April 5, 2007
From the desk of Jane Galt:Question of the day
What is the deal with those commercials like the ones for Hot Pockets featuring creepily cheerful families booming out bizarrely unconvincing dialogue as they stare into the camera with identical rictus grins.
Posted by Jane Galt at April 5, 2007 11:18 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksIs that dialogue more or less convincing that the notion that Axe body spray causes women to charge through the jungle in bikinis to get at the guy wearing it?
Are the families more or less creepy than the men in the fishing boat suffering from reduced semen volume as a result of their prostate drugs?
Just curious
I think it's meant to be ironicalish, with a side of pop-culture reference. Evidently, the kids today flip for that sort of thing. Mike Myers has a lot to answer for.
I haven't seen the Hot Pockets ads, but the ironicalish comment above is probably right. But I've wondered the same thing about those irritating "are you gellin'?" ads...surely, they can't be serious, but if they're trying to be funny and ironic, they're failing so spectacularly.
Agree with Dave.
One more thing: The very fact that you ask this question is in itself a case in point. Advertisers want people to remember their ads.
The commercials that annoy me the most are the ones that show men as buffoons and idiots, of course women are never portrayed in that manner. One particularly bad yet typical one is for a brand of microwaveable cakes and brownies called Warm Delights. A man and a woman are riding on an elevator when the woman starts thinking of Warm Delights. She closes her eyes and starts making soft moans. The resemblance to an orgasm is, I am sure, 100% intentional. The befuddled man looks at her, and you can almost read his mind: "What, in the name of Christ, is this crazy chick doing???" The woman then opens her eyes and catches the man looking at her, and of course he is completely humiliated.
Notice the extreme double standard; a woman is perfectly free to orgasm over the mere thought of high-calorie junk food, but if a man dares look at her, he's a disgraceful loser.
Of course you'll never see commercials that portray women is anything but a favorable light. A commercial showing a woman as a lazy, Oprah-worshiping housewife whose husband works 12 hours a day to support the family? Don't hold your breath waiting to see it.
What's particularly disturbing is the fact that the advertising people behind these male-humiliating commercials are likely to be predominately male themselves. Women watch much more non-sports TV than men, and influence a substantial percentage of buying decisions, so there may be an economic basis for such egregiously anti-male (and, by implication, pro-female) commercials, but that doesn't make them morally right.
Most national ads are pretty self aware these days. With the Hot Pockets or the Axe body spray and things of that ilk, I think the idea is that both the creators and the viewers are all in on the joke. Though self-aware ads may not be any less annoying, if you want truly oblivious clunkers, you've got to look towards local advertising these days.
Far and away the most absurd campaign I ever saw was when I lived in Rochester, NY, I would guess sometime during the fall of 2002. Of course, in upstate NY, there are only two kinds of local advertisements: Car dealers and personal injury attorneys. You really do get the impression that all people do up there is buy new cars and then crash them into motorcycles.
Anyway, the typical personal injury ad is of course a lawyer talking all sentimentally about how your rights deserve to be protected blah blah blah and how his firm has the strength to do that blah blah blah. But this one firm (it wasn't named after a partner, it had a rather generic name I believe) started off with an add just showing images of various car accidents with a rather alarmed voice over and some text. Not so bad yet, as far as these things go. The second add in the series took it up a notch though: Now, instead of real car crashes, it was showing scenes of chases and wrecks from old movies, and as the ad goes on, suddenly we see ninjas fighting, shoot outs happening. Ad ends with a car flipping through mid air and exploding. Mind you this all while the voice over is talking about getting you cash for accident. Pretty funny. Well the last ad in the series, they simply abandon reality (at least in terms what you'll find in a personal injury case) and just use stock footage from actual wars. Tanks firing, helicopters overhead, guys in gas masks, missiles flying everywhere. The add culminates, I shit you not, with a nuclear explosion. I remember being utterly stunned the first time I saw it. Literally the only thing they could have done to go farther was show the twin towers coming down. But still, the whole escalating campaign really was a thing of sublime beauty for its sheer absurdity.
I'd like to think I have a little bit more faith in human nature than to believe the ads worked, but the guys producing them certainly made enough spots and bought enough airtime that they seemed to think so.
Wow, people still watch commercial television?
For an irritating commercial featuring an idiot man, it doesn't get any worse than the "Spongebob. . . no pants" ad that Burger King is currently running. I'm so glad I can boycott the place without changing my eating habits.
Come on, people!
Have you ever tried Hot Pockets?
They are all good things to all people...in pocket-form. HOT pocket-form.
My least favorite commercials are for cars. Other than VW (which stink for non-standard reasons), they are all dead serious. They usually portray someone ooh-ing and ah-ing over a mid-size sedan that looks exactly like every other mid-size sedan on the road.
The salesgenie commercial from the Superbowl was so 80's-cheesy that I wondered if it was badly produced or supposed to be ironic.
The message?
Hot Pockets are more addictive than crack cocaine.
These kind of ads are useful to viewers because they remind them that life could be so much worse.
mtc,
That ad campaign actually sounds completely self-aware and hilarious.
Mini-me, are you hungry? Would you like a Hot Pocket?
Not to sound stupid or anything, but exactly what is a "self aware" commercial? Does it mean that the advertisers know the viewers aren't taking it seriously? If so, how does that differ from any comedy-themed commercial?
i actually am a self-actualized buffoon and idiot, so i always feel better about myself when men are stupid on tv commercials.
i think it takes a special kind of guy to feel like someone's trying to chop off his crank simply because a tv commercial portrayed the humiliation of a man. then again, nobody has ever accused me of being particularly sensitive.
I guess I said self-aware, because the previous comment seemed to imply that the insurance company wasn't aware that this was a funny set-up, using the archival footage of increasingly large and irrelevant disasters. But more broadly speaking, of course there's a huge difference between intentionally funny and unintentionally funny.
Hot Pockets! The Mentos of the 21 century.
mtc, that ad sounds awesome. Perhaps you could do a youtube search for the benefit of the group?
Two points spring to my mind. First, is that the 'father knows best' parody commercial is standard fare. Not glitzy, the fact that it is a commercial, the way the product is featured, all are standard fare. Comfortable, moderately successful. Done before, cheap to produce.
The other point is that research continues to show that annoying ads, not artistic or interesting ads, sell more product.
But then, I consider the frequent interruption of a program for commercials, and the succession of 30 and 60 second commercials, to be the destruction of modern concentration, and the cause of attention deficit disorders. Unlike a novel where the mind dwells for an extended period in a world provided by the author, or in a technical book with minimum distractions, commercial TV and radio jerk and snatch at our attention. If we consider a child interrupting a conversation to be rude, how can we think that ads designed to distract us onto an unrelated topic will be good for us?
That is just my thought.
Megan, you have to have seen some of the worst commercials that are running in the Washington area these days: Empire Today flooring company. They combine the owner's very soft, creepy voice, with the MOST ANNOYING JINGLE EVER. The jingle accomplishes this feat by sounding wrong. I kid you not. You hear the jingle and the melody is all jacked up in a perverse way. But I'll tell you what, because of that god-awful jingle I will never forget their phone number, which is exactly what they were aiming for.
I suspect the Hot Pocket commercials are attempting the same thing: to annoy the customer so much as to force them to remember it.
Megan, you have to have seen some of the worst commercials that are running in the Washington area these days: Empire Today flooring company. They combine the owner's very soft, creepy voice, with the MOST ANNOYING JINGLE EVER ... But I'll tell you what, because of that god-awful jingle I will never forget their phone number, which is exactly what they were aiming for.
(music) 800 588-2300, Empire! (/music)
Almost as corny as the music are the crude claymation figures.
I'm surprised the ads run in Washington, because they're on all the time in the New York area and I figured it was a local outfit.
Shows you how effective that ad is. I haven't lived in Chicago or owned a TV in 3 years and I can still remember the 588-2300 EMPIRE jingle.
That they completely succeeding in fooling everyone in the nation that they are a small company and not a nationwide one is even better. Support the little guys!
This guy agrees on the Hot Pockets issue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUVmSBGyKm0
I keep hearing all these reasons to shoot the TV, but not enough sounds of pistols cocking. Why is this?
Of course you'll never see commercials that portray women is anything but a favorable light.
For a long time, I have attributed this situation to the following. All men know that, from time to time, they will do things that all women will categorize as stupid. As a result, men are willing to accept other men doing stupid things in commercials. "At least this time it wasn't me," or "Even I'm not that dumb." So men can find it funny.
Women never seem to find other women doing dumb things in commercials to be amusing.
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