Dang's Weblog

There was just this weird Burger King commercial where there were all these people grilling next to the side of, otherwise empty, scenic roads. Apparently, we’re supposed to connect grilling in the wild (using a Webber grill, no less) with Burger King. Somehow. Decidedly odd.

Then, there’s this glasses commercial where the kid says “Cool! I get to choose two?”, refering to picking glasses. Now, no kid I’ve ever met wants glasses.

Then there’s the whole slew of “Don’t ever try what we’re doing in this commercial, or you’re surely die.” commercials. Car commercials do this a lot, with spin outs, and slides sideways, and huge plooms of dust, and so on. Apparently, the fact that their car slides a lot is supposed to make me want it.

Then there’s NetZero HiSpeed. They say “You can surf the net up to 5x faster”, but the small type says “Does not speed up data transfer or downloads”, so what’s faster?

Then, there’s the “Returning employee-leasees get this incredible lease, but you can’t get it, nyah nyah nyah” car commercials. It makes me want to say, “Why bother even trying to find out how much the bloody car costs, when the only price that’s low enough they can quote it on TV is the returning employee price.” Of course, the ones where that don’t say that also have enormous restrictions, they just put it into the tiny type.

In general, commercials suck because they can say anything they want, as long as they say “Just kidding, we lied” in small type at the bottom, usually with such bad contrast you can’t read it. Sometime, I admit I pause commercials in the Tivo to read the tiny type, just to see what kind of junk they’re trying to pull over on me.

Now, I can’t be the only person who completely discounts all quoted prices in TV adds. Not one of them is a price you can actually get, because, if nothing else, the stars won’t align right. I know this, others must know this too. So, why do they do it? It must work, and work often enough to be worth it. This means that people are even worse morons than I thought they were. I mean, if the people like me, who realize commercials are pure bunk, are just noise in the demographic, then the masses are truely asses, and not only in groups. Frankly, I’m scared.

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