Double Take

For about the last year or so I've occasionally come across ads from Discover Card's "We Treat You Like You'd Treat You" campaign while watching Hulu (they were probably on regular TV too). The ads are meant to show how friendly and superior Discover's customer service is and how their customer service people will treat you like you would treat yourself. To demonstrate the point they have the same actor playing both the caller and the Discover employee explaining to the call how great all their features are. The characters are varied from sassy black women, to paranoid private investigators, to unhappy mothers, and bewildered spouses.

I never really paid much mind to these ads. These weren't exactly all that memorable but I suppose there were way worse :30 adverts out there. However I have to admit that I was legitimately surprised by the most recent one:

Every other so far has been presented as visual representations of Discover treating the customer like the customer would themselves, but here it turns out they are literally twins. I did not see that coming. Although now that I think about it, shouldn't the sister who was working for Discover have figured out that she was talking to her twin when she pulled up her customer information? 

Domo Arigato Buster Roboto

Like nearly all my more time sensitive blog postings, I would have liked to have written this up earlier but hey beggars can't be choosers here at "Victor Sells Out". Let's be happy that I didn't wait so long that it wasn't even worth putting up. Maybe I'll eventually devote a whole month to all my severely belated postings (that eulogy for Horshack is almost approaching a year).

So in anticipation of the much hyped return of a new season of a certain critically acclaimed though ratings challenged Fox comedy from the mid aughts on Netflix, I went ahead and caught myself up on the previous 3 seasons of "Arrested Development". Truth be told, I was never all that into the show when it aired and I only become at best a casual fan during its hiatus. I have to admit I didn't even finish watching most of the third season before last month. I liked it, I definitely admire it as an achievement in televised comedy, but I didn't love it like most of my other friends and people I know. Actually this is probably why I, watching this new Netflix season, don't feel all that let down or disappointed as some fans who were working under the massive weight expectations based on their devotion to the first 3 seasons. Having watched about half the season, it's pretty good like all the other episodes I've seen; though the plot can get pretty complex at times, also Portia de Rossi does look a little off. That's the whole of my views on the current season.

Going back to my catching up on the show, all this re-exposure to the spastic comedic talents of Tony Hale (Buster Bluth) reminded me of his early role in a popular 1999 Volkswagen commercial (Wow an 8 speaker cassette stereo system...standard!), looking young and kind of like a white version of Abed from "Community" 

That commercial was actually responsible for my first mp3 download, "Mr Roboto" by Styx. While there are a lot of "firsts" I don't recall completely, I do remember most of the details about my first encounter with digital music. Starting out just before the arrival of Napster (and eventually Kazaa), I used the Scour Media Agent from Scout.net of which not much information is left online. Utilizing a 26K dial up modem to download an ambitious nearly 5 minute long song took roughly my entire second semester of high school freshman year. I think I also had to cull some data to find room in my PC's overburdened 2 gig hard drive. I even remember my second mp3 was "We're Not Gonna Take It' by Twisted Sister (I think that was after seeing a "Pop Up Video" of it).

Interestingly enough I believe whatever mp3 copy of "Mr. Roboto" I have on my phone and computer is likely from that original download. I'll have to listen for the one second blip error about halfway through the song to make sure. 

I was pleasantly surprised when I got to the sixth episode of season 3 "The Ocean Walker" and saw the clever little reference to Hale's role in the commercial. It's these little details that really distinguishes the show.

Tired of That Annoying Old Ring?

Most of us can agree that life is not easy. However the initial "before" vignettes of infomercials laying out the problems the featured product would solve would have you believe that life is a complete and total nightmare. It's an endless monochromatic purgatory where you're fat and sick; your home, children, and pets are unacceptably filthy and smell; everything costs too much; there's never enough time to cook a healthy, delicious, dinner; and attempting even the simplest of tasks ends in humiliating disaster. At least, before you order the advertised product.

Now I'd like to think we're all savvy enough to realize that there is some exaggeration and puffery going on in these ads and that we shouldn't take them at face value. Still, sometimes the products do come off as pretty awesome and it's tempting to assume they would work just as effectively and as perfectly in our homes as they do in a controlled sound stage being utilized by a trained salesman. I watch that "Slap Chop" video now and it's still amazing how Vince can make it seem like how one cheap plastic chopping utensil will radically transform your life (plus he just throws in the fucking Graty absolutely free!).

No amount of infomercial magic however can spin the utter uselessness of the Jingle Ring. Even as an easily impressionable preadolescent watching this ad in the early 90s, I thought it was ridiculous. Say what you want about As Seen On TV products, at least they claim to tackle common everyday problems most people can relate to. The Jingle Ring attempts to eliminate an issue that about 99.9% of the population couldn't careless about: extreme displeasure with the telephone ring. Has anyone ever found themselves so tired and annoyed with their home telephone ring that, like the lady in the commercial, they find themselves THROWING THEIR PHONE OUT THE WINDOW in abject frustration? Who can relate to this scene? Paranoid schizophrenics? Shell shocked trauma victims? Someone on bath salts?

After having established this all too common affliction of modern living, the Jingle Ring provides a solution that manages to be a hundred times worse. Using "microchip" technology it converts your phone ring into one of a whopping eight pre-recorded jingles, which all come off as way more annoying than a standard phone ring. If providing irritating novelty jingles wasn't bad enough, the Jingle Ring does it in a relatively cumbersome method; to bypass the regular ring you have to run it through this additional device that's about half the size of the phone itself which is there solely to make a different ring.

The family in the spot, who have apparently purchased multiple Jingle Rings to fit everyone member's eclectic taste from classical parody loving dad to Andrew Sisters fan Mom, to the kids with their modern love of cow sounds and "rap" (there has to be at least one hip hop artist out there who can use this for a hyper esoteric sample track); dramatize just how wonderful life can be in a Jingle Ring household. Every call, whether it be from Aunt Margo or the coroner's office, is a smiling occasion for pure joy. What I never quite understood was if they liked the new rings so much, why didn't they just let it ring for as long as possible before picking it up? Or even picking it up at all? The father clearly didn't care to pick up the phone when it had the old ring (which actually would have made prolonged the terrible ringing).

When I recently rediscovered the old Jingle Ring I assumed that such an objectively worthless product would have, along with the commercial, long since faded out into obscurity. With the contemporary obsolescence of the home phone line, the Jingle Ring would somehow manage to be even even more worthless nowadays. However, like some kind of living fossil, brand new Jingle Rings are shockingly available on Amazon (at least the price went down from the original $19.99); I can only assume that there's some poor guy out there with a warehouse full of these, desperately waiting by his Jingle Ring enabled phone, waiting for the moo of a potential new order. So if you or someone you know is trapped in the living hell of conventional land line phone rings, your prayers have been answered.

Confidence is Very Sexy

For me one of the great things about the Internet, aside from the whole facilitating the worldwide democratization of information thing and the instant, anonymous porn delivery; is how it constantly reminds me that no matter how obscure or esoteric a reference or obsession I have, there is someone else on the Internet thinking the same thing. I find that oddly reassuring; that I'm not that crazy and alone in my thoughts after all and that there is a fellow weirdo backing me up. In fact, if you have a crazy preoccupation or interest and you see someone else on the Internet blogging or tweeting or pinteresting or whatever-ing what you're thinking, it makes you come off as slightly less insane since at least you didn't put the effort in posting it on the Internet for everyone to see.

So the weird little bit of past esoterica that's needlessly distracting me this week is this early 90s television spot for Skin Bracer aftershave starring the late Jack Palance:

Despite having a six decade long career filled with memorable classic film and television roles, this is my definitive Jack Palance moment. Forget his deliciously evil turn in "Shane" or his Oscar winning comeback role in "City Slickers" or the famous one armed push ups he did at the ceremony, when I think Jack Palance, it's this short clip of him selling me aftershave. 

However considering that this ad may possibly be the single most genuinely manly fifteen second TV spot in advertising history, I don't think it's that out there to have it as my lasting image of the icon. The commercial has a sort of a "Most Interesting Man" approach. Right from the start, Palance is a blinding supernova of self confidence; and really he needs all of it to make the spot work. He comes off as someone who doesn't really care for cologne or even aftershave for that matter; he just happens to not object to Skin Bracer which he just casually dabs on with one hand when he remembers to. Even the commercial itself with its brevity and bare bones production gives the impression that the whole thing is just a casual, off the cuff comment by Palance in between doing important movie star things. Skin Bracer was taking a bit of a gamble relying on the seductive sex appeal of a septuagenarian character actor who was often cast as creepy villains. Even with the charming confidence there is a subtle slight creepiness factor to the whole thing; it is easily one of the most idiosyncratic deliveries of the phrase "sexy" ever recorded (on a personal note: this commercial was probably the first time I heard the phrase "sexy" on TV and my preadolescent self was shocked to hear what I vaguely knew to be a bad word in a commercial).

So aside from finding someone else who was enough of a fan of the commercial to post it on Youtube, I was delighted to find that there was at least one couple out in cyberspace that was obsessed with the commercial enough to make a reenactment of the spot:

Sure the production quality is obviously lacking (then again not all bizarre, seemingly unnecessary, shot by shot, pop culture remakes can have the budget and star power of "The Greatest Event In Television History"), however it is obvious attention has been paid to all the small details from the bedside lamp to the final "By Mennen" (random aside, almost every commercial featuring the "by Mennen" tag line on YouTube has someone writing in the comments a variation of "Co-Stan-za").

The fact that tributes like this exists outside of just these random blog posts is pretty neat. Don't you think?

Re-Charge!

My last post about the resurrection of previously discontinued advertising mascots has made me nostalgic for the return of other commercial icons of the past, particularly everyone's favorite mischievous money loving monarchist Sir Charge!

Until I started thinking about retired mascots I had all but forgotten about Time Warner Cable's cheeky satirical representation of the supposedly countless superfluous surcharges in a Verizon home phone bill. I for one thought he was great commercial character: easily recognizable, broadly humorous, and had a dead simple message that was stupidly brilliant (his name is Sir Charge, he was all about giving out surcharges, get it?). Unfortunately the character only had a brief, albeit ubiquitous, run lasting about a year, circa 2007. However I believe that he was a victim of unfavorable timing and that the Sir Charge character would have been a bigger hit had he debuted just a few years later.

First off, it didn't help his longevity that Sir Charge was advertising a product that was spiraling into obsolescence (home phone service) he might as well have been selling print magazines. He was also aligned with such a uniformly unlikable entity like Time Warner Cable (fighting against that Verizon menace; talk about a broken two party system) . Most importantly though Sir Charge had the misfortune of coming on the scene just before the social media and the internet viral culture really took off. Had he come out around 2010, he would have reaped the benefits of a vastly expanded facebook community, an exponential explosion of blogs, trending on twitter (#SirCharge), the rise of reddit and the meme-fication of the known world (he could have been just as big as The Most Interesting Man In The World). It was just due to bad timing that Sir Charge never really got the exposure he deserved outside of the tri-state area to become more than just a local phenomenon.

This is why now would be the perfect time for Time Warner to dust off the bowler, break out the bills, and bring back the Charge. Aside from the internet hit potential, Sir Charge's absurdly aristocratic shtick would make him the perfect foil in our current post-financial meltdown, anti-corporate, Occupy Wall Street world. All his stereotypical displays of wealth and upper class status have taken on a far more loaded connotation since the quaint pre-Great Recession days. If there was ever a poster boy for corporate greed, income inequality, and the wealthy 1% it would be Sir Charge. The man just sits in his fancy office all day surrounded by stacks of random currency, ordering constant rate increases upon his working class customers. He makes Mitt Romney look like a lovable boxcar hobo. Additionally with the recent Royal Wedding, the success of "Downton Abbey", and the 2012 London Olympics anglophilia in America is at an all time high, so a posh regal Englishman would also get some play with audiences (I do wonder though why this old English aristocrat had such an interest in American telecommunications and what did he get that Knighthood for? Was the temptation of turning his name into a homonym of surcharge so great that the Queen just couldn't resist it?).

That'd be one unexpected charge I would actually welcome seeing.

He Has Risen!

Now many of you may already be well acquainted with this story, but for those who aren't familiar I would like to share with you an extraordinary tale about an extraordinary man. He didn't come from status or privilege, just a common man of modest means, but he was put on this earth with the singular goal to give us the important message of saving. As he traveled about preaching his message and converting the people he met, he performed many amazing feats and miracles. Though there were other pretenders with seemingly similar messages, the truly faithful knew that it was only through him that they would be assured great future riches beyond all others. In the end he eventually made the ultimate sacrifice, gaving himself up to a tragic death to save us all...some money.

However, just when it seems like death had claimed ultimate victory over him, he was resurrected!

Yes that slightly forced Christ comparison is true. Less than 8 months after seemingly securing his last discounted hotel room, the Priceline Negotiator mysteriously returns (and apparently he's taken up surfing now). However I really don't know how to feel about the Negotiator coming back. There is a part of me that feels a bit cheated that after all the attention and publicity paid over the final farewell of the character, to have him come back so soon gives the whole affair the taint of a cheap publicity stunt. Had this actually been Priceline's intention all along, then shame on them for being so manipulative and shortsighted with their valuable and respected mascot.

Now if the Negotiator's return is the result of an overwhelming popular movement among surveyed customers to bring back a beloved icon, an exemplary display of direct democracy in action, it would be sort of acceptable (Lord knows how many unsuccessful letters I wrote asking GEICO to bring back the googly eyed stack of money). A part of me would still would have admired Priceline more for sticking to their guns and not so easily bowing to public pressure, but on the whole a company should go with the customer being always right.

From what we see in the commercial it is still somewhat ambiguous if this new advert is just a brief triumphant post script to allow the Negotiator to ride off into the sunset (crashing waves) on his own terms or the first in another new round of Negotiator ads. The ultimate conclusion, like any good advertisement, leaves the watcher wondering. Despite the spot looking eerily like the ending of "Point Break" with Shatner in the doom Swayze role, I am pretty confident that we haven't heard the last of the Negotiator.

Sweetness Is My Weakness

While it has been a couple of years since they debuted and though they are seldom really seen today, I still feel I have to belatedly profess my strange affection for the series of TV spots for the sugar substitute Truvia. While there was nothing particularly worthwhile about the commercials visually, I was utterly drawn in by the idiosyncratic charm of the individual jingles performed in each ad. I have always been a fan and supporter of the well written commercial jingle, which has become a critically endangered species as of late, so I was already halfway on board. However, what really made these songs stand out for me was their uniqueness. Each ode to the wonders of Truvia is sung in this odd, quirky acoustic-folk style in a non-traditional, slightly unpolished sounding voice (for those of you who wish to know it's some random actress-singer named Therese Hegler). As for the lyrics, they are these odd little first person love ballads to Truvia's natural, calorie free delights, with accompanying dramatization, about being in a miserable relationship with a psedo-personification of "sweetness" (who sort of comes off as a terrible boyfriend in each song) and then finding a a new love (a zero calorie true love!) with Truvia; strange rhyme schemes and weird metaphors abound.

The jingles walk an extremely fine line between shaggy charm and irritating quirkiness. If their youtube clips are any indication (the clips tend to skew about 1/3 to 1/2 dislike rate along with comments that range from "So fucking adorable. i love this commercial" to "i wanna punch that voice") they are fairly polarizing. While I normally hate this sort of overly precious (dare I say "adorkable") work, there's something weirdly genuine about these ads. I think it's because the product is so mundane (it's just another kind of Sweet'N Low) and the melodrama of the jingles are so needlessly high (seriously who has that kind of wonderous life change just from switching to sugar substitutes?) that there is a legitimacy to its cute lack of coolness, I can really believe that they are not trying hard to cool at all. It's a hell of a lot more real than that insufferable old Zooey Deschannel cotton ad.

I recall seeing at least two different adverts on TV, but from what I've gathered there are at least four different commercials. If I had to rank them by some subjective personal metric from least favorite to favorite:

Sweetness comes off as manipulator, a toxic emotional vampire that sort of delights in playing head games with the protagonist. The "guilty crumbs in my bed" line creepily infers a weird sexual relationship. In regards to the video, I don't frequent guilt laden stare downs with chocolate bunnies are all that common a complaint among modern women.

Sweetness is now a serial philanderer to which the protagonist finally resolves herself to escape his chocolate covered charms. Also, four women sharing one tiny desert? They have some serious issues with food that even Truvia won't cure.

Sweetness is just a straight up jerk here, plain and simple. I like the line about Truvia not landing on "my hips or my thighs" followed later with "it's better than flirting or french fries" (although I have to disagree, few things in this world are better than french fries).

This is the most literal representation of sweetness, it has made the protagonist's butt fat; a valid cause as any to leave a relationship (perhaps this is some sort of sick feederism based relationship?). I consider this the best because it's the most straightforward and relatable with the target audience. As an ad it works the best.

For those seeking a fuller effect, check out the medley with the lyrics.

Staying Alive

I find the vintage board game "Stay Alive: The Survival Game" to be a bit of a letdown. With a name like that, I expected some kind of fun murder mystery with a deep story line and an interesting cast of suspicious characters; something along the lines classic "Clue" or even "13 Dead End Drive" (was I the only one who had this game growing up?). There should at least have been some sort of fictional murder element to a game predicated on eliminating your rivals and winning by being the last player standing. Unfortunately, as the commercial demonstrates, "Stay Alive" turned out to be just an abstract strategy game that involved careful marble placement and turned based elimination of said marbles. Fun in a "Connect Four" sort of way, but where was the compelling narrative? The theatrics? The element of escapism? At least "Battleship" had pieces that looked like actual naval ships.

As contextually sterile as the game may be, the old 70s commercial for the game implies a rich, yet disturbingly dark back story in its brief 30 seconds.

• My initial, overarching question would be: what exactly are these kids doing here? It seems to me that the children are in a "Lord of the Flies"-like situation where they are stranded on a desert island with no adult guidance, free of the social structures and moralities of modern society. They also don't seem to be in any noticeable want of food or water, as they don't appear to be disappointed by the discovery of a washed up board game rather than sustenance. Boredom seems to be the greatest danger on the island. However, I am not willing to rule out the possibility that the kids are delirious with hunger or thirst and are just playing the newly found game for the hell of it, or they just may be idiot kids with stupid priorities.
• As for the board game, I have to note that it is in extremely good condition for a cardboard box that had been indefinitely floating around the ocean. It's totally free of any water damage, loose sand, or accumulated seaweed. All the mechanisms seem to be in perfect working order and none of the marbles are missing. It probably still has its instructions unlike half the board games in my attic.
• The conclusion of this commercial is downright haunting. After a tension filled match, or series of matches, between the four, the winning kid in the hat comes to the shocking realization that he has indeed won by remaining "the sole survivor", at which point he gives a blank, 1000 yard stare and the sound abruptly cuts out as the commercial transitions to a shot of the game box. Has there ever been a more ambiguous reaction given by a winning kid in a board game commercial? Given what I have seen, I can only conclude that the kids were using the newly found board game to make the grizzly determination as to who was to be selected to be sacrificed and cannibalized by the remaining players. Eventually the game comes down to the final two kids and the winning kid earns himself another week or so of desperately staving off hunger, but must also now grasp the disturbing realities of his gruesome acts and the realization that he will now be utterly alone, having truly become "the sole survivor".

The whole premise might come off as a tad dark for a game suited for ages 8 and up, but I think they should have applied some of those elements to color the game. For next week I am calling out the makers of "Crossfire" for failing to deliver on its promise of game play that's as exciting as a one on one death match on flying platforms over the flaming pits of a riotous dystopian fighting arena during a thunderstorm (sounds like an even more badass version of "The Hunger Games").

It was...fun. Oh, my...

To paraphrase General Douglas MacArthur: "Old advertising mascots never die; they just fade away". The life of an advertising icon is an unpredictable one; some continue to live on as the indelible (somewhat racist) face of a national brand for well over a century, others are over used and worn out into total irreverence, while others flop right out of the gate into obscurity. Occasionally a mascot may get discontinued, only to find unexpected new life decades later. One thing mascots hardly ever do, however, is actually get killed.

It is an exceedingly rare and bold move on the part of a brand when they decide to go for the nuclear option of putting in the effort to deliberately and publicly eliminate their mascot in an advertisement. The only other example I can think of is the heroic death of Segata Sanshiro, the star of a series of brilliantly insane Sega Saturn ads in Japan from the late 90s that I would need to devote an entire entry to properly cover; he had by far the most epic death for an advertising mascot. I do recall the Budweiser frogs were the victims of an assassination attempt in 1997 by some vindictive Italian-American lizards and their hired ferret associate, which did leave one of them traumatized.

The public executing of a mascot is the ultimate expression on the company's part that they are going in a totally new direction and leaving the past completely behind. If a company takes the time and spends the money on a proper end for their character, I suppose it either means that they: (a) have grown to absolutely despise the character and want to be as public with their disapproval as possible or (b) have so much respect for the character that they want to give them the dignity of a big finale rather than just quietly phasing them out.

In the case of Priceline.com's decision this week to kill their longtime spokesman, the legendary William "The Negotiator" Shatner, it is definitely more the latter reason. Priceline, which somehow managed to survive the dot.com bubble and (to my continuing surprise) manages to thrive today as a travel website, has finally decided to drop its silly "name your price" feature, which never really worked that well, and has finally become a straight travel discount site like all the others. This end of the need for price negotiation obviously means the end of the "The Negotiator". It appears that the war had ended and apparently fixed prices have won.

So after 14 years of loyal, price slashing service from the quirky concert sets of the late 90s, to his epic showdown with Leonard Nemoy, to his latter day role as "The Negotiator " (with occasional help from the Big Deal), the people at Priceline decided give Shatner a final act on par with the passing of his other famous character. Looking at the two deaths there is an odd similarity between them. Both instances involved a large explosion on a vast cliff, a fearless act of heroism that saved many lives (and in the case of the commercial, also money), and a sort of symbolic passing of the torch to a new generation. As commercial mascot deaths go, I think it was a fine way to close the chapter and turn the page.

Farewell Negotiator, I hope you're in a better, more affordably priced place.

If You Say So Mr. Loggia...

A few days ago I suffered a completely random pop culture acid flashback about the above Minute Maid Orange Juice Commercial featuring veteran actor Robert Loggia from circa 1998. I was not at the breakfast table at the time nor was I drinking any orange juice or watching "Necessary Roughness". It was just one of those inexplicable overflows from the thick simmering stew that is my subconscious (also maybe my body's telling me I should get more vitamin C in my diet?).

Regardless, after looking up the commercial again I came upon a few new observations and conclusions that escaped me when I initially saw it in the late 90s:

• Before I even get into the content of the commercial, I was surprised at how much more popular this commercial was than I originally thought. I thought the ad was so obscure that there would be a good chance that it might not even be available on the internet. Additionally, despite a having a career that spans television and movies all the way back to the 1950s, Loggia's performance in this commercial takes up on entire paragraph of his wikipedia entry. It may either be a testament to the popularity of the commercial or the shoddiness of his wikipedia page (I'd say a combination of both; it's definitely not the best written of pages).
• The commercial predates "Family Guy" by nearly a decade in discovering the previously unknown inherent humor of just mentioning the name Robert Loggia. I don't know if the "Family Guy" cutaway was supposed to be a loose parody of the commercial, or an inspired pastiche of the ad, or just a weird random coincidence. I still find it pretty funny; although like all "Family Guy" cutaways I have absolutely no idea what the actual episode was about.
• The joke of the commercial is ostensibly supposed to come from a young boy randomly suggesting an unexpected actor like Robert Loggia to be a source of integrity about the deliciousness of the new orange juice and the sudden appearance of said Mr. Loggia into the kitchen to convince the boy. It's all a pretty surreal scene. However, the commercial becomes far more interesting and oddly more logical if you suspect that the mother is having an affair with Robert Loggia. Check out the knowing, beaming smile of the mom when he invades the kitchen. The dad reacts the way any normal person would in that situation, with surprise and suspicion, but the mom just keeps that gigantic devilish smile going through the whole scene. Add that to the knowing wink Loggia gives to the mom right before he leaves and you have to suspect something's going on. I can't rule out the possibility that Billy is the secret love child of Robert Loggia and the mom and our poor bald dad is a pathetic cuckold whose "son" doesn't even respect him enough to believe when he says he'll like the taste of the juice.
• As to the implausibility of a pre-adolescent boy knowing who Robert Loggia is, while it's highly unlikely that he knows him from is tough guy roles in mature movies like "Scarface", "Prizzi's Honor", or "Lost Highway"; but he might have just saw him the night before in "Big" or maybe "Independence Day" (ID4 was still sort of fresh in all our minds around 1998). What's really inexplicable is why the kid is so ardently anti-calcium; does it even have a taste?
• That extra Robert Loggia "yeah!" at the very end of the spot really is the cherry on top, the whole spot would be nothing without that final exclamation point. The bite special effect that comes right before the "yeah!" however makes it sound like he's the one who took a bite out of the carton.

Next week, I'll be covering that old Little Caesars commercial where the little girl goes to meet the head of Little Caesars only to have it be George Burns instead (although she doesn't seem disappointed in the least by it).

An Alternative Approach

About a week and a half ago I gave my armchair adman commentary on a recent TV campaign featuring Nutrigrain Bars; praising how, through subtle editing, its creators cleverly managed to tie a product of questionable nutrition and wholesomeness with an effective message of all purpose wellness and self improvement. I thought it was a pretty nifty bit of soft selling.

In STARK contrast to those ads, here is a previous Nutrigrain Bar spot from around five years ago I found that also promises similar themes of great self improvement using what I can be considered an alternative approach:

From what the ad indicates, it would appear that Kelloggs was experimenting with a new line of Nutrigrain Bars containing significant doses of PCP in the mid oughts. While the current spots says choosing to eat a Nutrigrain Bar will bring you happiness and self improvement by leading you to make other modest but effective positive lifestyle choices, this ad seems to say that eating a Nutrigrain Bar will bring you happiness and self improvement through reckless and insane decisions and actions. What I don't understand is why is everyone else also insane? The main character is the only one who actually ate the laced Nutrigrain Bar. Shouldn't they all dismiss his wild eyed, hyper intense behavior? Maybe that's just how powerful these new bars were, they would give you the power (in addition to invulnerability from physical attacks) to get everyone on your side (whether it be quitting your job or having hundreds of babies), no matter how ludicrous your proposition was, through sheer force of will.

Now is this a "good" advertisement. Well, people remember it and I'm writing about it for free aren't I? Did it move Nutrigrain Bars? I'm not sure. I suspect that this ad might not even have aired publicly. It's all part of that age old advertising debate of whether the quality of an advert is judged solely on it's effectiveness in the market place or is there an inherent creative, cultural value regardless of sales? Ideally it should be both but more often it's one or another. As for me I don't know, I just liked the ad (Nutrigrain Bars still sorta suck though).


Also, did you notice the protagonist's friend Larry was handling woman's lingerie right before he burst into his office to tell him he was quitting? I must have seen video like five times before I spotted that. Not sure how that contributes to the story.

Double Vision

Every once in a while I will come across an advertisement or campaign that will really catch the eye of the former communications student/aspiring copywriter in me and make me say "wow, that was pretty good". With that being said I find the two recent television spots for Kellogg's Nutrigrain Bars to be subtly brilliant.

The two spots have been running for at least a couple of years, but there's really nothing flashy or buzzworthy, or even outwardly memorable about them. They don't have any gimmicks or jokes and their biggest visual firework is a simple split screen (cutting edge!). Ostensibly the story is about as straightforward as they come, in both commercials you have the unhappy woman on the left who didn't start their day with a Nutrigrain Bar and the happy woman on the right who made the great decision to start their day with a Nutrigrain Bar. Message to viewer: eat Nutrigrain Bars to be happy.

Reading a little deeper into the commercials though, it's impressive how subtly the advertisers put forth what is really quite a powerful message.

First and foremost, the commercial never explicitly states that Nutrigrain Bars are really any good for you; and as someone who ate his fair share of Nutrigrain bars in high school, it's sort of true. On the whole they're just slightly better for you than eating a candy bar. In both ads the first and only time you see the bars is when they are compared with blatantly unhealthy food. A Nutrigrain bar is not the best thing you can have for breakfast but it is certainly better than a chocolate frosted doughnut with sprinkles or a monstrous pastry the size of your head. That's the only thing the commercials can say about the actual nutritional merits of their product, all the other scenes simply show the general benefits of healthy life choices (taking the stairs, opting for fruit, drinking more water) completely unrelated to Nutrigrain bars.

The commercials manage the clever trick of associating the simple act of eating a Nutrigrain bar in the morning to living a better, happier life and simultaneously shows the quiet sadness and misery that comes with not starting your day with one. They deftly manufacture this fairly impossible correlation between eating these marginally not unhealthy bars and achieving almost every general healthy lifestyle goal. In reality, if starting your day off with a Nutrigrain bar would cause you to make so many healthy choices in your life, you would end up replacing the Nutrigrain bar the next day with oatmeal and fruit. The ads may appear to be geared primarily towards woman, but it has a general appeal that taps into everyone's inherent desire for self improvement, to better oneself whether it be to lose weight, to get a better job, spend more time with loved ones, read more, to live a better life.

It's the subtlety of the two simultaneous scenes that really drives home the message. While they are in sharp contrast to each other neither of them are extreme scenarios. This is far more effective than the hard sell of an infomercial where they give you a totally unrelatable scene of a monochromatic hell of laughably exaggerated horrors where even the simplest of tasks is a surreal ordeal and then show you how unbelievably happy your entire life would be after this one peeve is eliminated. In these commercials there is no exaggeration of the happy or sad lives. One side isn't losing a foot to diabetes while the other side is winning a triathlon. One just has a little bit more pep, a few more smiles, and bit more energy than the other which makes both scenes utterly relatable which makes it far more affecting on a personal level. We can see ourselves in both windows. We've all had days or moments where we felt like we were trapped in the unhappy left side of the screen and that a ticket to the happier more productive right side was just an adjustment or a routine change (or in this case a purchase) away.

This is the all powerful message of improvement that every ad for a consumer product is trying to get through to the viewer; your life will be better for buying this good. With just a simple concept and some effective editing, Nutrigrain bars has managed to associate their product with a universally desired picture of health and happiness while never explicitly saying their product is even all that healthy. Pretty good.

It's Like...

Recently I've developed a mild fascination with the above frequently run commercial for Dunkin' Donuts' new Frozen Hot Chocolate drink. For such a brief 15 second spot for a product that would appear to be essentially dressed up chocolate milk (isn't that what a "frozen hot chocolate" really is?) this shouldn't be taking up so much of my attention, that is any of it.

Maybe it's just me but the more I watch it the more I'm convinced that the white man and woman on the other side of the table are totally high (I do often tend to jump to conclusions about characters' drug use). Right off the bat you have poor man's Lizzy Caplan way too emphatically describing her drink as an "iceberg volcano" while even poorer man's Ryan Gosling quickly interjects with equally unnatural zeal that it's like "lightning in a snowball". When the afroed straight man dryly tells them that it's like Frozen Hot Chocolate they bust out into a completely genuine and un-ironic expression of wide eyed amazement (If someone could go ahead and make me an animated gif of that brief scene, it would be much appreciated) at his normal observation . Our big haired protagonist reacts to all this with a look of perplexed disgusted as if he's asking himself "why am I hanging out with these ridiculous degenerates?" Even the final tagline for the commercial "It's like Frozen Hot Chocolate" sounds like it was written by someone totally baked.

I do feel a bit sorry for the main protagonist. When he's not wasting his weekends with these goobers, as seen in this recent Zyrtec ad he gets plenty more of this idiosyncratic nonsense at work (also what happens when you mix juice and Allegra, does it turn into mustard gas or something?). So it would appear that he is forever doomed to hang out in parks as the black third wheel to a quirky white couple.

Love in the Time of Dial-Up

Some products and their advertising campaigns are so classic and timeless that they remain virtually the same for years even decades. It's quite a remarkable feat for an ad given the ever changing nature of the marketplace and modern society in general with dynamic shifts in technology and popular culture occurring by the second. This particular AT&T ad for their internet services from 1997 is not one of those ads.

In the fourteen or so years since I last saw the commercial, I am quite shocked at how throughly outdated this spot has become in almost every possible way. The internet service that AT&T is primarily advertising is obviously going to come off as outmoded but really it's all the other incidental stuff in the ad that's truly disturbing. This one minute slice of life vignette of the mid-90's comes dangerously close to total irrelevance to younger viewers and in about another decade or so will become just as unrelatable as a black and white commercial for an Edsel or a Victrola. It's a harsh, undeniable indictment of my oldness that's scarier than any horror film.

Here's how it all breaks down:

• First off, I think it's utterly fitting and proper that Larisa Oleynik plays the female protagonist of this commercial. Few actresses are as closely associated with the mid to late 90s than Larisa. Her entire career essentially runs from the 1994 to 1998 run of "The Secret World of Alex Mac" to her the reoccurring guest role on "3rd Rock from the Sun" to her grand swan song in 1999's "10 Things I Hate About You". Sure she continues to live and her filmography claims that she has been steadily working all throughout the 00's, but can you really say you've noticed her in anything post-"10 Things"? Also, the boyfriend sort of looks like a poor man's Andrew Keegan, another casualty of the 00's.
• Check out out Larisa's vintage period gigantic sweater and jeans ensemble. It looks like she's wearing one of Nicholas Brendon's sweaters from "Buffy". She's practically drowning in wool. A burka would have been more revealing.
• With the recent demise of the classic boxy archetypal station wagon, the boyfriend's sweet ride has now become just a relic of a bygone era. Perhaps one day you'll be showing this ad to your children and they'll ask "Mommy/Daddy, what is that weird looking car that's not as big as minivan but bigger than crossover SUV? Is this what life was really like before the war with the machines?"
• The towering beige monolith and their accompanying bulky CRT monitors are an obvious and expected antiquity (Larissa's weird trackball mouse has aged particularly poorly). With the recent rise of laptops, tablets, smart phones, etc., it would appear that the desktop PC itself may be joining the station wagon soon enough.
• I don't think I need to prove to you that "AT&T WorldNet Service" no longer exists. Also, doesn't it look like they are typing up word documents and emailing them back and forth to each other? These are like the only two suburban teenagers in 1997 without AIM.
• I could devote an entire post just on the primative proto-"sexting" scene that goes on between the young couple. From just a sociological angle, it's fascinating how they both go through all the motions one would imagine from a modern day sexting session despite the fact that the picture couldn't be any tamer. There's the not so subtle flirty back and forth, the mischievous, playful look on Larissa's face as she send out her self shot pic, the sudden look of arousal on the part of the boyfriend when he receives it (maybe it's the first time her saw her sans sweater?), and the dude's eventual picture response (although the polite thing to do today would be to send a dick shot). It's like watching old "scandalous" footage of people wearing full suits to the beach.
• From a technological angle, obviously the major difference is the lack of cellphones. If there was any modern sexting going on here it would most likely be done via SMS. Larisa's method of taking photos of herself with a Poloraid (which they no longer even make film for anymore) and scanning it to her beau is only slightly ahead of drawing a picture and mailing it. I do have to commend her dude's solid MS Paint skills, it was a pretty smooth cut and paste job given the time crunch.

So there you have it. If anyone asks, that's what life was like in America circa 1997. If it was anymore 1997, the Spice Girls would have shown up at the end carrying matching Tamagotchis. Quite unsettling how much everything changes in less than a decade and a half.

Getting old is the worst.

But, Ironhead....

For such an imposing figure with a tough guy reputation and one of the all time greatest NFL nicknames, the late Craig "Ironhead" Heyward had one of the most mediocre 11 year careers a running back could have had in the NFL (4,301 rushing yards, 4.2 ypc, 30 TDs, 1 Pro Bowl). He was basically Jerome Bettis with the numbers of Tyrone Wheatley (his most similar player according to Pro-Football Reference). Try as I might he has never come up as the answer on a single NFL related Sporcle quiz (maybe one day when someone makes a Falcons running backs of the mid 90s quiz). His fan made Youtube "highlight" reel runs barely past a minute and although there are plenty of NES Tecmo Super Bowl clips of contemporary RBs like Bo Jackson and Christian Okoye dominating defenses, the only such clip I could find of Ironhead was him dutifully eating clock for nearly 2 quarters.

While it is quite obvious that Ironhead Heyward was more reputation than actual performance, it is that same tough guy reputation that is actually responsible for, what I think is, his greatest legacy. Perhaps some of the younger folks haven't been around long enough to recall (I even I was pretty young then) but there was a time up to the late 90s in the pre-Axe Body Wash, Queer Eye, metrosexual world where the concept of a man using a body wash was a foreign and strange notion. Nowadays, bath sponges hanging freely and body wash containers lie throughout male inhabited showers all across America but this humbling of the mighty bar that once dominated the showers didn't happen overnight, it took the concentrated efforts of marketers and manufacturers.

At the forefront of this shower room sea change was Zest Body Wash who in an effort to dispel the image of body washes being dainty and unmanly went to a pitchman whose public image was the complete antithesis, enter Ironhead. Anyone who watched a decent amount of TV in the mid to late 90s remembers the ubiquitous series of spots (I remember they were on all the time during wrestling) where an angry, towel draped, pre-shower, Ironhead challenged the viewer to put aside all their preconceptions and try a round with Zest, aggressively attacking any reservations in the viewers' minds ("What's with this thingy?") of bathing with a body wash. The message was clear, if Zest Body Wash provided a better clean and was macho enough for surly NFL power backs when it was good enough for the average guy. This approach, along with Axe's well documented "this body wash will literally make women insane for you" advertising contributions essentially created the men's body wash market we know today. Interestingly Old Spice Body Wash's current campaign follows the exact blueprint of the old Zest ads (former/current NFL players in the shower aggressively asserting the manly effectiveness of their product) with a slightly surrealist bent.

So while it's highly unlikely that Ironhead Heyward will get that bust in Canton, if they ever make some sort of crazy pitchman Hall of Fame, his contributions in the field of personal hygiene product marketing would guarantee him a place right next to the Hathaway Shirt Man and Dos Equis Guy.

A Frank Statement

In keeping with my recently emerging theme of tangentially relating old 90s television commercials I remember with recent events in sports; LeBron James' ill conceived, hour-long, painfully public divorce with the city of Cleveland last week (also known as "The Decision") reminded me of another highly publicized press conference announcement by a basketball legend:

You know, there would have been a lot less media speculation and confusion if he said he wanted a Hebrew National.

Innovation

I came across an interesting article in TIME about how a computer scientist at the University of Warwick in England devised a way to modify a Xbox 360, to detect heart defects and help prevent heart attacks. Apparently the powerful computing power of the gaming system provided a faster and cheaper tool for detecting heart defects than the usual supercomputers utilized by current doctors.

When I read this, it immediately struck me as the complete opposite version of those old 3DFX commercials where cutting edge chips and processors are used to play PC games rather than save lives:



Of course anyone familiar with the subpar quality of later 3FDX products would agree that even if they used the technology for medical science, grandpa would still be keeling over at the birthday table. There's a good reason the company has been long defunct. Product quality aside, these commercials were pretty spot on though. Seriously, they're probably about a decade old, but giant tech company ads they are paraodying are still as bland and generic as ever.

A Piece of the Pie

Well, another All-Star Game, another annoyingly close American League victory. Thirteen years of NL winlessness (we'll always have that tie game in 2002). It makes me yearn for the NL glory days when Jeff Conine was winning All-Star game MVPs and Ozzie Smith would be doing backflips.

While the game was ostensibly close yet strangely unexciting, the other major competitive events of the night could have been found in the ubiquitous Domino's commercials, like the one above, detailing the escalating back and forth battle of words between various regional Domino's factions in support of their particular "American Legends" pie.

All I have to say is shame on you Domino's.

These are trying times for the American people. This nation is currently struggling through such adversities like an extended economic recession, continuing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, international threats from abroad, the death of Michael Jackson, and the impending August release of "GI Joe:Rise of Cobra". It is during these trying times that we need to put our personal differences aside as American citizens and recognize that it is only through cooperation and teamwork that we can bring back prosperity.

Domino's partisan pizza rhetoric is definitely not what this country needs. Instead of the "Cali Chicken Bacon Ranch" loving residents of Los Angeles trading insults and ugly stereotypes with the "Memphis BBQ Chicken" patrons of Memphis or the Philly Cheese Steak" eating residents of Philadelphia engaging in verbal fisticuffs with "Pacific Veggie" fans of Venice, they should all learn to respect and embrace their unique nuanced differences and realize that in the end they are all disgusting Domino's pizzas.

You're Gonna Make It After All

I was looking over some of the random scribblings I wrote in my pocket notebook the other day and I came across a note to myself to comment on the above Chase banking commercial. It has been a while and I'm pretty sure the commercial doesn't even air anymore, but I figured it's better to have a hopelessly belated post rather than to have never posted at all.

The obvious reading of this commercial and the ostensive message conveyed by its producers is how liberatingly helpful and flexible Chase banking services are. In displaying that message, it also co-opts the excitement and optimism of a young adult experiencing the exhilarating novelty of being an independent adult; earning their first paycheck, opening their own bank account, living on their own, etc. On top of that you throw in a dash of modern generation female empowerment with the girl rock cover of the Mary Tyler Moore theme song "Love is All Around". Overall it's a well produced textbook example of the first part of my unified three part theory of banking commercials. The theory is that all banking commercials essentially fall under a three part life cycle trilogy: (1) commercials about opening an account, earning reward points, building credit (youth); (2) commercials about getting a mortgage, refinancing a mortgage, building your business (middle adulthood), and (3) saving up for retirement (death).

So at the time this commercial was still running, about six months ago, I commented to my younger sister, who had then recently started her first big time career job working as a buyer for Macy's in the big city and at the time was balancing her checkbook online (she actually uses Bank of America), that with all this new found grown up independence and responsibility she reminded me of the protagonist of said commercial. She was familiar with the commercial as well and surprisingly commented back that she really didn't enjoy it and found our blond banking heroine to be an incredibly sad and pathetic figure. She thought the character's downright ecstatic reaction to such an unremarkable act as receiving a paycheck and opening a bank account was unrealistic and more than a tad ridiculous. She also was a little off put by the character's disturbingly compulsive monitoring of her account balance via cellphone and her psychotic wide eyed joy from completing every mundane financial transaction. She also suspected that the girl was paying for the companionship of her "boyfriend" since it appeared that she was paying for everything and had to make sure her deposit cleared before she could even kiss him.

I initially laughed off her unexpected take on the commercial, but the more I saw it, the more I started to agree with her viewpoint. Colored by my sister's context our commercial protagonist comes across as quite a sad figure. This is a person who has never really lived. Whatever sheltered life she had before setting out on her own in the big city must have been so repressed as to make everyday tedium like personal banking such an unbelievable thrill. You can tell from the first scenes at her workplace and the eye rolling cynicism of the guy handing out the paychecks that she had already irritated and alienated her fellow workers with her psychotic chipperness in her first two weeks. Her immediate reaction to getting her first paycheck is to sprint directly out of the building and into the first Chase branch she can find to open an account. One can only imagine the scared look on the Chase employee's face as the woman reacts as if she had won the lottery after being given her temporary checks.

The hired rent boy theory also appears valid as well. She has to constantly monitor her finances while on "dates" with her man to make sure she has enough to pay off his hourly companion rates at the end of their day. She even has to break up their kiss right in the middle just to see if she'll be able to afford him for the duration of the movie and later on. When she sees that her deposit has cleared, she goes back to kissing him with the confidence of having enough funds to keep him. Also on the topic of purchased relationships, I'm also suspicious about the circle of friends she's having lunch with. To me they could either be compensated friends that are paid to humor her insanity or her actual friends who are all also similarly insane.

By the conclusion of the commercial where she's doing her best Ophelia impersenation in front of the fountains, I start to worry about the fate of that poor dog and wonder if she hadn't inadvertently killed it via some Lennie Smalls-like misguided, overly enthusiastic petting.



P.S. For all you eagle eyed viewers out there, as it turned out the girl in the commercial is indeed Jess Weixler, star of the refreshingly original yet still fairly terrible horror/dark comedy "Teeth".

Patrick Chewing

All I've got are two questions. How awesome is the above commercial and how did I not see it until just recently? As a fan of Hall of Fame Knick centers, I found this to be as satisfying as any Snickers bar. Sure the sweet flat-top fade is obviously a wig, his less than stellar physique certainly seems to indicate he's been having more than his share of "Patrick Chewings", and if he was going to jam on a goofy white guy I would have preferred it to have been Rik Smits; but in the end it was just a pleasant surprise to see the big guy in action again.

On a related note. At one point did the entire marketing and advertising community agree that candy commercials should be disturbing and surreal? Between Skittles' nightmarescapes and the absurdist fare of Starbursts the emphasis seems to have switched from sweet and delicious to creepy and unsettling. Compared to those Daliesque experiments, those quirky Mentos commercials look like cinéma vérité. Call me old fashioned, but I wouldn't mind a wholesome old Werther's commercial every now and then.