“With a name like Smuckers, it’s gotta be good!”
“I didn’t take a shower yesterday, and I may not take one today, because I use Right Guard.”
Anybody remember F-310? A gasoline additive that made car exhaust transparent. Not non-toxic, but you could see through it! They had giant clear balloons attached to car exhausts; one was filled with nasty, black, roiling car exhaust, and the other one had car exhaust with F-310! You could see through it!
“The main song ‘Beasts of England’ uses the original words written by Orwell, set to music by Enya.”
Sweet.
Check out this piece of drek.
In a (somewhat) similar vein, RetroCRUSH presents National Geographic ads from the 1920s. Good stuff…
“Sick! - and I let my life insurance lapse.”
At the 20th International Space Symposium, the City of Omaha (Nebraska) was advertising their suitability as a location for high-tech space companies to move in. They put on a video showing shots of open rolling prairie interspersed with clean rooms and people in bunny suits (the NASA kind, not the furry kind). The music was Crystal Method’s “High Roller” with the sound bites from the moon landing. So far, so good. Then the main title comes up:
OMAHA’S GOT SPACE.
Cut to a long, zoomed-out shot of Omaha’s skyline, which looks like this:
________________..#.#[]|||[]#...#...______________________________________
…and cue a conference room full of east- and west-coast city-dwellers giggling.
There’s one running on TV a lot lately, for a bank or a credit card or something–I really can’t recall.
They are trying to advertise some sort of premium they’re giving out to their customers. They show various people making huge mistakes, then avoiding blame by randomly saying, “Thank you.” For instance, the guy who sent the wrong e-mail to the whole company, or the woman who thought the other woman was pregnant when she wasn’t. Once they say, “Thank you,” they’re let off the hook.
What the commercial seems to be saying is, “We’re giving you this thing so that you won’t make a fuss about the lousy stuff we’ve done to you at other times.”
Not, I think, what they should have been going for.
Yeah, but you gotta admit that the original diarrhea girl is smokin’ hot.
Heh, just remembered another, from Reader’s Digest.
An elderly woman sitting at a restaurant table with a strangulated look on her face, and the caption:
Trapped wind. It’s no laughing matter.
Sorry, but that ad makes it one.
There’s a commercial running now for some sort of business compuer network protection. It starts off with some guy in a dimly lit room, being being harrassed by three people in business suits, who are demanding, in a vaguely sinister fashion, to know where he was “next Thursday.” The guy can’t answer, of course, and the three interviewers start really tightening the screws while the poor guy sweats. “I’m getting pretty tired of your evasions, Steve.” The tagline is, “Company X detects threats to your network before they even happen!” The message, however, is, “Company X brings Stalinist police-state tactics to your workplace!”
There’s an ad on the radio for a bank and the jingle goes “Nobody does banking like we do.”
Only I’m not the only one who hears “Nobody does spanking like we do.”
It makes me giggle uncontrollably. Okay, so it’s not bad copy, but bad enunciation is just as, well, bad, isn’t it?
I don’t know if anyone has seen this, but Alex Trebek shills for Colonial Penn pay-as-you-go term life insurance.
And the set-up to the spiel is an old woman, looking at the camera as her daughter and grandson are hurrying her toward somewhere. And she puts a quarter in a parking meter and says something along the lines of,
“Don’t you wish life was like this, and you could get more time with the people you love? But you can’t (and it’s at this point, I kid you not, when the meter flips over to read “TIME EXPIRED.”)”
Then they go into how important it is to have life insurance.
I started at the television, unable to comprehend the callousness of it all, before breaking out into howls of laughter and falling off the couch.
That was Mitchum—“With Mitchum, you can skip a day!”
I’ve seen various ads for systems to protect business’ computer networks from hackers:
A young guy and girl are sitting at a computer terminal and talking: “Hey, this guy makes $30k a year more than all the others doing the same job.” “I wonder what the others would say if they knew that?” “They do know. I just e-mailed the whole company.”
A guy who’s just been fired takes his revenge by hacking into the company network and deleting files.
A punked-put dude with a mohawk asks the audience: “Why would we spend time hacking into your company’s computer network? Same reason we pierce our tongues!” [grins and sticks out pierced tongue]
Ad shows three young hackers getting arrested and thrown in jail thanks to the viligilance of the system being advertised
etc.
I have yet to see an ad of this kind that didn’t make me sympathize with the hackers and want them to get away with it and screw the corporate bastards.
But then, I guess I’m not their target market.
Worse than cockups or triteness are the ones that are impossibly labored.
There’s a TV commercial for Honda with loads of frankly oogy CGI people wearing gas masks in a factory, banging on about the most popular word being “OK” and what if the most popular word was “what if” - this combined with one of the hideous drones removing his gas mask to reveal a hideous face. What. The. Fuck?
And one I’ve just heard:
“Value mushrooms. They taste great. At only £1.35 a pound, they’re incredibly ugly. But who cares? They’re going into a steak and kidney pie anyway.”
[self-important radio voice]
I’m here to tell you about…[proverbial pregnant pause]…my duck’s bed!
OK, I think it’s probably spelled ‘Dux’. Whatever, it’s radio. How could anyone listen to this and not wonder if it’s all its quacked up to be.
That one doesn’t seem too bad. It’s sort of like the ad they have here in the U.S. for Mountain Bars. (“They’re only ugly until you taste them.”)
I once read an ad on the back of a Tropicana orange juice container that said “It only takes a minute, but the feeling lasts all day!” Yeah, and what about the orange juice?
I love the commercials with the woman whose husband is chronically constipated. She’s been feeding him the same brand laxatives for years and years, and he’s *still constipated!!! * Time to switch brands, lady.
And then there was the commercial for the car that “just FEELS right,” implying that there’s plenty wrong with the car, even though it feels right. They had to re-voice the commercial to “just feels RIGHT.”
What was the commercial for a drug whose side effects included abrupt bowel movements? It was put like this:
“… a sudden urge to have them and an inability to control them.”
A colleague who’s been on the dating scene for some time said it more or less described the attraction to motherhood among 40-year-old single women.
Not bad at all. A classic ad was run by Volkswagen, published the day after the Apollo 11 landing. Echoing their theme, it had a full page picture of the LM, with the caption “It’s ugly but it gets you there.”
A few very specialized ones. One chip company (I forget which) ran a series of ads with a picture of an engineering type in bed with his dog, the theme of which was they worked their engineers so hard they didn’t have time to have lives. It did not resonate too well. And there was a billboard along Highway 101 in San Jose, for a company that rented CAD tools with three women - one trashy, one medium, and one homebodyish, with the caption that you can rent our tools by the hour, day or month.
