Lowering the bar

Cingular may have the fewest dropped calls, but they seem to have made it a point over the past couple years to annoy the crap out of the viewing public by blanketing the March Madness airwaves with ads featuring two guys. If you follow college basketball at all, I'm sure you know the ones I mean. Apparently they were popular enough for a return engagement this year, although the ad below is from last year:



Okay. You know what these ads remind me of? The "Mac vs. PC" ads that also bring the bile up in my throat. The problem isn't even that Cingular (and Mac) are painting the competition as a bunch of embarrassing doofuses. It's that they compound that by making their pitchman insufferably smug. How is this good business? As dorky as the guy with the "other" phone may look, the guy with the Cingular phone is by and large an obnoxious asshole. It isn't selling me a Mac and it's not selling me a phone either. Maybe I just don't understand something about appealing to the public, but you'd think "If you don't have this phone, you are a MORON" isn't the shrewdest technique.

Separate from that problem is something that annoys me in general about Cingular ads. An entire segment of their campaign - I dare say the bulk of it - revolves around having "the fewest dropped calls."



They're both at home! Hey, you know what really never has a dropped call? A FREAKING LAND LINE!!!! It may be nice that Cingular has the fewest dropped calls when I get lost on my nature hike, but if you're in your house and you can't get a cell phone to work, maybe you should consider OWNING A REAL PHONE.