elevision is pretty much chock full of ads, and as you've no doubt noticed by now, quite a few of them are abysmally stupid. I try not to watch that much TV, and I try to watch zero commercials, but since they're impossible to completely avoid, I absorb some, and usually end up blogging about them in some way, when I'm horrified or offended by their stupidity.

You can see more general ad discussion here, and some talk about penis pill ads here.

More recent entries are on top of this page.

February 2, 2004

We did watch the Superbowl, and then the first episode of Survivor All Stars afterwards. If you look at Survivor as one long game, spread out over weeks and weeks, it's started off to oddly parallel the Super Bowl.  I. E. both had a very boring beginning.  Whether or not this season of Survivor will pick up the pace just before halftime, then have a sucky 3rd quarter before the teams once again remember that they're allowed to throw the ball downfield and thus leading to a great finish remains to be seen.

As for the other big portion of the day's TV, the Superbowl ads... I didn't see anything real memorable. There were way too many Cadillac commercials for their truck like faux-sports car things; vehicles that I can't imagine anyone buying.  I mean what's their target audience?  I assume they still churn out those old, ugly, Buick-like Caddys for rich old people to tool around in and eventually confuse the gas with the break and plow into a crowded sidewalk on their way to get a refill on their glaucoma medicine.  They just don't advertise those on big ticket shows like the Super Bowl, since they know that 1) old people with money will seek them out ads or not, and 2) that young people with money won't buy cars with that styling no matter what their ads are like.

But as for the new ones with the impotence symbol grills that look like last year's Dodge pick ups, I can't tell you.  I think they all look like ass; like boxes that have been partially streamlined, or futuristic (hard angles) Volvo station wagons. And anyway, it's a Cadillac; it's a big, slow, plodding car for old people, or for poor people who want to appear rich by buying a car that doesn't do anything special but that's priced as though it does.  And all the sexy commercials with Led Zepplin sound tracks and magical Matrix-like waves of air force, or water, or whatever it's supposed to be that's flying off the cars across the desert while the black Cadillacs are driving around won't ever change that.

At least not in my mind.

There weren't any big movie event trailers this year, for a change. Last year the hype pre-game was for a new Hulk trailer, and a new Matrix 2 trailer.  And in retrospect, looking at how well both of those movies turned out, perhaps that's a good thing.  They had a bunch of movie commercials, but none of them had anything new in them, that I saw.  Hidalgo and Van Helsing were 100% from their existing trailers, and so were the others that did nothing to stand out in my memory.  They had one for 50 First Dates, with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore, but it was no more entertaining than the trailer, which is simply boring.

There were a bunch of AOL commercials, featuring mechanic guys modifying existing vehicles with AOL 9.0 technology to make them go incredibly fast. I suppose those are useful in that they spread consumer awareness of AOL 9.0 and that it's supposed to be super fast, but there are two problems: 1) The entire concept was ripped off, sort of slick, watered down versions of those Sega video game commercials where guys build a gun or boot or something from one of the videogames, film themselves using it in real life, and blow up their entire neighborhood, or leap over a plane, or something, and 2) It's for AOL; everyone is familiar with their product and has an opinion on it at this point (most people think it's the noob-ernet), and AOL making claims that they're faster than they used to be isn't going to change anyone's mind about their ISP, especially in this day of cable modem ubiquity.

There were a ridiculous amount of "can't get it up" pill commercials, several of which even gave you some chance of guessing what they were commercials for.  There were the usual Levitra ones, which are utterly perplexing in their vagueness.  I saw the one with the guy throwing footballs through a tire swing at least a dozen times during the regular season without ever suspecting it might be an anti-impotence pill.  I figured it was for an arthritis pill, or something like that, since the whole commercial shows a guy who is working in his hard and playing around with an old football, and seeming to feel rusty.

I never had any idea it was for what it's for until I read a Dave Barry column about it, and his jokes at last clued me in to the rather absurdly-metaphorical aspect of an aging man taking a pill that suddenly allows him to repeatedly throw a football through an old tire.  In my defense, I never paid the commercial any attention, other than wondering why the hell this guy was throwing a football around like that, and laughing at how it was yet another idiotic commercial for a prescription drug that at no time made it clear what the drug was for.  I saw Claratin ads for at least two or three years before I eventually found out what they were supposed to do.  Perhaps I'm ignorant, but magazine photos of fields of flowers, and TV commercials of smiling people with excellent facial skin never shouted out "anti allergy medication" to me.

This is as true of arthritis and baldness and indigestion and allergy pills as erection ones, in my viewing experience, and the marketing scheme puzzles me.  They show random images for 30 seconds without ever putting up a single one that directly tips you off to what their expensive new chemical is supposed to do if you take it, and then spend the last 8-10 seconds with their silken-voiced announcer reading off a long list of possible side effects like diarrhea or nose bleeds or headaches. And then they say, "Ask your doctor about it."  What?  Do people just make a doctor appointment to go in and say, "So, I saw this ad with a guy throwing a football through a tire and running around and hugging a woman, and I have no idea at all what the pill does, but I simply must have one, just because their commercial was such a masterpiece of Madison Avenue genius!"

One of the dicker upper pills on the Superbowl sounded interesting, since the ad said that it worked for 36 hours, for when "the romance turns to passion" or something romance novel sounding like that. As best I could tell, you take it, and then if at any point in the next day and half you start to get turned on, you'll get an actual serviceable erection.  I can't see how that works; it's like a lurking instant boner?  How long until they have that in some sort of drug implant, like Norplant under the skin, to release a constant supply of whatever hormone or chemical enables proper penile blood flow?

Aside from all of the other dumb commercials, there were two that really stood out to me as amazingly stupid.  And that's saying something, since I hate TV commercials.

The first was for Gillette disposable razors, and it was eye catchingly idiotic.  The commercial featured pleasing and inspirational music and lots of images of random, heart-warming events.  Planes flying, a jogger bursting through a wall, smiling men, beautiful women, hurdlers, etc.  Just on and on, and totally pointless.  It was like some guy's photography demo reel.  And then eventually they mixed in a few shots of instant razors in their packaging, and guys doing that frighteningly-reckless "sweeping across the throat" motion, the razor plowing cleanly and effortlessly through the perfectly-applied shaving cream.  A move that you will only ever see in a commercial, since every man and woman alive who has ever shaved with a cheap disposable plastic razor knows that if you do that over a sharp corner (chin, lip, knee, ankle, etc) you'll look a lot like you just used a potato peeler on yourself. Of course the commercial man is already shaved to bikini wax closeness, and he's just using a plastic razor with no blade to remove the shaving cream, thus simulating a shave, but it still always makes me jump when they do it.

I didn't think that commercial was dreadful for that; every shaving commercial perpetuates that lie.  I thought it was stupid since it had nothing to do with razors, and was just so silly and "film school audition reel" in appearance.  It reminded me a bit of the old movie convention (spoofed in Austin Powers 1) of showing metaphorical things after cutting away from a passionate couple; the train plowing into the tunnel, waves crashing, a volcano erupting, etc.  Since it's a man shaving, shouldn't they show relevant stuff: a carrot being peeled, a building being leveled, those houses in Trinity during the nuke test, etc?

The other super stupid commercial was for Charmin, and it showed extras in bad no-specific team football uniforms lining up for a big play, while announcers babbled on in the voice over.  The quarterback kneels down to place his hands lovingly beneath the center's huge, swollen choad, and gets all hung up feeling the strip of toilet paper dangling down from his waist.  So hung up that there's a delay of game penalty, and then the announcers somehow realize he was distracted by the amazing softness of the towel on the center's ass, then that it's toilet paper, and they go, "Who switched that?" and the scene cuts to the QB and coaches seeing a guy in a bear mascot costume giggling, and they all chase him.  And it then dissolves into a cartoon bear who flies around and lands on the Charmin package of toilet paper.

This is wrong on almost as many levels as the Garfield movie trailer (which I'll discuss some day when I'm in a really foul mood and watching it can't possibly depress me further).

• How do the announcers know what's delaying him?
• How can they tell it's toilet paper?
• How are the QB's hands not all wet or dirty?
• How does a cartoon bear mascot walking around with rolls of toilet paper get onto the sidelines of a football field?
• Since when has Charmin had a bear for a mascot?

And I'm not even going into the idiocy of anyone stopping what they're doing due to being so distracted by the pillowy softness of something made to wipe your ass with.  Or the fact that when you see toilet paper sticking out of the back of someone's pants, your first impulse isn't to touch it.  It's to wonder, with a certain disgusted fascination, where the other end of it is stuck.

I suppose at the pitch meeting they were like, "Look, we want to do a Superbowl ad, and we need a commercial that somehow ties football in with toilet paper. And it's costing us over $2 million to air it, so it's got to be big."  Can't you just picture the stunned looks on the advertising guys' faces at that point?

Look, I'm sympathetic to the plight of toilet paper advertising companies. It's hard to design a commercial for a product that most everyone needs, but that you can't ever show being used for its actual purpose. Imagine if you had to do commercials for a restaurant, but you couldn't show people eating?  So yeah, they've got to have little kids being cute, or kittens, or babies, or cartoon/puppet bears, or whatever.  They can't even do those "soaking up ability" type commercials that tampons and paper towels do, with that mysterious blue water (Blue being the only color they could use that in no way suggestes actual human bodily fluids.) since people really don't want to think about what they're going to do with toilet paper.  They just want to think about buying it when they run out, even if hey use it for other things; wiping up the sink top or something, I don't know.

So the ad guys want to emphasize the softness, but they never want to go into any detail about how nicely it wipes things, or how much liquid it can absorb without soaking through and getting your hands wet, etc.  It's a thankless job, and I never said it was easy.  Plus Charmin costs more than other brands, with the selling point being the imaginary softness bonus.  How much logic do you want consumers using when they're considering that they'll be wiping their ass (or other delicate parts, if they're a girl) with the stuff?  So they've got to try to do something thematic for the big game, and not just their usual kids running in a field of flowers.  I'll give them points for trying.

But Jesus Constipated Christ, a bear mascot?  A quarterback accidentally touching it and being overcome with the softness? Announcers in voice over?  It was just ridiculous.  Fricking ridiculous. I may never shit again.

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