While, quite frankly, all TV commercials piss me off except for the Aflac duck ones, there are a few which anger me to no end:
Those Dell commercials with that stoner kid. Why the fuck does everyone like these? Every time I see that kid, I want to punch him in the face and give him a black eye or two.
The pink rubber stomach commerical that I used see on ABC news a lot. It had a pink rubber spleen/kidney/whatever the fuck that thing was staying at the “Heartburn Hotel”. And fire came out of it. Then it took some medicine, and left. I dunno about you, but if you’re trying to sell me something, you don’t do it with a pink rubber stomach that looks like that thing from The Blob.
Car commercials. Just the fact that they expect me to make such a major purchase as a car because of a mere commercial I saw during The Daily Show makes me think “KILLLLLLL”.
Commericals for “feminine hygiene products”. Well first of, TAMPONS. THEY ARE CALLED FUCKING TAMPONS! IF YOU CAN SHOW A RED DOT FLYING AROUND LOOKING LIKE THE JAPANESE FLAG, YOU CAN SAY “TAMPON” ON TV! IT’S NOT LIKE YOU’RE GOING ON THERE LOOKING LIKE A PIRATE WITH TOURETTE’S! Also, for some ungodly reason, the fluid they show pouring into the “feminine hygiene product” is blue. BLUE! If anyone around my house starts secreting anything blue, how absorbent their tampon is will be the last thing on my mind.
Ditto, but for a slightly different reason. Most car commercials are about how either the appearance or the “experience” of driving the car being advertised is SO radically different from all the rest. People on the street stand and gape like toddlers into store windows where the car is displayed, or turn their heads whiplash-style as if they just saw Brittney Spears strolling past nude, or (a particularly asinine new ad) a cop-in-a-box camera keeps snapping pictures of the car in question.
It’s just a fucking car! Most sedans look like every other sedan and most SUVs look like every other SUV, and the “experience” of driving that car will be oddly VERY similar to the experience of driving any other car. If you buy the new Fugazi XL2, you AREN’T going to be schussing around curves on EMPTY mountain roads, or zooming along EMPTY, straight, but slightly hilly rural highways. :rolleyes: You’re going to be driving in the exact same damn urban or suburban TRAFFIC that you did in every other car you ever owned. Driving will be a good or bad experience based on where and when you’re driving and NOT the bloody model of car you’re driving.
Traffic is the one thing you NEVER see in a car commercial, except in those damned scenes that make me want to throw an egg at the television, where the car being advertised either:
(1) pulls out of a traffic jam of “ordinary” cars ( :rolleyes: ) and passes them on an empty lane – presumably in the opposing lanes and therefore head-on into oncoming traffic! – or
(2) speeds along on a completely traffic-free overpass over a roadway below jammed to capacity, again, with “ordinary” cars.
To pick a specific set of ads, what the flying fuck is with the ones with the stupid prescription labels printing on the screen?! If you drive this car, you’ll never want to drive another again! It’s more exciting, exhilirating, blah, blah than any other car! Dumbass! IIRC, it’s not even a real sports car, it’s just another generic interchangeable Amereurojapanese sedan. And I don’t even remember what car company it is, so it doesn’t exactly have the stranglehold on one’s memory or imagination that the ad people intended.
I hate the Fidelity commercial with the woman who says to someone, “Hey, that’s my cab?” and then immediately says to someone else, “Do you want to share a cab?” There seems to be an editing problem there – like they combined two commercials into one.
Then, she gets in the cab and says to the other guy, “So you work at Fidelity?” How does she know, for one: does he have a bumper sticker on his briefcase? Or is she surreptitiously reading whatever he’s reading? And just because he works for Fidelity, how does that make him an expert on 401(k) plans? And why is she completely clueless about how a 401(k) plan works – she has had at least 3 jobs since the 401(k) job; what, nobody ever told her how to withdraw or roll over her account balance?
Red Bull - the animation, the voices, the scripts. Every single aspect of the commercials fills me with the urge to go on 5-state killing spree all the while shooting molten feces out of my ass whilst making unkind references regarding Mother Theresa’s sexual proclivities.
No believer in deities am I, but if there was anything that could convince me of the existence of externalized evil entities, it’s cut from the same cloth as these commercials.
Should I ever meet the pitchperson who created this concept, I will seriously have to rethink my views on irrational random violence.
I do not like them on a train,
I do not like them on a plane.
I do not like them on the box,
I would not like them on a fox.
Why? Because on that one day a year, suddenly everyone I know who hates ads, watches this dumbass football game JUST FOR THE ADS. And then they all TALK ABOUT THEM.
They’re goddamn commercials, people! Every other day of the year, you hate them! And you, you’ve got a TIVO because you hate ads, but you taped the Superbowl just to see them. What the fuck?
What do the ad companies hear when this happens? They hear, “Although we bitch about ads 364 days of the year, on this one day we love them and will discuss them non-stop! Please make more expensive ads, because we can’t figure out that they’re paid for by hiking up the cost of the product!”
…pant…pant…
And on another note, memo to Coke, Pepsi, and Nike. No one will forget about your companies if they go three minutes without seeing one of your ads. You do not need your logo within my sight 24/7. No one out there flipped on the TV and said, “Hrm, Pepsi? Never heard of it, maybe I’ll give it a try!”
MacGyver selling us phone cards. Not so much because of MacGyver, it’s the damn singer in the background.
Takin’ it to tha streets! Whooo! Freedom! Takin’ it to tha Freedom! Takin’ it to tha streets! Whooo! Freedom! Takin’ it to tha Freedom! Hoo-yeah! Takin’ it to tha streets! Whooo! Freedom! Takin’ it to tha Freedom!
Jamie Lee Curtis can take that VoiceStream phone with all its extra minutes and cram it.
I second Carrot Top commercials, and the “Can you hear me now?” commercials. Some people and catchphrases just don’t work. It doesn’t take a half dozen commercials to tell you that.
And I hate those fucking AFLAC commercials. Hearing Gilbert Gottfried screaming “AFLAC!” while a duck puppet lip syncs him does not make me want to buy more insurance.
The commercial that fakes a Mastercard “priceless” ad until it turns into a “you’re funding terrorists if you buy drugs” ad. Way to place the blame, guys.
Chunky Soup. Tell Mom to zip it, OK McNabb?
Burger King ad w/Shaq. Five decades of BK goodness is pretty horrible.
Finally, the “Truth” ads. For the sake of Pete, we all know cigarettes are bad. Yes, they have cyanide and lead, but how many nanograms? Quit the Super Secret Spy shit and shut the fuck up.
The Chrysler commercials where the mom talks to her kid about her conception. I think they’ve finally run their course but I’m still fearul. And Chevy truck commercials. “Like a Rock” best describes the handling on those hunks of junk. If Bob Seger were dead he’d be turning over in his grave.
I’ve another: Dennis Franz going back and forth with his agent about in a conversation about what an integrity-laden individual he is punctuated by little pips of sound.
I hate most commercials - Dell, Aflac, 1-800-anything, Burger King, the McDonalds one with the Spice Girls song, car commercials, anything that uses a familiar song, etc.
But the one that really bothers me is the Kia one, that supposedly takes place at the Class of 1992 reunion. It makes no sense at all. Supposedly two people are getting together for their tenth reunion, and the former cheerleader/popular one is all washed up. Anyway, the last thing in the commercial is what the now really washed up former high school jock guy - standing next to a Gremlin, if I remember correctly, with a mullet, dancing to “I Ran” by a Flock of Seagulls.
What the hell? First of all, all the people in the ad look like they’re 40 - I graduated in 1992 and I’m 27. We didn’t have any 30 year olds in my class when I graduated.
Second, why would anyone who graduated in 1992 be rocking out to a song from 1983 or so? It shifts time in a really stupid manner - like the advertisers don’t want to try an actually appeal to people over thirty, yet they go for the campiness of a stereotypical 80’s song. You can’t have both.
Two commercials come to mind that routinely make me cringe:
That chunky beef stew one with the black athlete and his “momma” who continually insists that he has to eat this new slop-in-a-can meal
The one where that kid hands the dog a spoonful of peanut butter and the poor mutt smacks its lips a thousand times over due to the thickness of the peanut butter. That one PISSES ME OFF. I want to smack the little brat upside the goddamned head whenever I see that.
Second on the Domino’s commercials with the doorbells.
My cats don’t run to the door when the bell rings–they run away. They’re scared of doorbells. So I’ll be sitting there with one of 'em sprawled out on my lap, purring and generally being content, and this damned commercial will come on. “Ding-dong!” and the cat’s off like a shot.
We always forget to hit the mute button before it happens.
I haven’t paid close attention to that commercial, but I thought it was supposed to be the 20th reunion of the class of 1982.
Anyway, I think that in a year or so, these discussions will become moot. The value of advertising should exceed its cost, and the cost is so huge nowadays, it’s unlikely to be justified by its value. Is Pepsi going to recoup what they paid Britney Spears for their current series of ads? Maybe not. And if not, and if other companies similarly fail to benefit from the obscene amounts of money they’re spending on advertising, they’ll simply have to scale back.
Someone mentioned a BK commercial with Shaq. I haven’t seen it. The BK commercials that I have seen in the last five years have featured only the food. Which is what they’re selling.
In the '80s, people whinged about how much they hated “those commercials with people in an office talking earnestly in low tones about a product.” Why? How were those ads annoying? They were descriptive, subtle, and easy to tune out if one wasn’t interested. Now we have commercials that explode off the screen and scare your pets. Is that what people wanted when they were complaining about the talking-heads ads?
Actually, Bob Seger is all pro-Detroit and IIRC, he offered his song to Chevy.
What’s up with those fuckin Carl’s Junior commercials where various people show how lousy their table manners are? I especially hate the one where a bunch of hip, socially desirable twentysomething dudes (you know, the backwards-baseball-cap types) suddenly stop what they’re doing to cram some hamburgers in their drooling pieholes, while the audience is supposed to - what? watch in envy, or force back a glob of rising bile? What was going through the minds of the idiots who wrote this commercial? “I know, let’s get some asshole-looking kids who most people wouldn’t hit the brakes for if they saw them in a crosswalk, and have them stuff our hamburgers in their stubble-encircled faces, and we’ll put microphones right under their chins so people can hear every disgusting drop of grease as it dribbles down the back of their syphilitic throats. That’ll really get our corporate crudburgers flying off the grills!”