J'adore Jon & Charlize

TV Commercials I love ... and a few I don't

Hello Complaints Department? I want to register my displeasure with your ads.

I don’t watch a lot of TV – at least not the kind that has commercials - so I tend to pay attention and give a very critical eye to the ads when I see them.

I know a bit about demographics and also find the psychology behind marketing quite interesting, but I am just going to lay it out there - most of these expensive attempts to get me to buy something are just plain stupid. They seem to be written by people who have never, and would never, buy whatever they’re schilling, but I think my biggest beef are the ads that don’t have any relationship with what they’re selling at all and leave you wondering what in fact the product is.

Not that I dislike every single ad. I loved that old commercial for j’adore with a glamorous and gorgeous Charlize Theron waltzing down a long hallway in a luxurious Parisian apartment, flinging pieces of her jewellery and designer duds this way and that.

And I do absolutely love the Skip the Dishes ads.

I never really paid much attention to Jon Hamm – never watched Mad Men – but I now firmly believe he should be in EVERY commercial – about EVERYTHING.

There is a scene with a family in a car moving very slowly through traffic to get to dinner. Inexplicably, Hamm is seated in the middle of the third row of the vehicle. As with all of his ads for Skip the Dishes, you think, what the heck is he doing there?

With some clever wordplay, the dynamic between one kid in particular and Hamm is quite funny. He says “you shoulda Skipped it” and the kid retorts “we shoulda skipped YOU”. I not only know exactly what the product is, and what it does, I am being entertained - and now have a new insult to mutter under my breath!

But then there is the other food delivery service ad for, honestly, I don’t know their company name. I just know they use the premise of zombie like weirdos crawling / dancing to the door to pick up half a bag of groceries, (or is it restaurant food – not clear). Each ad has a different bizarre scenario but all share the same gibberish music that starts with “eeny meeny, pusscalini” - or something like that.

The worst of these has a woman with a dozen or so very young children, all wreaking havoc in a hall of a house that seems to go on endlessly, who dances maniacally to the front door, assaulting some guy in her way, to grab a half-filled bag of, I don’t know, drugs maybe? ‘Cause whatever was delivered sure isn’t enough food to feed a family of 14 or more.

As I said, the commercial is for some sort of a delivery service but I don’t know which one and frankly would avoid it if I did know, if only to punish them for that goddamn song which I now can’t get out of my head.

Now I don’t expect anything said in an ad to necessarily be true. Quite the opposite. If I hear “clinically” in front of proven or tested or researched, I know that every single thing they claim in the commercial is undoubtedly a lie.

You have a clinically proven formula to cure the memory loss of Alzheimer’s? Well geez, how come some big pharma company hasn’t scooped up this amazing discovery and turned it into a multi-billion dollar boost for their shareholders?

Hair loss? Looky here! A supplement that will make your hair grow like Rapunzel without being locked away in a tower! It’s clinically tested!

And then there are the commercials for the mainstream, everyday stuff. You know, laundry detergent and toilet paper and cars and trucks and actual prescription drugs that actually do something, although I tend to avoid anything that cites anal leakage as a possible side effect.

It is clear that some big money is going into the production of these things, especially when an actually famous or semi-famous person is plugging the item.

There is a commercial out right now for a cellular service. Which cellular service you ask? I haven’t a clue, but I know Billy Bob Thornton is in the ad. Why him? Why would the ad agency and marketing department that hired them think I would want to buy anything from that strange old dude, that I honestly thought had died a few years ago? Wait, maybe he is dead. I googled him and he is still alive but I want to know who sat around a room and said, “Hey, you know that weird actor who carried around Angelina Jolie’s blood in a locket? Billy Joe Something? Let’s put him in an ad.” I guess Ed Norton was busy?

I am going to leave this rant describing one last commercial that irks me.

First, it is for a product for people who have a washing machine but don’t like using it very often and prefer to cover up the odour that comes with dirty stuff as if they live in 17^th century France where bathing is optional and perfume is used abundantly to mask the stench of the great unwashed.

Second, it is called Unstopables. That is how it is actually spelled which means someone in product development at Downy / Procter & Gamble either didn’t notice the mistake until after it went into production and 1.6 million labels for the containers for the crap had already been ordered, or perhaps they thought it was somehow clever to misspell unstoppable? Like the New Coke, I suspect no one ever admitted the real reason they dropped the second p, but it bugs me and I would like to know who to blame.

I fixed it. Just waiting for someone from P&G to send a cheque.

The actress in the ad is not famous, but she is actually pretty good because she almost looks like maybe she really believes covering up smelly stuff with chemicals instead of actually cleaning them is a good thing, as Martha would say.

At one point, she says she “was concerned that the scent would be overwhelming, but it was the exact opposite and was the perfect amount”. I thought the exact opposite of overwhelming was underwhelming, but apparently it is not. According to Downy, it is perfect.

She then proceeds to tell us that her dog’s blanket still smells great weeks after washing and indeed her family sleeps in dirty bed sheets - but they smell really great too so not to worry that they are in fact, filthy.

Her voice trails off at the end, as if even she can’t bear to say one more stupid thing from the script even if the commercial may mean her acting career could take off any minute now and she wouldn’t have to do these things anymore, at least until she becomes famous and starts making the big bucks selling shit no one needs. I wish her the best of luck.

If you got this far, I want to thank you for reading my little diatribe. (I already used the word rant and jeremiad seemed a bit too precious.)

Let me know about the commercials you hate the most and why!