Posts Tagged ‘ads’

Super Bowl Sunday! It's coming! The day you've been waiting for! The greatest day of television ever! The day you gather unto you your friends and family in a joyous shared activity filled with action, suspense, laughter, soaring triumph and crashing defeat. Unfortunately there's also a bunch of football mixed in there to distract you from the highlight of the day: the ads.

The Super Bowl is the day ad men dream of when they go to sleep. After all, nearly a third of the country will be watching the game, and many of them watch as much (or more) for the ads as they do for the sport. And why not? Super Bowl ads are always the wildest, most outrageous, most controversial commercials you'll see all year, and more people will be talking about them the next day than whatever goalie made a free throw from the green, or whatever it is they do.

So why not jump straight to the meat? Head to AdWeek and watch a lot of them right now. Learn how to tell when you need a new job, watch a conspicuously non-wired man in an avatar-filled world, see how insects are plotting to steal your refreshments, discover how Danica Patrick was enhanced, and get a jump start on getting this year's annoying SoBe Lifewater CG-lizard dance song stuck in your head.

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I’m not sure the Transformers commercials for GM cars is working like they planned, unless the goal was to leave me terrified of climbing into a 2009 Chevy Camaro for fear it would turn into a city-trashing behemoth with me still in it.

That wasn’t the message? It’s the one I got.

Many commercials seem oblivious to what viewers take away, relying on cuteness or snarkiness or just a love of weird CGI instead of, you know, promoting their product. I’d like to suggest that perhaps a bit more thought would be good.

What did I learn from the MasterCard commercial where zoo animals use an ailing zookeeper’s credit card to purchase helpful medicines and soothing refreshments for him while he remains sick at home? Why, I learned that identity theft is so easy with a MasterCard that a freaking elephant can use it and no one even asks for ID. Thanks MasterCard! Good to know!

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KFC — which is finally embracing their unhealthy roots again and going back to calling themselves "Kentucky Fried Chicken" — has decided to go for the flyover and alien market by creating an 87,500 sq. ft. image of Colonel Sanders in the Nevada desert, near the fabled ufologist hotspot Area 51. It is composed of 65,000 1'x1' colored tiles and is visible from space (image is from Google Earth; if you have the program installed click on it to view the deep fried visage yourself).

"If we hear back from a life form in space today – whether NASA astronauts or a signal from some life form on Mars – we'll send up some Original Recipe Chicken," said KFC President Gregg Dedrick, quoted in a Reuters article.

Which opens up a greasy cardboard bucket of questions. How, exactly, will they do this? Has the KFC Corporation secretly been developing their own space program to enable geosynchronous takeout? What about the other franchises? Are we just now finding out about a frantic fast food space race? How far away are Happy Meal payloads? What happens when the delivery gets to ISS and the astronauts discover they forgot the potato wedges? And is this the first step towards marketing to extraterrestrials, or is this a subtle way to stop alien attacks by clogging invaders with cholesterol?

These are exciting times, my friends.

The following is a paid political announcement from Americans for a Nicer America, a citizen's interest group formed for the sole purpose of paying for this commercial.

"Hello, I'm a candidate for an elected position. I believe in family, tradition, and God, whenever anybody's watching, and that's more than you'll get from my opponent if even half of the stuff I made up about him is true.

"I have served the needs of my constituents — keeping in mind that my accountant, car dealer, bookie, and mistress are all registered voters in my district — and I stand proudly on the parts of my record that I'll let you see. Big changes are necessary to bring this country around to the direction I want to go, and there's every chance that the people of America might benefit accidentally.

"Like with that bill I pushed forward that helped a lot of old people or something. I don't remember it, frankly, but I'm proud that I inadvertently helped so many people that weren't on my payroll. Vote for me, and it could happen again!

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The latest commercial from Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" movement is an illuminating one, especially if you've never really internalized the fact that models on magazine covers and advertisements are Photoshopped to within an inch of their lives. Everyone "knows" that, of course, but still there's that hidden (or not-so-hidden) belief that someone who looks like that actually exists somewhere outside of a Barbie box, and that if women just try hard enough — and buy the right things — they can look like that too.

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Soon Clark Kent will face the one foe that can control his actions and dictate his movements, and he won't be able to do a thing about it.

Advertisers.

When you watched "Smallville" last night, while you were grumbling about the 27 minutes of commercials for other CW shows that kept interrupting you from watching this one, and all with those green construction-paper style graphics that made you wonder if they decided to save money by hiring kids to do them — you might have missed this:

Chloe and Jimmy Olson were in a car in the woods at night. They talk, there's some playful banter… and they both stop, wrapped in their own thoughts, giving us plenty of time to clearly hear the commercial for the new Toyota Camry hybrid on the car radio. Ha! Take that, TiVo!

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Entertainment Weekly is terribly concerned about me.

It's touching, really. The little notes, the shy reminders, the e-mails. Perhaps I've forgotten? Maybe I didn't notice? They are so sorry for the intrusion but they know, with every fiber in their pages, the unbearable anguish I would surely feel were I to miss even a single issue and so they chide me, gently, affectionately, with discreet letters and whispered notices and great big honking wraparound covers with 72-point type that let people know from across the street my subscription will wither and die in just six more painfully short weeks.

I just laugh heartily and put it off another month, because that's the kind of guy I am.

It's fun to wait as long as possible to see just how far the company is willing to go to keep you signed up. I let the renewal notices stack up and measure 'em periodically against a ruler. So far EW is nowhere near the record (Science Fiction Book Club, 1982) but they're certainly presenting a respectable showing.

I already know I'll be renewing — I like EW — so the near-constant entreaties to come back and reaffirm my loyalty are just funny. It's a different thing entirely when I don't want the product or service, of course. Like the record club I finally escaped in 1984 that still sends out determined representatives to hide in my bushes, ready to sign me up again in a moment of weakness. Like the credit card that could only be canceled by traveling to a hidden valley in the Congo, defying deadly traps and mythic beasts, and bringing back the Emerald Eye of Raheesh before the month rolled over and another service charge could be added. My phone company wants my Internet business; my Internet provider wants to offer me phone service, and neither of them seems to understand the words "no," "I'm not interested," or "Seriously, I have a gun."

An even more persistent example of corporate clinginess was provided by blogger Vincent Ferrari last month when he attempted, foolishly, to cancel his unused AOL account. The recording of that attempt — long, agonizing, familiar-sounding minutes of the AOL retention rep continuing to deliver his "we-know-you-don't-really-want-to-cancel" spiel while a frustrated Ferrari was reduced to doggedly reciting "cancel my account" over and over — swept around the Internet for a few weeks and resulted in the firing of that rep, a public apology from AOL that declared this should never happen, and an avalanche of comments from people that declared it happens constantly. That's how devoted to you these companies are.

Companies love you. You're all they think about. And breakups are always rough for everyone involved.

Right now your phone service rep is lying across his or her desk, doodling hearts around your account number and hoping you'll prove your affection by signing up for more calling features. It's a true love, a lasting love, a love that can only be expressed by a 50%-or-higher retention rate.

Rather than get annoyed or frustrated, I suggest you enjoy it. I love it. It's like being the popular kid in school, in a sad, pathetic way. Suddenly everyone's after me, I'm the one they absolutely have to have, it's all about me, me, me! And my checking account, of course.

So I toy with them. I'm coy. When called, I dither about and finally say that maybe I'll renew, I just don't know… Once I even called my cellphone salesperson while I was standing in front of her competitor's booth in the mall, shamelessly flirting with a new 2-year contract, just to hear her beg me to stay. Oh, I'm a hussy, no two ways about it.

And I'm getting worse. Next time I get calls for Internet access I'm thinking of inviting the reps over to have them fight it out in my front yard, possibly with rakes. The winner, assuming one survives, can crawl inside and hook up my new service .

As long as I'm not bothered. I'll be too busy reading my Entertainment Weekly.

Bowing to the pressures of the fiercely competitive market, struggling television networks The WB and UPN announced yesterday that they would merge into a new network called "CW" in a move that stunned millions of shocked viewers who had never heard of either network before.

Both networks have been competing for the same 18-34 year-old viewers, even to the point of entering random houses at night and forcing hapless teenagers to watch "One Tree Hill" at gunpoint. But neither UPN or The WB have achieved financial success despite the brilliant, envelope-pushing marketing of, respectively, a schizophrenic Star Trek show and an animated frog.

Now with this new venture, named after the first letters of current network owners CBS (Corporation) and Wacko Warner (Animaniac), CW has the opportunity to trim back the failing shows, push the good ones, and otherwise cram everything together into a programming juggernaut of well-meaning mediocrity. It can't fail.

So, coming this fall, the new CW lineup!

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Just recently my wife and I picked up the first two seasons of "Smallville" and settled down for a few weeks of four-show-a-night binging. After skipping the whole 3rd season for medical reasons we wanted to look back and remind ourselves why we watched it in the first place (Hint: Lex).

Soon afterwards the new season started and, fresh from our newly reawakened "Smallville" appreciation, we eagerly tuned in to the WB's Thursday night. And we hated it.

Not the show, mind you. The experience of regular broadcast television.

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Time for some random ponderings over items that have recently confused or bothered me. These are the sorts of things I think about during traffic lights and long Web page loads instead of thinking about anything, you know, useful.

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Planned Parenthood recently filed lawsuits over "Choose Life" license plates, claiming that offering only one side of an issue was a violation of First Amendment rights. South Carolina State Rep. John Graham Altman, probably only half joking, suggested that "Choose Death" license plates be issued as an alternative. Now, there's no way I'm jumping in the middle of this particular hot button controversy, but you know what?

I really, really want a "Choose Death" license plate.

Not to express any specific philosophical views, but because it's just vague and unsettling enough that people would give me plenty of room on the highway for fear I might suddenly make my choice on the I-95 overpass.
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