I’m
starting to realize that so long as there are commercials on TV I will always
hate them. Thankfully I’m watching less
and less TV because of it. It also doesn’t
help that I may very well be the last person on earth not to embrace the DTV
conversion which just makes my television viewing experience even worse now
that the image is stretched to fit the new widescreen format and somehow my
reception is even worse than it was before the switch which is what we were promised
when the switch was made. At least with
the analog format you could see through the static and didn’t lose your picture
entirely. For these reasons and many
more I have pretty much stopped watching TV but it can’t help that stupid ad
campaigns had a little to contribute to that.
So let’s take a look at the new series of commercials that are pissing
me off.
There’s
a lot of reasons I find this ad tiring.
2. It reminds me of those stupid ad wars Verizon had with AT&T with coverage maps and those commercials managed to make both ATT&T and Verizon like petty obsessive assholes. Why the hell would you want to do that? Why the hell would anyone want to do that?! Proving your superiority by attacking your competition in ads is equivalent of the big guy on the playground pushing everyone around. Every time you do it it doesn’t make you look bigger better or stronger it just makes you look like an asshole. How bout this, instead of attacking your competitor by stating how much better you are you prove your product or service is good all on its own.
There's an ass for that
3. It's a lot like those Geico ads I bitched about last time that offer information with nothing to back it up. I love how cell phone commercials will provide you with “research” that you can either take at face value or look up yourself. I guess that makes them the Fox News of the commercial world. I don’t know who has the best coverage and quite frankly I don’t give a shit. Ya know what kind of phone I have? I have an old tracfone that only has basic access to the internet and I almost never lose calls. Accuse me of being old fashioned if you will but I really don’t see the need to use a phone for every conceivable thing but a damn phone. It’s more important to me that I get to talk to the people I need to talk to rather than download useless apps, access the internet(if I need to do that I’ll use a damn computer), or play games.
4. I get the joke. The bar graph drastically shows how superior Verizon is to their competitors but you’ve got to take me for an idiot if you want me to think Verizon has that much of an edge. If this “research” is true it would mean that T-Mobile has absolutely no coverage at all and Verizon has at least 4 times as much as their closest competitor.
5. What the flying fuck is LTE?! It took me the longest time to understand what the term 4G was when it started popping up in commercials. I’m starting to think this is a tactic cell phone providers are employing to confuse the shit out of consumers. Let’s introduce an industry term, abbreviate it so it appears more confusing, use the term casually making the consumer assume that he or she should already know what it means confusing them even more, and finally give them “research” about said confusing term until they’re so confused they believe 2+2=5 and gravity doesn’t exist.
6. There is no way on earth I believe this was a real focus group. Just imagine if political candidates employed this same tactic in their campaign ads. They’d be exposed for the frauds they are and no one would vote for them. But I guess it’s perfectly normal for a cell phone company to hire actors and provide fraudulent data. I can’t place it but I swear I’ve seen that lady that says, “It doesn’t really matter how you present it.” in another commercial.
On top of all these flaws I just find it grating and annoying just like almost every commercial. I didn't find it funny, cute, or informative(I'm assuming these were the aims of this commercial) the first time and every time after that it just gets worse and worse.
Confession
time; I hate Apple and most Apple products.
I even take issue with Apple users for their high and mighty dependence
on the company. I use a PC and I like it
that way so it pains me that Microsoft is now the object of my ire. I also use Google as a search engine. I remember about ten or so years ago when I overheard
a tech nerd talking to one of his buddies where he confessed that yahoo’s
search sucked and he didn’t use. Yahoo
was the search engine I was using at the time and I couldn’t understand his disapproval
of it. After all even though he thought
it sucked(for reasons he didn’t bother to go into to) I found it user friendly
and always found the page I was looking for.
Now I hear about people going on about Bing and I use Google. I’m perfectly happy using Google. As far as I’m concerned all search engines
are created equally and there’s nothing you can say to convinced me otherwise,
plus I’m just stuck in my ways and unwilling to change.
Just
like the Geico taste test commercial this is a supposedly blind internet search
test. What bothers me about this is they
show the reactions of these people and them admitting Bing is better but we’re
not allowed to see the results of their web searches making their opinions that
“Bing is better” completely void. If the
intended result of the ad was to convince me to switch from Google to Bing I’m
gonna need a little more information than random people saying it is. At least the people they snagged for this
commercial look more like normal people and less like actors. This commercial is bad but I don’t find it
nearly as irritating as most commercials.
If
you read my last article about annoying commercials it should come as no
surprise to you that Geico made the cut again.
When I first saw these commercials I wasn’t really paying attention and
thought I had just seen two different commercials and this continued the next
few times I saw them. The problem here
is I’m lulled into a daze by the first part of the commercial and when these idiots
with the guitar and ukulele come on I have no idea what the commercial was
originally about because they don’t seem to fit into whatever situation that
came before it. Seriously why the hell
are they there and what the hell are they doing. They just seem so out of place and this
illusion is increased by the fact that these idiots are on a stage and playing
instruments. Essentially they are the
commercial and everything that came before them is completely inconsequential. Actually this is the same exact format as these commercials(only in reverse):
They only cut out the guy in the
business suit and put in an annoying two man band. They’re still using the same tactic of using
a simile to explain that you could save %x on your car insurance. The only difference is the previous versions
of these commercials had one or two I didn’t hate and might have found funny
but saw them one too many time they eventually lost their charm. These on the other hand are annoying from the
get go. The punch line just falls so
flat it’s embarrassing. Are Geico
commercials like watching a funny comedian do his routine? No Jimmy, I’d say they’re more like watching
a tragically unfunny comedian constantly bomb to the point where you just feel
so bad you can’t bring yourself to boo at. What makes these commercials even worse than the others isn't just because they're Geico commercials it's because they're a trifecta. They aren't just one commercial they're 3 and I HAVE SEEN ALL 3.
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