I saw one for a touchless soap dispenser. You see if you have one of those old, pump-type dispensers, nasty, evil, germy things live on the handle and will get on your hand if you touch it. So with this new one, you just hold your hand in front of it and it detects it almost by magic.
Why is this stupid? Because if germs do live on the soap pump handle, and you do have to touch it, the absolute very next thing you’re going to do is wash your hands! With soap, and everything. I can understand not wanting to get your hands all germified after you’ve washed them. But this is before. Immediately before. If any germs do get on your hands, they’re going to be dead in about two seconds when you start washing them. That’s why you’re washing them.
They’ll probably sell a million of them.
And there’s one with a grown man dressed as a baby and pouring sand on his head, but I’ve only seen it once and don’t remember what it was for.
The Geico commercials where the Gecko is interacting with the company president, who is a complete fool. Why would I want to buy insurance from a company that is run by an idiot?
Atop my list of non-favorites these days is for one of those diet meal services, Jenny Craig or Seattle Sutton or something.
In an amateurish, store-bought-software type animation, there’s a stick-figure silhouette of a woman (like on a rest room door). Pictures of unhealthy food like cheeseburgers, burritos, etc., fly into the frame and disappear into the figure, which proceeds to get fatter and fatter. This is accompanied by clownish trombone music and sound effects of slurping, chomping, and (I swear) oinking noises.
Suddenly, the music changes to the Halleluiah Chorus, and the food is now healthy diet food, and the figure now gets thinner. There’s still a “chomping” sound effect, though less piggish than before, and the sound of a woman saying “Mmmmm!” repeatedly.
The whole thing is just disgusting and extremely off-putting.
There’s a current Smucker’s commercial where the two boys are looking up at an apple tree. One kid asks if he’s ready to pick the apple yet. The other says no, he’s waiting until it’s ripened to perfection. They then cut away to strawberry jam being spread on bread, and then show a jar of strawberry jam, grape jelly, and raspberry jam. WHAT NO APPLE???
I confess that I love those commercials. They’re so unpredictable. I do wonder why they advertise in my market, because there are no Sonics within an hour’s drive.
I think the secondary market is flooded with old cathode-ray TVs. It’s too hard to find anyone willing to buy one for more than negligible value. I don’t think thrift storees around here will even take them.
Also, this commercial implies that the $6 Hair Salon place that opened across the street from the established barber is evil because it’s a nasty chain store trying to put the little guy out of business by undercutting him. I wonder how many independent office supply stores have gone out of business once Office Depot rolled into town.
I don’t know if the baby one mentioned is the hamburger with “this baby was literally born yesterday”. Except it’s a man dressed as a baby, which just looks like fetish porn.
I haven’t seen it in a while, but there was a Ragu commercial that went something like, “Would you rather eat this jar or this sauce?” That’s right, don’t buy crappy pasta sauce in a jar, buy Ragu, the crappy pasta sauce that comes in a cylindrical glass container.
There’s one for Cisco computer systems where they’re in an elementary school classroom, all excited about the field trip they’re taking that day. One kid says, “we’re going to China!” Then some adult observer in the class goes on about how “in my day, we only got to go to a local farm on our field trips, blah blah blah.” Then the ad cuts to a view of the class watching a big teleconference screen with kids in a classroom in China connected at the other end. Sure, watching some kids in a classroom in China is just like actually going to China.:rolleyes:
Something else stupid about this commercial: if it’s daytime at the school in America, wouldn’t the Chinese kids be at home sleeping?
That was exactly the comment my wife made when she saw the ad. “That’s ironic. How many little mom and pop stationery stores did they put out of business when they came to town? Now they’re all about sticking up for the little guy?”
They aren’t “rat things”, they are spongemonkeys (why, I do not know; but there you have it) And they commercials featuring them were the best Quizno commercials ever!
That creepy gay oven could learn a thing or two from the spongemonkeys.
Can anyone tell me, in the Cisco series like the one described above, who the girl is supposed to be? (in another, she goes to see a doctor - as a patient or friend, I’m not sure, who’s in Copenhagen and another, IIRC, the mayor greets her by name - Ellen). Is she some local celebrity in Cisco-town-ad-land, or in reality someone that everybody else knows but me?
The thing I noticed was that she says something like “when I was a kid, we would just go to a farm.” Ellen, you were a kid last month.
However, those commercials still rock, because I have been to that town. Spent about two weeks there, in fact. I’ve walked right by that school building. The first time I saw that commercial, my jaw hit the floor.
I don’t know about the hipster cred, but there’s some local cred. Ellen Page is from Halifax, the commercials are set in Lunenburg, about 60 miles down the coast. There are some beautiful shots of the town and the waterfront.
And they commercials featuring them were the best Quizno commercials ever! 
