Have any local TV (or radio) ads which you can’t seem to get away from? Here in Jacksonville we have a couple of used car dealers-one (Keith Pierson Toyota) has been using his cute twin daughters to sell his cars for years now (they’re like 14 y/o now), while one which sells Kias is a more typical in-your-face-and-shouting-and-waving-until-you-buy-one-of-his-heaps type.
As for lawyers we have one guy (forthepeople.com) who is so bloody sanctimonious that I wouldn’t be surprised to see him break into spontaneous stigmata on camera one day. My buddy and I joke that it is more like “for the dollar.com.”
I haven’t lived in Chicago for nearly 30 years, but HUdson3-2700 is still burned in my brain.
Out here in Los Angeles, Cal Worthington is still kicking around, although he doesn’t do stunts or play with wild animals anymore. The weirdest thing he does now is call 2010 and 2011 models an “Oh-ten” or “Oh-eleven”.
The joy that is the National Tiles radio ad has been made into a dance remix, note that we don’t say ‘hello’ or ‘tiles’ like that here!
On local TV here in Melbourne we have Chris and Marie, http: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgvpgKYPhMc. He’s normally running around in a pink tutu, but for this version he goes completely starkers (nothing much shown, but probably NSFW?)
Seriously, the great majority of the local ads around here are incredibly laughable. Picture stone-faced Scandinavian types with Fargo accents saying things like “Our quality is our best asset” or chubby pale 20-something chicks smiling awkwardly while pretending to hand a beer to an old guy in a Stormy Kromer and a winter jacket 3 sizes too large.
And the jingles. Don’t even get me started on jingles. Apparently nobody in the area will buy a thing without an annoying jingle telling them to.
We also all grew up - for AGES - with “garfield 12323” which was a local jingle promoting…I don’t know what. When I first heard it, there was no more “garfield” exchange. I had never even heard of such a thing (it was the 80s, we were using number exchanges). But they still played the jingle, just like that.
There’s a commercial playing on local radio here (I think it’s for an RV dealer, but I’m not sure). The only reason it sticks in my mind at all is because they give directions to the store, which apparently is just off of “I-50”.
There is no Interstate 50. Not in Sacramento; not anywhere in the country. There is a US Highway 50, but nobody refers to it as “I-50”. Nobody. It’s “Highway 50”, or sometimes simply “50”, but *never *“I-50”. It shouldn’t bother me quite so much, but it does.
I guess I should just be happy they don’t say “the 50”…
I always got a kick out of the old Carvel ads featuring the voice of Tom Carvel himself… unfortunately it seems to be difficult to come up with examples of the ones I remember, in which the entire soundtrack was him hawking his latest creation, but he is heard at the end of this one.
A local jewelry store has been running radio ads for about 20 years espousing the quality of their jewry. Come check out our low prices on the best jewry in the valley! At Tom & Sons jewry, you’ll get the best deals!
My youngest daughter has her 30th Birthday coming up, I’m going to march in there and ask to see something in a brilliant cut .25 cw Hasidic stud (earring.)
So deeply irritating and overplayed, that decades later, the quickest way to get someone from Cumbernauld to punch you is to ask them “What’s it called?”
If you live in VT, upstate NY, and probably parts of NH, you’re familiar with Nina’s Jewelry Shop, who never sells diamonds at a profit of more than 33%, and her husband, Ray, who does the voiceover for all the ads.
What! I used to see those commercials on cable when I lived in Vancouver and I always thought that was Vern. I’m kind of disappointed.
In Vancouver we also had ‘The Captain’, who ran a secondhand store and produced incredibly low budget ads that always ended with him proclaiming “aye aye and goodbye!”. Sometimes you would see him tooling around town in a little hatchback with his catchphrase printed on the back window and a huge sail bolted onto the roof. It’s been years since I lived there but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he was still at it.
