Wow! That's an awful commercial!

By this point I'm sure you've all seen that god-awful Staples "Wow, that's a low price" ad. You haven't? But you'd like to punish yourself? Well, okay.

That commercial, however, is not why we're here. We're here because of this one:



That's veteran character actor Joey Slotnick (I did not have to look this up in any way. Is that weird?) as the audience surrogate. And if you saw a guy doing that in a Staples, you would, in fact, probably react exactly as Slotnick does here - with grimaces and eventual sarcasm. But Staples isn't here to bury its ridiculous yelling pitchman. No, he wins this little duel, by smugly pointing to a price that is, in fact, so low that it would apparently cause anyone to go apeshit.

What is really the point here? This is easily one of the five most annoying pitchmen in history. That seems like exaggeration, but think about it. How many characters can you name off the top of your head who are more hateable? I might be able to come up with a handful, but even after I did that, I would have to concede that most of those characters at least have some sort of personality. This is just crazed yelling by an escaped mental patient. Not only is it obnoxious, it's some of the laziest writing you'll ever come across. Bear in mind that this ad is ostensibly supposed to be funny. So where's the joke?

And that was just the first ad. The fact that Staples had the gall to put this second commercial on the air shows that they recognize how stupid and annoying the first ad was. Here, they're admitting that they quite frankly don't give a shit. Why? Because for every reasonable person who hates these ads, there are apparently two who think it's hilarious to recreate them and post it to YouTube. This may not be the single laziest major-corporation, nationally-televised ad campaign in recent memory, but I can't think of any that are markedly lazier.

And the second ad is worse than the first. The first ad, while thoroughly unfunny, at least attempts a punchline.

Lunatic: "Wow! That's a low price!" [x3]
Female Employee: "How many products do we carry?"
Male Employee: "Seven thousand."
Female Employee: "I'll get him a cart."
[more crazed yelling]

Painfully bad. However, it does follow the basic structure of a joke. The second ad? Not so much.

Lunatic: "Wow! That's a low price!" [x3]
Man [sarcastically]: "I'm sorry, did you say something about a low price?"
[Lunatic points smugly]
Man: "Wow! That's a low price!"
Lunatic: "I know!"

As McBain might say, dat's de joke. In the first commercial, there's a bad joke surrounded by obnoxious yelling. In the second ad, Staples basically says, "Hey, we know you hated that first ad. So guess what? Now we're not even going to pretend there's anything else going on! We don't care what you think. We're going to shove this awful shit down your throat until you choke on it."

A couple posts ago I talked about those awful Toyota Sienna ads and how I didn't understand why you'd make an ad in which the presumed protagonists and pitchmen are so loathsome. But this really is what we've come to in advertising, isn't it? The point of this ad isn't really to be funny. Not even Staples could possibly think this ad was legitimately funny. But while it's unfunny and stupid and annoying... it is distinctive. In those Sienna ads, that family is awful and I have no desire to emulate them. But I did remember the ad. I personally don't believe the old adage "There's no such thing as bad publicity" - there have been ad campaigns that have led me to stop using a product because I hated them so much. But I'm starting to feel like maybe I'm shouting into the wind here.

If there's one thing I've learned in three years on this blog it's that corporations, almost to the last, are simply not interested in making good advertisements. They're interested in making money, and if Jay Leno, Jersey Shore and the Transformers films have taught us anything it's that in mass culture, there is no prerequisite of quality or value for success. Why does Staples make an ad like this? Because it's cheaper than making a good one and because they don't think it matters. And the sad part is they're probably right.

This is probably reading like a sign-off at this point, and it's not. We're not closing the blog, and in fact I've added a Twitter account - you can follow @windiermegatons if you want - so that I can throw up the occasional bite-sized thought on ads that annoy me but don't quite merit a full post (although sometimes, as with Buffalo Wild Wings, I get there eventually). But I'll be honest: this ad is so bad it's pushed me to the edge of the abyss.

Possibly the worst commercial ever made

It's hard to define the "worst commercial ever made." But I think I would suggest that some good qualifications for the title would be (a) being incredibly unfunny; (b) featuring things that no human would ever say; and (c) being really creepy. Congratulations, AT&T: the only way this ad could have been worse is if it were also racist.



Black guy's thumbs: "Funny is knocking at the door, and he wants to partay!"

This is not funny. It is not something anyone would ever say to indicate that they found something funny. And good God, those thumbs with the faces on them are creepy as fuck.

Nerdy white guy's thumbs: "That's insanium in the cranium, dawg!"

Kill me.

Goth girl's thumbs: "I'm laughing on the dark, abysmal inside. Heh heh."

Ugh. Hey, goths like dark things! You knew that, right? Please let this end.

Guy with a hat's thumbs: "Shake your funny-maker. Shake it. Shake it hard."

I would like to shake the person who wrote this ad hard. And slap them across the face a few times.

Blonde woman's thumbs: "If they bottled that kind of funny, I'd buy it! Hilarity, by Daryl."

The bottled version of this ad: "Crippling Head Pain, by AT&T."

Announcer: "How would you say LOL?"

Not any of those ways, not in a million years. And neither would anyone else. Ever.

Announcer: "With a full keyboard, it's easier to text it how you say it."

Oh God. That's the point of this ad? That is all you were using this ridiculous bullshit to sell? Guess what - even with a full keyboard on a computer, when I indicate that something is funny, I might type the onomatopoeia of a laugh. I would not, in a jillion fucking years, write that something funny my friend said was "insanium in the cranium," and anyone who would should immediately be euthanized for the good of humanity.

More importantly, why did they have to use the horrible, creepy talking thumbs? God, they're awful. This ad was written, produced, looked at by probably dozens of people, and apparently not one of them said "This is really awful" or "This isn't funny at all" or "Those thumbs look like garbage and they're terrifying" or anything. Or, which would be worse, these things were said and AT&T just figured that the public at large will laugh at anything. Based on the YouTube comments, it seems like that might be true. Gag.

Year's Worst, 1st Entry - Hillshire Farm

I firmly believe in arbitrary rankings, so I'd like to nominate this Hillshire Farm ad for the Worst Commercial of 2007.



This commercial is the advertising equivalent of Gwen Stefani's rock hop anthem "Hollaback Girl." Sometimes commercials try to show a consumer in their target audience being sold on their product. In this case, someone's already eating an Entrée Salad - so, no selling necessary. And yet, when she innocently begins using the product, people start annoying her with a cheer that would make a 5th grade pom squad blush. Some advertisers assume the consumer has a brain; others, including Hillshire Farm, think they speak in monosyllabic grunts:

That salad rocks, the best,
Make it easy at your desk

"Best" and "desk" do not rhyme. They barely near-rhyme. Can a copywriter please spend more than 5 seconds on a script occasionally?

It's second to none,
Just add lettuce and you're done

You know what I have lying around the office? Lettuce. Just bags of the stuff with my name on them in the fridge. If only there were a plastic package of cubed meat I could buy to mix it with....

You hungry, you hungry, yo mama says you hungry

There's nothing ol' Johnny Lunchbox thinks is funnier than white people saying "yo mama," right? This is classic material. Totally not dated, and totally inoffensive to general taste.

When I say Hillshire, you say Farm!
Hillshire! Farm! Go Meat!

When I say BRAND NAME, you say BRAND NAME!
BRAND NAME! BRAND NAME! RETARDED SLOGAN!

It's catchy. Or something.

"Go Meat" is the central campaign for Hillshire Farm, and it's so bereft of any subtlety or art that it may very well have set back advertising several years. Why can't you portray your delicious meat products in an appealing way? Why can't you talk about your delicious meat products like an adult with a sense of taste and a high school-level vocabulary? Remember, you're (apparently) selling this to the 9-5 office worker - you're probably going to have to say more than just "Hillshire Farm -- MEAT! MEATY MEAT! BIG OL' MEAT! YO MAMA! LOL!"

But I do like to represent alternative opinions. For instance, what might the meat industry think of this campaign? Here's Hillshire Farm's VP Tim Roush:

There is no escaping the fact that Americans have an unabashed love of meat, and the poll results just reinforce that fact. We developed our 'GO MEAT!' campaign to celebrate and, in some instances, unleash the meat enthusiast in all of us.

Americans. Unabashed love of meat. Leashed meat enthusiasts. Fat, meat-gorging half-wits who love yo mama jokes and cheerleaders. The poll he's talking about? It said that 85% of Americans could not live without meat. Who conducted the poll? Who wrote that clearly misleading paid survey question? Hillshire Farm.

This is why this blog exists. Not only to point out when ads are bad, or when ads aren't doing their jobs, but also when ads operate under the pretense that we're all a huge lot of morons waiting for companies to drill false and sophomoric messages into our heads about shitty products. This is a campaign against bad ad campaigns. Let's send "GO MEAT!" and its like-minded marketing brethren back to the stone age where they belong.