Claiming Money Is The Key, So Keep on Dreaming

Television advertising is a strange medium. We're building up to the day when companies unleash their biggest and most innovative ads on the Super Bowl viewing public, all with the intent of generating enough buzz to gain some extra business. Most of these ads won't convince anyone that their product is any better than a competitors, but it might help the company name and image be fresh in your mind the next time you are at the store. With the impending advertising blitzkrieg in mind, let's go over some things I've noticed in ads recently.

Whoever wrote that Freecreditreport.com jingle needs to be fired. Even more, they need to be punished for making that thing stick in my head for days at a time.

I'm sick of the King from Burger King, but I know that they are building up to a big Super Bowl ad. Whatever it is, I can only hope that it involves regicide.

Doggy Steps. Maybe it's just my bias as the owner of a 70-plus pound dog that has no problem climbing on whatever chair he wants without the aid of these lovely carpeted steps, but I'm thinking that if you have a dog that can't climb up onto the furniture that might be a good thing.

Dennis Haysbert is doing ads for All State, now. That's great for him, but I'm not sure I'm ok with the former President of the United States is pushing car insurance.

I'm still waiting for the ad where Mama McNabb smashes Terrell Owens over the head with a can of Chunky Soup as if it were a folding chair. "That's what you get for talking trash about my son."

The ad that bugs me the most recently is the Wendy's ad where everyone compares things to the cost of items on the 99 cent value menu. A woman looks at a pair of shoes, "Oh, they're 85 Frostys." A man asks the babysitter how much she makes, "Like 6 Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers an hour." Maybe I'm too literal, but are those shoes really $84.15 and does the babysitter make $5.94, or were they meaning $85.00 and $6.00? It's a 99 cent menu, not a dollar menu. At the end of the commercial, a guy tells his wife that she looks like a million Crispy Chicken Nuggets. Ok, that's actually $990000, which is nice, but not a million bucks. However, the nuggets are 5 for 99 cents, so in reality he's telling her that she looks like $198,000 - a long way from saying she looks like a million bucks. I don't know why I think about this stuff, but I do, and because I do, the commercial drives me nuts. Oh well, that's my 0.0202 Jr. Cheeseburger Deluxes.

Until later...