Posts Tagged ‘ads’

Hey, I really appreciate you lettin' me bring this to you, but who else would have the vision, capiche? I got your next five Oscars just waitin' to make you some serious bank, are you ready for the love?

I'm tellin' you, this comic book thing ain't gonna last, you got me? Spider-Man, Batman, Superman, maybe a Sin City, that Whedon chick's Wonder Woman, and what's left? All the A-list heroes will be used up, studios will be lucky to bag the next Catwoman, you see what I'm sayin'?

Turn more old TV shows into movies? There's a "Starsky and Hutch" or "Bewitched" to stink up your bottom line. Cartoons? Shoot for "Scooby Doo," you get "Looney Tunes: Back in Action" and then nobody answers your phone calls no more.

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OK, guys? Seriously? We're not idiots, even if your market research seems to think so.

Right now you're wasting untold millions on advertising campaigns that actually turn me away from your products, and that's not in either of our best interests. Let me give you some advice before I abandon consumerism entirely and just walk around with a rice bowl.

Don't scream. It frightens me. When I hear you shrieking about insane, end-of-the-year, below-factory-invoice, no-money-down deals, I start taking side streets to avoid your car lot because I'm honestly afraid you've escaped from somewhere and taken over the radio station by force looking for hostages with good credit, bad credit, or even no credit.

Please, please stop using phrases like "Up to 50% off!" We know what "up to" means. We know what "up yours" means, too.

You're wasting your time with the commercials of smiling wives and retired football stars and Bob Dole. It's painfully obvious that you're just trying to make me insecure enough in my masculinity so that I'll buy your vaguely described products in a desperate bid to revive my no-doubt lagging marriage. Ha! I laugh at your feeble attempts. I was insecure in my masculinity for years before you came along.

You almost had me with this one, but it turns out that $1.95 is actually closer to two dollars than it is to one dollar, even though it also starts with a "1." I'll admit you had me going for a while there, but I sat down and worked it out with a pencil until I got the hang of it.

All the free gifts in the world aren't enough to blind me to the 27 1/2% interest rate ("compounded bi-hourly!") hidden on the credit card application, even when it's written in teeny, tiny type on the inside flap of the envelope. In white ink. Backwards. In Navajo.

The bikini girls hanging on guys who drink the right beers? No luck. I don't know about you, but my self-esteem doesn't require blatant social reinforcement. Although, bikini girls… no! Bad advertisers! Bad!

"Collectors Items" never are. Special offers that are available only if I order "before midnight tonight!" lose their punch after the first week or so. "Limited Offers" are never limited enough.

A free gift that requires me to pay anything, for any reason, is – and this will shock many of you — not a free gift. "Free" does not mean "free with purchase" or "free with postage and handling" or "free with rebate." "Free" means you give it to me and I don't have to do anything after that. Let me know if I'm going too fast, here.

I want to go to a fast food restaurant and demand a burger that looks like the dynamic, plump, delicious-looking half-pound showcase on their poster. Not what I usually get, which more closely resembles a brake pad with cheese that's been assembled by blind, spastic chimps on espresso.

No matter how hard you try to make think that wearing your clothes will make me feel better about myself, it's not gonna work. Especially if it involves stretch weave.

Whenever I hear the phrase "Not sold in any store," I always gleefully add, "thanks to your local Better Business Bureau!" Sorry, can't help it, it's one of those compulsions you read about. At least I've stopped giggling in public when it happens.

I'm confused by salespeople who have known me all of twenty seconds but tell me something like, "I'm going to give you a break because I like you." So why, us being such good friends and all, couldn't he just give it to me? I never buy from people like this, but I do wink at them and smile coquettishly.

I realize I'm being crankier than usual today. There are indeed good businesses with fun and honest advertising, and they get my business because of it. I don't know what's come over me.

I've just been feeling kind of insecure lately…

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission set up a National Do Not Call registry so people who register their phone numbers will no longer receive unwanted telemarketing calls. There was some slight interest in this service: 7 million numbers were added the first day and the FTC had to scramble to add more resources to keep the site from crashing.

It seems people really, really hate telemarketers. Who knew?

(It was ironic, however, that the confirmation e-mails that the DoNotCall.gov Web site automatically sent out upon registration were initially interpreted as spam — unwanted electronic telemarketing — and tagged by several Web-based e-mail services.)

I was one of those 7 million registrees. Actually I was three of them, since I registered my home phone and our cell phones. And yet, in some ways I'm going to miss telemarketing. It was dependable. It was a connection to a larger world out there, a world that desperately wanted to talk to me about my interest rates.

I'll have to set my alarm more carefully, since now I have a chance of sleeping past 8 a.m. without being awoken with exciting news about aluminum siding. Long, leisurely, uninterrupted showers are going to show up on my higher electric bill. I anticipate a noticeable weight gain from completed dinners, and we'll have to find an acceptable substitute for the utterly trustworthy birth control offered by the alert and eerily well-timed credit card company sales force.

Most of all, I'll miss the entertainment value. Unwanted calls can be annoying, exasperating, and frustrating. But if you were in the right frame of mind — playful, whimsical, malevolent — it might have dawned on you that you had a captive audience on the line, one that was determined to stay there until their message was delivered. A prank phone call you didn't have to dial. And since they intruded on you, ordinary rules of politeness need not apply.

If the callers were out of state, I'd ask about the vacation possibilities wherever they were, or the weather. I once had a very long, very pleasant talk with one nice lady in Seattle, a place I've always wanted to visit, about the local club scene.

Calls praising the glories of a particular credit card were met with pathetic gratitude. "Oh, thank you! Ever since my insurance scam went bad I've been so broke you wouldn't believe it! But with your new credit card — 0% interest the first six months, you say? — I can work on this new gig I've got cooking. Thank y- hello?"

A friend of mine named Brian delighted in seeing how long he could keep a telemarketer on the phone. He'd pretend to be wildly interested in their product, asking questions and gasping at all the ways their product would improve his life, and he'd excuse himself to get a pen. Then the battle of wills would begin. He would wander around the house, visit the bathroom, play video games, and then dash back to the phone and apologize profusely, saying he knew there was a pen around somewhere, could they please give him just another minute? Legend has it that he successfully kept a vacuum-packed meat salesman on the line for the entire first quarter of the 1999 Superbowl (Broncos v. Falcons), returning during the commercials, but this was never substantiated.

But the most fun we ever had was with a funeral home. Usually phone solicitations for plots and services were met with quick dismissals ("I'm sorry, we eat our dead. Thanks for calling!") but my wife answered during a moment of weakness and agreed to accept coupons for a burial plot we didn't want. She gave our address and a good time to talk, and then forgot all about it until the salesman called back saying he was in our area and looking for our house. Somehow she hadn't picked up on the implied invitation to talk in person.

He was very pleasant and friendly, and certainly the person I would approach to buy a burial plot, but he was remarkably resistant to our polite insistence that we didn't want one. The fun began when he asked Teresa, "If something, God forbid, ever happened to your husband, what would be most on your mind?"

She answered, in all seriousness, "My alibi."

He laughed and said, "No, seriously, have you taken steps to prepare for that situation?"

I assured him that she had, and that, sparing no expense, she had invested in the really good garbage disposal, the one that can handle bones.

Like a judo master, he used that to segue smoothly into why burial was better than cremation as cremation may not always do the job and the skull may be left intact, which was a mistake because he had inadvertently succeeded in getting Teresa interested. "Really?" she said, leaning forward. "Would they let me have it? Could I put it on the mantelpiece?" That led to a furious husband-wife argument, which he patiently sat through, as I refused to allow her to display my skull unless she first got my teeth done.

When further discussions of our afterlife plans and the legacies for our future generations kept including the words "mulch," "reincarnation," and "Hefty Cinch Sack," he finally gave up. We thanked him for a fun and instructive evening.

Since then we have never gotten a call from a funeral home, no matter where we were, which made me wonder if we had been put on their Don't-Call list.

You've seen the offers in your e-mail! You've gotten the piles of junk mail at your front door! You've seen the amazing offers televised as late night "local programming"! But now, for a limited time only, thanks to this website, you can get all these insider secrets for absolutely free! Jealously-guarded tips from the world's greatest lovers, previously available only through mail-order books and court transcripts, are yours for the taking! You'll never need to read your spam again. Or any of your e-mail, just delete it all, because we've covered everything!

How to Get Any Woman You Want

It's just so easy! All you have to do is to work out, plan your finances carefully, and take sensitivity courses until you become a nice, hot-looking rich guy. What could be easier? Other suggestions:

- Carry Godiva chocolates with you at all times.
- Pay them.
- Tell them that by dating you they can drive their mother crazy.
- Keep a "lover's kit" in your car: romantic card, sensual (but not tacky) lingerie, silk flowers, burlap sack, ether.
- Get a fatal but non-catching disease, and contact the Make-A-Wish foundation.

You'll be rolling in women in no time!

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