Sunday, October 24, 2010

Fake-us group

I've been waiting for someone to explain to me how this commercial could possibly be real. Maybe one of you has an idea?



Woman: "Domino's doesn't want me to know what's in their ingredients."
Man: "'Cause it's probably not real cheese."


I find this a weird complaint, in the setup. On what grounds is she claiming that Domino's doesn't want her to know what's in their ingredients? Did she call her local Domino's once to ask for a list and they told her to fuck off?

Focus Group Leader: "Well, I've got a surprise for you."
[the walls pull away to reveal that they're in the middle of a field]
Woman 2: "Oh my God!"
Leader: "This is just one of the dairies that makes the milk to make real Domino's cheese."

Okay. So, it claims at the bottom of the screen that this was an "actual focus group." I just have one question.

WHAT?????????

I guess there are some subsidiary questions within that one. How could these people possibly have failed to realize that they were in a tiny shack sitting on the grounds of a dairy farm? How did Domino's get them there without this being in any way revealed? Blanchardville, Wisconsin is pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Either these people were from the area - in which case it is particularly incredible that they would not have realized they were on a dairy farm - or they were like bussed in from Madison, the nearest city of any real size, and also should probably have found something at least a little off about a major corporation holding a focus group in the middle of farm country.

But let's say, for the hell of it, that this focus group was going on without any of the participants realizing where they were... why were they out there in the first place? How did Domino's know that the legitimacy of their cheese was going to be called into question in this focus group? Was one of the people speaking a plant? This goes back to that initial comment by the woman that Domino's doesn't want her to know what the ingredients are. What? Where did she come up with that? It's almost like that's something she was... I don't know, told to say?

Lest Domino's get any ideas about some ad where I'm watching TV calling their focus group fake, and then they have all the members of the focus group walk into my living room and introduce themselves to prove they're real people, I'm not necessarily saying that this ad was faked. But I am saying, for sure, that if you wanted to make an ad that looked fake, that was supposedly real but was so insanely convenient that it had the whiff of contrivance all over it... well, you couldn't do much better than this.

3 comments:

Tyler said...

I like to pretend that they reported to a focus group taking place in a mobile unit on the back of a flatbed truck, and were then somehow driven to the dairy farm without sensing they were on the move.

Anonymous said...

What was said doesn't bother me. They could simply ask the questions in a certain way to get them to say just about anything.

But I don't get how they got in that little building in the middle of a daily farm without them noticing. What, were they blindfolded like in those Pizza Hut commercials? But then wouldn't that tip them off that it was something more than just a random focus group?

Anonymous said...

It's absolutely fake.