Stupid commercials...

Commercials, good or bad, don't affect me at all. Not once since I was a child has a commercial directly convinced me to buy a product or use a service.
I'm a market researcher's worst nightmare: when I watch a television spot, I see things evidently nobody else does, and I miss what everybody else sees, to the point where I often have no idea what it was I just watched.

Here's one current example. It's for the Mazda 6 series of automobiles, and if you've seen a Leafs game this year you've seen this commercial about thirty thousand times already. They've personified the guy's arm hair--stop laughing, I haven't even got to the funny part yet--and it muses about how it (the hair) is 'getting a real workout today'. Cue the narrator as the Mazda 'zoom-zooms' by: "All in favour of a car that drives like this...and looks like this...raise your hair."

That must be one scary automobile, friends and neighbours, because all the guy's hairs go up. I wouldn't drive it, not if merely looking at it caused your hackles to rise up. I'd run away. Fast.

Then there's the Coors Light spot where a guy presses a button on a remote control and causes a Coors truck to do the hokey-pokey As the truck bounces up and down, his friend asks him if he thinks it's a good idea. He says sure, and we cut to people in a house opening up cans of Coors Light, which blow merry hell all over everyone.
I'm sorry, guys: I don't turn my brain off just because my show's got a minute or two of hiatus. First of all, it's taken a MINIMUM of a couple of hours for that truck to be unloaded, the shaken-up product merchandised and sold, driven home and opened up. Am I seriously supposed to believe it's kept up such an explosive level of pressure all that time? I call bullshit. I've shaken up a few beer cans in my time, and I can tell you they go flat almost instantly if they aren't popped immediately.
Even granting this commercial a limited exemption from the laws of physics, what exactly is its point? That if you buy Coors Light you're going to get stains on your clothes and maybe a quarter of every can you open? Sorry--I'll stick with some other beer brand.

Kia Rio--which had a really good commercial a couple of years back featuring a demonic shopping cart--has a questionable spot on their reputation now: two robbers drive a Rio like maniacs, breaking about fifty traffic laws, 'til they get to a tarp-covered bait-and-switch car: doff
the tarp and we have...another Kia Rio. Bravo, Kia, you've just marketed your car to scofflaws everywhere.

The examples are legion. There is an underarm deodorant out on the market that somebody's christened 'Avalanche'. Who dreamed that one up? Yes, avalanches have an odor: DEATH.

There are some slogans so annoying they stick in your craw for years. You had to be here for this one, which ran on Woodstock, Ontario FM radio in 1990-91: "When you think freshness, naturally you think...(said all in a blur) Beckett Farmer's Market two-two-five Riddell Street Woodstock.
Ugh. The fact they played that one every three minutes did nothing to increase its appeal. Have I remembered it for fifteen years? Yup. Have I ever been to Beckett Farmer's Market two two five Riddell Street Woodstock? Not on your life.

Tampon commercials. Now, being a man, the slightest THOUGHT of Aunt Flo from Red River completely icks me out. Do they really need to show these commercials anytime a man might be watching? Especially at suppertimes, when I just might be eating fish stew? Don't you girls find out about these things from your mother?
Anyway, they've got one out right now that shows a guy and a girl in a canoe out on the middle of a lake. All of a sudden, a hole appears in the bottom of the boat--it's magic!--and the girl heroically dams the flow with her tampon.
I think all the ad execs who dreamed this dreck up ought to be forced to test it. Say, in Lake Superior: the deepest of the Great Lakes. Coldest, too.