The Blogg

Football season, Conan moving to the Tonight Show, and new episodes of The Office, House, and Family Guy mean that I have been watching a relatively large amount of television recently. I could record everything and then skip commercials while watching later, but they do not generally bother me that much. I’ve said it before: if you introduce me to a product that I was previously unaware of and have a use for, there is a very good chance your advertisement might lead to a sale. If you provide me with valuable information or a good laugh and all other things are equal, I might choose you over a competitor as thanks. But awful advertisements guarantee that I will never, ever be a customer of yours.

We are now in the Scranton / Wilkes-Barre market, although fairly far away from those cities, and there are some truly terrible commercials for local businesses. Toyota Scion of Scranton is the worst of the worst. I cannot find a video, so you will have to imagine the awfulness from my description. The basic, moronic premise of the advertisement is that you should choose the dealership from which you buy your car based on your small child’s preference, rather than price, service, or anything else. The tagline is “Don’t let your kid get hosed, come to Toyota Scion of Scranton!”. Along the way we get to see simply dreadful acting by a young boy, a girl who somehow cannot speak clearly, and incredibly annoying spring sound effects as the girl jumps around washing a car in giant boots. They have a second one in which the girl is at the dealership and still bad, but not nearly on the same level.

The runner-up in awful commercials for local businesses is attorneys Lenahan & Dempsey. I like the premise of their clip: that insurance companies are evil money-grubbing entities making the rich richer, and that the only way to get a fair deal from them is with the services of these lawyers. While it is a bit over the top, the type of people in a position to need their services are probably already in this frame of mind. But the acting is again positively heinous. A very old, rich looking man either laughingly turns down claims or explains doing so to his grandchildren (depending on the ad), then reacts in horror when he finds that the people he has been saying “no” to have called Lenahan & Dempsey. You can see one of these for yourself at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoo3v3rVqDA. You might think that lawyers might want to maintain some dignity so that they can look their clients, opposing counsel, and judges in the eye, but apparently not,

I believe We Do Metal Roofs is actually a national organization, but perhaps not. Their commercial does not include gimmicky acting and actually explains why their service may be economical in the long run, so it sounds like exactly the kind of advertisement I would praise. There are very amateurish graphics, but I can live with that. What makes this terrible is that at several points in the clip there is a very loud siren-like sound. Presumably the intent is to attract your attention even if you have been tuning it out, but the result is that I want to punch whoever wrote it.

Southwest Airlines is running several different commercials focusing on the fact that they have no luggage fees, which is fine. In one of them a woman says “$20 for the first bag, then $30 for the next — round-trip that’s almost $100!”. Yeah, I guess $100 is almost $100 under a loose definition of almost. There was one more that I wanted to complain about, but I cannot seem to remember what it was. If I come up with it, I will update.

Bonus note: I generally do not really watch Late Night with Jimmy Fallon because it is almost pathetic how unfunny he is. Since it does come on after the Tonight Show, however, I usually have it on in the background. I was very pleased to happen to hear Chick Corea sitting in with house band The Roots tonight, playing snippets from “Spain” and other great songs. Also the musical guest is They Might Be Giants. This should make it worth watching even if I have to sit through an embarrassing monologue and “lick it for 10″.

UPDATE: Having seen it again, I now remember what the other questionable advertisement was. Verizon is running one in which, to save money, the patriarch of a household turns off the hot water, only drives halfway to locations and makes his daughter walk the rest of it, and eschews electric lighting. In addition, he switches the family’s cell service to Verizon. This is ok, but do you really want to leave viewers with the impression that becoming one of your customers is a sacrifice on this level? I guess they can get away with this because they have run so many other commercials lauding the quality of their service, but it seems like someone did not quite think it through.

UPDATE 2: You can see the We Do Metal Roofs example at http://www.metalroofs.tv/index2.html, it is the first one with the woman standing in front of the American Flag pickup truck.