And Now a Word from Our Sponsors

You know you have to put up with them, provided you are not part of the TiVO generation.  These are the little bits of entertainment between the shows.  You may know them better as commercials.  Perhaps it’s been a while since you even watched these things.  Luckily for you, I am keeping an eye on things for you.  First thing you should know is that they have not gotten any better in the years since you first started using your remote to flip around when they came on. In fact, I am starting to think there may be a problem in the advertising world.  They seem to have completely lost the ability to create decent commercials.  I have a hard time blaming TiVO as the generation that will grow up with that device have not yet gotten jobs in the advertising field.  As such, they would not be there to create these infernal commercials that are not funny, not creative and not able to sell anything. 

At the top of the list has to be the old guy with the foreign accent selling the miles program for a national credit card company.  OK, I have never officially worked in the advertising agency but I can tell you that one of the things you should do when you have a spokesman is that you should try to find one that you can understand.  I have no idea what this guy is saying.  His sidekick is not funny but just stupid.  At the end of each commercial the old foreign dude says something that sounds like, “rewarring, veddy, veddy, rewarrring.” I have been morally opposed to the Burger King guy ever since I first saw him.  One of the other rules for advertising that I would like to put out there is that if you want to have a mascot then you should have a mascot that has moving facial features.  Its mouth should move or even an eyebrow.  At the very least it should wink.  The one exception to this would be the Jack-In-The-Box guy and even he can change facial expressions from time to time.  Essentially the actual Burger King himself is just creepy. 

The Army has been showing commercials lately that conveniently leave out certain facts about being in the Army.  Of course, that is also a rule in advertising that you shouldn’t put anything in there that might turn people off from your product.  Still the Army commercials where you show parents who are happy that the Army has made their son or daughter smarter or stronger or that they can run faster just seems a little odd to me.  Or the one where the father tells his son that he looked him in the eye and shook his hand for the first time.   I have just about had the end of the whole cell phone commercial thing.  The one where Joan Cusak is sitting in what looks like a shopping mall singing the words “Call me” over and over again has to mark a low-point in her career.  I am also getting tired of the guy in glasses who heads up the “network” of that one cell phone company.  His smirk is getting on my nerves.There are a few commercials out there that aren’t too bad.  I like the one where the car manages to fall through the center of the earth.  You just have to occasionally tip your hat at a commercial that obviously cost as much as Hollywood movie to make.  Of course, I kind of wish they would stop playing it every five seconds during football season. 

I am very tired of the commercial where the Loch Ness Monster attacks that car.  Who is screaming “shoot it, shoot it!” at the end of that commercial anyway?  Why would someone want to just shoot the monster having finally just discovered it?  None of those particular special effects look good anymore. I am liking nearly every commercial that star Peyton Manning these days.  I would have to say my favorite commercial from last year was the one where he was walking around getting autographs from guys working in grocery stores and asking wait-staff for their aprons.  I also like the one where he is selling some kind of cell phone with the goofy wig and mustache.   

I recently saw a commercial where two guys shoveled up some dog poop and then slapped it into the hand of an obnoxious neighbor.  I am both amused and utterly repulsed by this commercial.  Part of the problem is, of course, the way in which the message comes across is so shocking I don’t think I could tell you what the product was if you put a gun to my head.  I also would like to put a moratorium on the drugs for men with erectile dysfunction.  At the very least they should make an attempt to make sense.  I don’t know about the old couple who appear to be headed upstairs when their grandkids suddenly stop by.  How would you feel if grandma and grandpa kept giving each other lewd looks the entire time you were visiting?  Also, what place in the world has bathtubs in the middle of the ocean?  Is there a lighthouse somewhere with this feature?  This commercial needs to be selling vacation packages to that place and not for the pills. 

I guess I just don’t understand where these advertising guys are coming from.  I guess they just want to try and be different.  I can appreciate that, but why do you have to go from different to ridiculous?  It has always been my impression that most of those ads are created by teams of people.  These teams of people sit around and have brainstorms and they come up with ads.  At some point do they completely lose touch and end up with monster living in the lungs of children who then get coughed away?  Do we need anthropomorphic phlegm?  Who decides what phlegm should look like?  What is phlegm doing that it can evidently have children? So, what I am saying is that in all of those meeting with all of those people sitting around and staring at their screens and drawing storyboards do they eventually decide animated phlegm is the only way to sell a medicine that is supposed to make you hawk loogies?  At some point, when it is late at night and you haven’t seen your children in a week because you have been sleeping at the office do you just throw up your hands and agree that animated phlegm is the way to go?  I just don’t know.  If I were the drug company I would personally go back to letting pharmacists recommend my product and not trying to make phlegm look cute. 

Finally, as a word to advertisers, it bothers me that everyone in commercials uses their credit cards upside down.  I know, you want the label and the name of the card to be seen, but no one has a magnetic stripe on the bottom of the card so you can swipe it right-side up.  It just doesn’t happen.  It never will happen.  Stop it.  Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.