Just saw one this morning, for Nationwide insurance, I think, that really cheesed me off.
Woman is standing at the window of her apartment, idly sipping coffee and asking her (presumably) roommate what’s covered on her car insurance. Why? Because, across the street, an angry woman in another apartment is doing the ‘throwing the boyfriend’s things out’ scenario, starting with clothes, but escalating to lamps, end tables, an overstuffed chair, a sofa, and a big-screen TV, all of which are dropping directly onto, and smashing, boyfriend’s (or is it roommate’s?) car, not to mention any hapless pedestrians who might happen to be wandering by. Meanwhile, idle woman gazes down on the scene, sipping her coffee and doing nothing whatsoever, like maybe, you know, calling the cops or something.
Yeah, right, and if it was Kitty Genovese being stabbed to death down below, I guess she’d be asking her roommate about what their life insurance covers. Sheesh.
There’s one out there for a car website with a montage of people explaining, in near dumbstruck awe, that the website “literally allows you to test drive the car.” The website does this by…showing you videos of someone else driving the car!!! The entire premise is so STUPID that I can’t even respect the actors as human beings for appearing in it.
“We didn’t wait for anyone else to storm the beaches of Normandy” - yeah, cause those cowardly Canadians and British decided to stay home.
“We didn’t wait for another country to grant Civil Rights.” - granting a race of people equal rights to others is hardly something we as a nation can hang our hat on.
Yeah, it only took about 100 years for the US to acknowledge that people who aren’t Caucasian are actually people. If the ad company doesn’t think that’s not waiting, I’d hate to see what they do think is.
Well, while we may be second to another (every?) country in granting Civil Rights, we definitely lead the world in unnecessary capitalization of vague phrases to do with Freedom and Liberty and such.
I just remember this commercial I saw a couple of months ago that confused the hell out of me at first, but later on just seemed pretty stupid (it may have been a Super Bowl ad, I’m not 100% sure).
Okay, so a spot for that movie Jumpers starts up. I had seen an ad for this movie before, so I was thinking, “yeah, yeah, Sam Jackson or whoever is gonna come out and start yelling about God in a second, blah blah.” Inexplicably, halfway through the ad, the main “jumper” teleporting guy jumps into a TV right at the start of an HP ad (the one with Serena Williams). The HP ad then ran at length, so I thought, well maybe I missed something and the Jumpers ad had ended before then. But as the HP ad wrapped up, the “jumper” guy reappeared and jumped out of the TV, and the ad for the movie continued. Yeah. Our movie’s so cool that we will assault you with product placement before you even get to see the actual movie. :rolleyes:
My wife and I watch a lot of TNT for some reason or another: Law & Order reruns, another nillionth repeat of the LOTR movies, something. So my complaints have to deal with this network in particular:
Never in a million years will I watch The Closer, even if it’s the greatest show in the history of serial entertainment. I am SO FUGGIN’ SICK of seeing the constantly-aired spots for the thing that, if I’m in “real time” on the tivo, I will rewind to two commercials prior, watch them again, all so I can fast forward through the The Closer ad. What’s particulary hate-worthy is the fact that they’ve been heavily promoting the new season for nearly a month now… the new season which starts in July.
Jesus wept. And so did I.
Ditto for Saving Grace. I don’t even have the slightest idea what this show is about, but I hate it with a passion.
But the worst thing they do are those damned graphics at the bottom of the screen that promote whatever show they feel like promoting… Yes, The Closer and Saving Grace are featured predominately in these, but also whatever movie which is coming up that they want to show in their Near-Infinite Loop Weekends - “Titanic on Friday, Saturday, and three showings on Sunday!”. It’s even worse when they put in a graphic that represents the movie like they did for the King Kong airings this past weekend.
Yeah, I kept wondering where Sauron was getting those little planes that were buzzing Middle Earth…
SciFi channel is the worst I’ve seen for this. I swear that sometimes the entire lower third of the screen was taken up with animated graphics advertising some other show.
I don’t watch a lot of FX anymore, but back when they showed Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns, they were horrible with the bottom-of-the-screen graphics during shows. I have terrible memories of trying to watch Buffy the summer that Nip/Tuck premired, and every thirty seconds you’d hear that Shing! Shing! noise of knifes accompanied by a graphic that took up what felt like a quarter of the screen.
And does anyone watch that Fear.net “On Demand” channel? I occasionally watch it when I’m at my parents’ house, and that has the worst graphic I’ve ever seen. You’ll be watching some horror movie, and inevitably during some suspenseful or otherwise engrossing scene, this really loud chainsaw noise comes out of nowhere while the chainsaw proceeds to cut the bottom quarter of the screen away to display a graphic that I’m pretty sure is just an ad for their website or something. I realize they don’t show commercials during “On Demand” stuff, but sheesh!
I got a new one to aaadd: the new promos on NBCeee.
I don’t know what kind of accent it isss, but the announcer stretches out the end of every lineee; sometimes more than thaaat.
There is also a commercialll on 950 KJRrrr here in Seattleee that uses the same kind of speech patterrrn.
If you still don’t know what I’m talking about yeeet, try looking for video of Congressman Joe Sestaaak(D-PAaa). I could tolerate it by hiiim because I generally like his politiiics, but now it seems to be speadinnng and it is just pisses me offfffffff.
I hate when this happens and it takes me a moment or two to figure out this is not part of the show I’m watching and/or it distracts me from something that I’m trying to focus on in the scene that’s onscreen.
I also mega-hate (is that a word?) when television networks do this while the credits roll. Then they squeeze the credits to one side or up to one corner. What, you don’t already do enough advertising or promoting in the time already allotted or across the bottom of the screen during the show?
It always seems to happen when there is information I specifically want to see that’s in the credits.
The one for surface sanitizer than depicts “germs” as green maggots.
There’s one for Zyrtec that claims it starts working 2 hours before Clartin. Pills, no matter what kind, take about 45 minutes to enter the blood stream.
So, Zyrtec starts to work an hour and fifteen minutes before it’s swallowed.
