, although neither one of them would be as good here.
I like the fact that, by the time the “painfully awkward” Rob Lowe and “crazy hairy” Rob Lowe iterations were premiered, the ads had pretty much given up on direct comparisons between the services. CH Rob Lowe doesn’t even refer to problems with his cable service.
I remember the days, in the late 70s – early 80s, when cable service could be disrupted for hours at a time; a couple of times we lost our signal for close to a day. That never happens any more. Customer service is always (will always be) a pain, and equipment will always fail, but it goes both ways…
The only advantage to my current service that I can identify is that my company has never gotten into a dispute with content providers that rose to the level where someone was threatening to cut off our access to content. That seems to happen several times a year with one cable or satellite service or another, but it’s never happened to us.
