So everyone knows commercials are BS, and hates them.  But do you notice any that are especially annoying and/or deceptive?  Or trends in them? It's hard not to.

I try to not watch or listen to commercials, and usually dive for the remote to mute the channel/station when it's commercial time, but even with my efforts, they are impossible to entirely avoid.  Even if you don't watch TV or listen to the radio, you get them in magazines, on websites, on billboards that line the highway, etc.

One thing we can take from the "buy our garbage" onslaught is some humor, as we analyze the obviously and blatant ploys that turn up in so many different types of advertisement.  This page mostly discusses techniques seen/heard in TV and radio spots.

Mediocre Product = Hyperbole

The more ordinary the product, the more hype the commercial will try to give it.

Commercials for "real" sports cars, like Porsches, just show the car being driven fast, content to revel in their own merits.  Commercials for average cars, especially ones indistinguishable from dozens of others just like them, will usually show people walking by and giving themselves whiplash looking at the vehicle, other cars circling it in a fever of excitement, the moon falling from the sky in shock, etc. Toyota Camry commercials will go to great length to discuss the "total redesign" when no one can tell a 1990 Camry from a 2002 Camry, or either of them from any of twenty other mid-sized sedans manufactured over the past decade.

Indistinguishable Products = Hysterical Excitement

Similar to the Mediocre = Hyperbole, if you have a product that no one can tell from other similar products, you must play it up to infinity.  Currently there's an add for some type of cell phone, a man and a woman talking:

Woman: Nice cell phone.
Man: Thanks.  It's the Motorola 550.
Woman: The Motorola 550? (Shocked voice.)

Given that most everyone just uses whatever cell phone comes free/cheap with their overpriced service...

Another example is the 2003 Honda Accord.  Lots of commercials around Sept 20th, 2002, and they are just absurd.  The car is shown being driven around a winding desert test track, with the ground wet, of course.  Suddenly an evil black Lear jet appears over the mountains, and they drive the car extra fast and get it under this sort of tent, just before the plane passes overhead, snapping photos the whole way.  (Yes, snapping photos, they show a camera-sight looking thing clicking as it goes over.) Like there is a guy leaning out the window with a Nikon.

As the commercial ends they show hundreds of black jets zooming overhead in suicidally close proximity, while the car is visible to the camera from the other direction.  This is stupid on so many levels that I could fill a page discussing it, but suffice to say that it's a Honda Accord.  It's identical to the last 10 years of Honda Accords, and virtually identical to about 15 other mid-size, non-sporty, compact sedans.  Hence the hysterical excitement in the commercial depiction of a car that's a good value, but that no one is buying under any illusion of it being sexy or coveted.

Consumers Expect Lies and Exaggerations

This is especially true in commercials that extol the unrealistic virtues of a product.  An example are commercials for SUVs that show them driving with race cars.  Everyone knows that SUVs handle like land yachts and are prone to tipping over in any high speed maneuver, and that those commercials are only possible with tons of dubious editing and trick photography. Which makes you wonder why they even bother pretending in commercials.

Other SUV and truck commercials do much the same thing, showing them pulling ice-locked ships, driving up the side of sheer rock walls, pulling canyons shut, etc.  These commercials have evolved to an art form, almost a sort of truck-based tall tale, where they are no longer meant to be taken seriously.  The commercials aren't intended to be any sort of exhibition of the truck's actual capabilities, and are just amusements.

It's interesting that commercials for some products are regulated, but others are not.  You couldn't run a commercial for aspirin showing it curing leprosy and AIDS, allowing the crippled to walk, raising the dead, etc.  But you can air auto commercials that are essentially the same thing.

The Bigger the Company, the More Incomprehensible the Commercials

Only really giant companies can run entire advertising campaigns that everyone hates, or that have virtually nothing to do with their product.  Pentium has practically made a science of it, with those universally-loathed Blue Men for the Pentium3, and then those weird, creepy, ugly aliens in their space ship for the Pentium4.

Budweiser is very good at this, doing everything possible to avoid showing actual beer in their commercials.  Horses playing football, talking amphibians, incredibly-annoying catch phrase spouting Black people (then nerdy white people, then mafia-esque Italians), etc.

You can almost be certain that any perplexing commercial, one that looks expensive but leaves you with no idea at all what it was for; is promoting some enormous company.  Currently those "mlife" commercials are running constantly, and most people have no idea what they are for, and don't particularly care.  I honestly don't know, I just remember seeing them during the 2001 Super Bowl and hearing/agreeing with jokes about how dumb they were.

Commercials for Embarrassing Products are Far Too Sincere

These usually feature actors pretending to be old friends or relatives, talking in ridiculously sincere voices about something no viewer even wants to think about.  Perhaps these fly with focus groups, but I suspect most people would just prefer to see a simple "use this for hemorrhoids" commercial, with some actor in a lab coat talking about what doctors recommend.  We'd prefer these to to the phony ones with a silver-haired grandfatherly actor confiding in the awkwardly-perched younger actor about what he uses to deal with his piles. And just you ask any woman how she feels about commercials that mention the "not so fresh" feeling.

If Your Clothing/House/Car Doesn't Shine, You are Scum

Detergent isn't enough; detergent that keeps a shirt 2% brighter over 30 washes is mandatory!  Daytime television is overrun with idiotic commercials that attempt to instill housewife guilt.  Floors must sparkle, countertops must gleam.  Babies are often shown sticking the stove burner into their slobbering, toothless little maws, with the obvious indication that your precious little grub will perish, or at least score lower on his college entrance exams, if you don't disinfect properly.

Celebrate Your Legally Required Achievements

Chevron and every other oil company battle perpetually to avoid any environmental responsibility for their incredibly-polluting industry.  At the same time they run ads boasting of their kind-hearted, bird-loving clean up of toxic waste from some spot they illegally dumped it in the first place.  I've long relished this hypocritical sort of self-promotion, and The Onion ran an article (that I can't find to link to) about the blazingly-hypocritical phenomena semi-recently.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.