Low Voltage

The 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? is an exploration of the reasons why the initial attempt at production of electric cars in America failed. Various possible reasons were cited, including the desire of the oil companies to spike a competing fuel source, a lack of appeal to consumers, and fears on the part of the automakers that long-term revenues would drop because electric cars required comparatively little maintenance.

Well, between last fall's ad campaign for the Chevy Volt and the one they've started running recently, I think I have an idea for a sequel in case the electric car fails again: shitty advertising.



What?

[A bunch of aliens are examining the Chevy Volt in a guy's garage.]
Alien: "Chevy Volt!"
Guy: "Guys... this is the third time this week."
[Aliens look somewhat chastened]
Guy: "Okay, I'll say it again. It's electric..."
Alien: "Electric."
Guy: "But when I need to go farther, it uses gas."
Alien: "Gas."
Guy: "Please, tell me you understand..."

You know what, Chevy? Don't fucking flatter yourself. Do you think really think this idea is such a hard concept? Hey, it uses electric and gas! Congratulations, it's a fucking hybrid, except it reverses the typical order of fuel usage. EVERYONE GETS IT. It was bad enough in the initial ad where the premise was "idiots at the gas station will hassle you because they're confused, because this is just WAY too complicated for people to grasp." Now we're really out in the depths of the egos of Chevy's design team. "That's right, not even space aliens who have mastered the technology of interstellar travel understand how a car could possibly have two power sources!"

Here's how a Chevy Volt ad plays out in real life. Ready?

Guy: "Hey, I thought that was an electric car."
Volt owner: "Yeah, it mostly is, but it does use gas as a backup power source for longer trips."
Guy: "Oh, okay."

FIN, assholes. No one is confused by the Chevy Volt. And by pretending that everyone is, you're making yourselves look like supercilious dicks.

I'm not even going to talk about the ridiculous "punchline" to this ad, since it doesn't deserve comment. I will say, though, between the electric car and the aliens, was anyone else reminded of "We Do," the song sung by the Stonecutters in the classic Simpsons episode "Homer the Great," when they saw this ad? I'm just saying, if Steve Guttenberg pops up in the next Volt ad I'm gonna be really suspicious.

Repulsion comes standard

How about another supplemental award? This one we'll call The Creepiest, Most Off-Putting CGI Award. And the winner is... Cars.com!



This ad is supposed to be funny and/or appealing.

Salesman: "Have you decided which vehicle you want to go with today?"
[horrifying CGI monstrosity version of the customer emerges from his back; music plays]
CGI horror: [singing] "Hey baby, I want that car / Hey baby, I really want that car / Let's get that car..."
Customer: "Yeah, that's my confidence, it's been coming out of me ever since I went on Cars.com."

I can think of many, many ways to depict someone as being confident. Cars.com has used at least a couple of them in earlier ads. This is... not one of the ones I would have picked.

Customer: "I compared gas mileage using their side-by-side comparison tool, and uh, this one would be great."
CGI horror: "Hoo! Yeah baby, let's get those keys and go!"
Salesman: "I'll get the keys."
CGI horror: "Woo!"

Quivering and I were talking about this earlier, actually. Why is it that so many ads try to be funny and so few of them are? We came to the conclusion that most people who are funny enough to write successful jokes for a national ad campaign probably have better things to do with their joke-writing talent than write commercials. There's a reason why Will Ferrell's Old Milwaukee spots have captured attention, and it has a lot to do with the fact that Will Ferrell is way too talented of a comedian to be doing spots for Old Milwaukee.

This ad thinks it is funny. There's no disputing that. But the only thing in the ad that is supposed to be funny is the horrible "confidence" singing. And it's not. I know that humor for most people follows the old Potter Stewart line about pornography - "I know it when I see it" - and so maybe it's futile for me to ask people who think this is funny (and, amazingly, they are out there) why they think it's funny. But I can't for the life of me figure out why this is funny or how it even is supposed to be. It's a creepy bit of CGI singing in falsetto that it wants a car. Who fucking cares? That's really what passes for a joke here?

Here's Ad Age's take on the spot, which they rated as one of the best of the Super Bowl - for real:

The first response to this commercial, in which a second head is singing that he wants this particular car, will be this: WTF? The second will be, "Wait, let's watch that again." Ultimately, this polarizing ad will push viewers into "love it" or "hate it" land with no room in between. The spot is made by the facial expressions of the main head and the singing of the second head—and that song, which will become this year's "Give me back that Filet of Fish." Me? I'm loving it.

Well, he nailed my initial response. And he was right that this is likely to be a love it or hate it ad, though it's still not clear to me why anyone would love it. But watch it again? I could barely stomach watching it a second time to transcribe it for this post. As for the song becoming this year's "Give me back that Filet of Fish" - apparently that's supposed to be a compliment? That singing fish ad made me want to stick my head in an oven. I guess there's no accounting for taste.

This commercial isn't even sure what it's saying, because it's too busy falling all over itself trying to force a terrible joke. So if you go to Cars.com you'll become confident! And that's a good thing! Except that the "facial expressions of the main head," by which "the spot is made," give every indication of being embarrassed by, and somewhat exasperated with, the "confident" singing head. I'm expected to think the creepy second head is a good thing? I don't.

A lot of ads have this problem. They want to make what they hope will be a funny joke, but then apparently they decide to hedge their bets by having the characters in the ad seem weirded out by, or somehow upset with, the source of the joke. IT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. If you're going to do this shit, you have to sell it. If you want an ad where a guy feels more confident after going on Cars.com and using their comparison tool - great! Do that. If you want an ad where you just do some wacky shit, fine, I guess. Jamming them together is super pointless. Especially when all the comparison tool told the guy is which car gets better gas mileage, which last time I checked is usually one of the first pieces of information stamped on any showroom car anywhere. All we end up with here is an ad where the guy is really confident for no good reason but seems to feel ashamed of that fact. This was supposed to make sense? This was supposed to sell me on Cars.com? It's a lousy pitch even if this spot didn't feature creepy-ass CGI and a "song" that makes me want to stick knitting needles in my ears.

Last year's Cars.com ad, for those of you lucky enough not to remember it, was four "jokes" in thirty seconds. This year's ad is one joke, and it's even less funny than any of those four, all of which were awful. Give Cars.com some credit: they're getting more efficient at making bad jokes.

What the Hawk?

I sympathize with makers of local commercials. You're tasked with standing out amid a sea of high-budget national ads that never fail to make your spots look even cheaper than they already would. With that in mind, I can see why a company might opt to borrow ideas from a national campaign for their local ad. However, the eTrade baby is not the one I would have gone with.



Baby: "I'm looking cool in this car! This thing is a stroller magnet! I should work on my pick-up lines."

First of all: no. You should not do that, because you are a baby. Also, note that the baby's body never moves, which is kind of disturbing and just makes him look like a tiny quadriplegic.

Baby: "Hey girl, you need a nap? 'Cause you been crawling through my mind all day."

As awful as the eTrade ads were with their implications of babies having sex with each other, I'm not sure this isn't more blatant than any of those. Baby pick-up lines? Someone really thought this was a good idea?

Baby: "Wow. I'm slaying it!"
[Mom in front seat rolls her eyes]

"Ha! Man. My infant son thinks he's, like, the hottest shit. And he's so not. I would never fuck him if he used that line on me."

Baby: "How about, dang, girl! That diaper's looking good on you."

How about not? How about I'm three seconds away from clawing my own eyes out and shoving them into my ears?

Baby: "What are you, a size 18 months? Yeah, I like my girls a little chubby."
Announcer: "You want some chubby?"

What? What the fuck are you talking about? If this is reliant on me having seen previous ads in whatever fucking series this is, or knowing Hawk Ford's shitty dealership slogan, that is a BAD idea, because I live in Chicago, watch a lot of TV, write about ads as a hobby, and yet can't recall ever seeing one of their ads before. If it's not reliant on that... WHAT?

Announcer: "Chubby discounts. Chubby savings."

WHAT. THE. FUCK. ARE. YOU. TALKING. ABOUT.

Does Hawk Ford know that "chubby" is also a slang term involving the penis? Were they going for that pun? When the baby says that he likes his girls "a little chubby," is that intended to be a play on words, in that he might also have a "little chubby?" Because if so, I want to drive down to Oak Lawn and light that entire dealership on fire.

And if they don't know that, and they weren't going for that pun... what in the hell were they going for?

By the way: "Chubby discounts, chubby savings" isn't even Hawk Ford's normal slogan, as evidenced by these other ads in this campaign. So... a baby calling another baby fat was just so hilarious we had to alter our whole ad to be built around it, in spite of the fact that it makes no goddamn sense? For fuck's sake, at least those other ads use the baby for semi-legit reasons. With this one it just seems like there was a bet in the office about how horrible a commercial they could make and still get it on the air.

Sub-Optima

This isn't some ridiculously terrible commercial or anything. It's just kind of a mess.



I suspect this is what happens when there are six ideas in the pitch meeting and they just decide to use them all. My prevailing thought about this ad is that the first piece of the plotline, which depicts a couple handcuffed to a cop's motorcycle as the cop drives away in their Kia Optima, would probably have been sufficient by itself for the entire ad. You start with the couple driving, cop pulls them over, cop looks the car over and is taken by it, cop has the couple step out of the car, then hops in and drives away. Gets the point across, doesn't make wild, random lurches between events in something that can only charitably be called a narrative, and is at least conceptually amusing.

But does this ad stop there? No. In fact, it doesn't even start until right at the end of that piece of the plot. Instead, we move on to a helicopter grabbing the car with a giant suction cup and flying out across the ocean to deliver the car to some rich guy on a yacht. (Apparently this takes place in an alternate dimension where there is only one Kia Optima in existence, because surely with a base MSRP of around $20k, dude could afford his own. Hell, hiring that helicopter and fitting it out with the suction gadget probably cost more than that.) But does the yacht get to the rich guy? No. Because - watch the ad, this actually happens - fucking Poseidon pops out of the ocean, knocks the helicopter away, and examines the car.

Okay. I say this a lot on here, perhaps too much, but it's too often applicable: I know this is supposed to be funny. Or something. But I just find it stupid and "lookit me!" What use does Poseidon have for a car that he's like 20 times larger than? Or at all? Maybe it's just going to be a present for his daughter's Sweet Sixteen - not to drive, mind you, because they live under the sea, but to add to her collection of human items. She can admire the car as it slowly rusts, all the while humming "Part of Your World" and combing her hair with a dinglehopper. Or maybe this is kind of retarded and could just as easily have been left out, except that Kia apparently really wanted to show off more of their mediocre CGI.

Then aliens zap the car away, but they lose it as well, as the car is pulled through some sort of wormhole and ends up in Mayan times, ready to be worshiped as some sort of god. Okay. How do the Mayans know what a car is? What are they going to do with it?

So in 60 seconds the car is possessed by six different entities (I'm including the couple at the beginning, who technically have already been dispossessed before the 60 seconds start). Doesn't this seem a little frantic? Am I the only one who finds it sort of distracting and muddled? You'd think the idea of an ad like this would be to focus on the car, but in sixty seconds it seems to me that only about seven of them - 0:05 to 0:08, when the cop is driving, and 0:37 to 0:41, when the alien is driving - really show the car doing anything besides being pulled from one place to the next. A 60-second car commercial and barely more than 10% of it actually shows the car in action? (It could be worse, of course.)

That might even be okay if there were anything particularly distinctive about the Kia Optima... but it's a mid-size sedan, a.k.a. the most conventional automotive category in existence. Virtually every car in that category looks at least 80% like all the others, and the Optima hardly looks like an exception. It's not a hybrid, it's not electric... the only thing we know about it is that everyone in this ad wants it, which is hardly a convincing argument. Shit, even that awful Cruze ad cited the car's MPG. The only thing we get at the end is the starting price (which is only if you want it in manual, by the way). I mean, for all I know there are lots of awesome things you can get with the Kia Optima - for six million bucks, plus whatever it cost to produce, is it too much to ask that this ad mention any of them? Or should I just be thankful that no more hamsters showed up?

Hamstering it up

It's about time I got around to this one.



This ad, from early 2009 or so, is a good commercial. It's a clever use of interesting visuals to communicate, getting across the idea that the Kia Soul is distinct from the many cookie-cutter cars on the road. It even gets in a couple facts about the car at the end.

Unfortunately, Kia bought into the hamsters maybe a little too much.



What the hell is that mess?

It seems pretty clear that I'm not in this ad's target demographic (the references to 145th Street and Amsterdam Avenue place the setting quite conspicuously in Harlem). But it's still baffling. First of all, Kia makes the pretty bold assumption that you remember their earlier hamster ad - it was a good ad, but it wasn't exactly "Have you had your break today?" Even beyond that, the two ads have virtually nothing in common beyond the hamsters - the hamster wheels make only a fleeting appearance in the sequel, the hamsters have now been dressed up in all manner of clothing, and Calvin Harris' "Colours" (an electronica song from 2007) has been replaced with Black Sheep's "The Choice is Yours" (a hip hop song from 1991). Really, why did they even bother to keep the hamsters? Surely the branding from the first commercial wasn't that valuable if they just threw out everything else.

Gone is the clever suggestion that the competition is like a bunch of identical hamster wheels; in its place are comparisons to a toaster and a cardboard box. Is this still supposed to represent the competition? Is it supposed to represent the used cars that might be the only other alternative for someone shopping in the Kia Soul's price range? It's impossible to say for sure when Kia is dealing entirely in metaphors. I don't know. Maybe if I lived in Harlem this ad would make perfect sense... but somehow I doubt that.

It's also worth noting that by giving the hamsters so much more to do, Kia has successfully called attention to the not-especially-good CGI they're employing in that department. The first ad seemed like it might have been mostly real hamsters until the end; I can't imagine there's a real hamster for even a frame in this commercial, and it's painfully obvious. Does that really matter? Probably not. But it looks cheap. I don't know, maybe that was the point.

Sucklicious

Guess who's back?



More Naomi Campbell and CGIed lizards? I mean, was it that successful and/or thrillicious? We have the same bad actress that nobody likes (by the way, if you're a celebrity and E! doesn't approve of you, you have a problem), the same stupid lizards (but this time they've got costumes on!) and the same general sense of pointless overproduction.

What's Naomi Campbell's motivation for joyfully carousing with a lounge of lizards? Some weird lizard fetish? Is the lizard kiss supposed to be funny, or sexy, or... I just don't understand how I'm supposed to react to it. It's unsettling to say the least. The tropical beach background, the lilting sounds of Santana, the self-serious expression on Campbell's face when she kisses the lizard -- it all points to a very genuine portrayal of supermodel-lizard sexual attraction.

New delicious flavors for summer -- Life Water. Thrillicious

Since this ad doesn't use "Thriller," why are we going back to Thrillicious? Why not "BlackMagicWoman-icious"? "Carlos Santanicious"? Also, this doesn't even tell you what the flavors are. Or anything about the product. They rely a little too heavily on hoping Naomi Campbell+animated lizards will resonate with people, and not just remind them of Geico. I wonder how much car insurance sales have gone up since this campaign started.

I had hoped, desperately, that we'd seen the last of dancing lizards commercials. But I think now we're in for a long ride. Somebody over at SoBe must just be over the moon with this whole concept. Next up: "Life Water After Dark" -- new flavors to put you in the mood, with an ad featuring our favorite, laugh-a-minute lizards fertilizing freshly laid eggs by Naomi Campbell. If you can't move product by showing in vitro human-lizard hybrids, then you don't deserve to be in the ad business.

Puns and Ammo (hey, meta-pun!)

What do you get when you mix the hilarity of predictable puns with the glitz of low-budget CGI? You end up with a sparkling gem like this (EDIT: The :60 disappeared, so here's the :30 that's not as egregious, but gives you a taste of how bad this commercial truly was.  Also, I know now that they used an actual bear on a greenscreen, not CGI.  Man, bears are weird looking.):



A grizzly bear walks into a Lowe's

Whoa, is anyone familiar with bear safety? What these folks need to be doing right now is crouching down, avoiding eye contact, and walking away slowly from this enormous wild animal. Grizzlies are the largest land predators on Earth. What the Lowe's people don't need to be doing is trying to sell this thing a grill.

Salesman (to bear): Hello, welcome to Lowe's. Grills? Grills are right over here.

No, you idiot! Get out your bear mace, play dead, and tell everyone else to walk calmly out of the store!

Salesman: Can you say "grilled salmon"? I can.

So now we've gone from selling a bear a grill to making stupid bear puns?

And let me put this out there -- how is it that a bear can walk into a Lowe's and instantly find a sales associate? Every time I've been to a Lowe's, there's like one guy out on the floor, and he's usually selling washers and dryers to somebody with a huge line queuing behind him.

Salesman: I think you're a big eater, am I wrong?

Please eat the salesman, bear. Please. Do us all a favor.

Salesman (imitating bear grunts): Ow.... ow..... outdoor furniture, right this way -- come on.

Oh, why didn't you just eat his face, bear...

I wonder if there is something that is professionally made that is clumsier and more retarded than this hack-tastic segue. And if there is, I don't know that I could even bring myself to blog about it. This is comedy at its most insipid and most demoralizing.

Salesman: Oh, you like this? Go ahead, sniff it.

Please get to the point. We're like 30 seconds into this and we just do not get the concept. What is the objective of putting the stupid bear in this ad?

Salesman: Is there a Mrs. Bear? Because we haven't talked about that. Couple cubs?

Are you hitting on the grizzly bear? Because that's what it sounds like. Is Lowe's a cover for a creepy bestiality ring or something?

I love the "we haven't talk about that" line. Spare me, Lowe's. You do not chummily converse with Lowe's sales associates (assuming you can find one) -- there's like one per store and you're lucky if you get 10 seconds to spit out your question.

Salesman (to bear who's looking at decking wood): Oh, I see you're looking at the Trex. Trex is the way to go. Yeah.

This is the only manufacturer plug in the commercial, and it's for a brand of wood. Do most people insist on trading up to name brand wood? Oh, and, hey sales guy -- any particular reason why Trex is the "way to go"? Remember, this isn't just an absurd 1-minute comedy about a bear buying shit at a store, it's also a commercial -- don't be afraid to sell me on something.

Voiceover: Time to come out of hibernation and head over for all your outdoor living needs.

Finally, we get to the point. It was just a man who was in hibernation! And he was dressed as a bear, or something. Or maybe he actually was a bear and then transformed into a human, like a weird Ovid poem. But, I generally get the idea. Finally.

Anyway, flimsy concept. What Lowe's was trying to say was, "It's Spring! Time to head to Lowe's to buy what you need to spruce up your outdoor space!" Instead, they went with, "It's Spring! You know what's funny? Bears! Here, we spent a bunch of money to poorly animate one walking through our store! Hope you like cornball puns!!"

Bear turned Man (to neighbor who is now a bear): How do you like your steak? (bear growls) Rawr? Oh, rare.

Oh man! Another pun! Everybody wins! That's almost as good as the "Ow...outdoor furniture" one! How do you guys come up with this stuff?!


So, you may not learn a single interesting thing about Lowe's or what they sell from this commercial, but I will give Lowe's this much: they really hit hard on the bear message. Their bear marketing sense is top-fucking-notch. That is a bear no one is soon to forget. What is it, I wonder, about a cheaply-animated bear that makes an ad so... incombearable?

The skeeve that goes... crunch

When did Chester Cheetah turn into a creepy, weird asshole? Oh, about ten seconds after Goodby, Silverstein and Partners decided to "re-invent" him?



You know, that woman could probably have raised her objection in a slightly nicer way. But this... what is this? "Inside the mind of every Cheetos eater is a strangely old, dickish cartoon cheetah just waiting to be turned loose." Hell yeah! Makes me hungry. That woman is going to know it was you, by the way, lady. Hope you're prepared for the fallout from that little move.

The Orange Underground? Yeah, nothing's more subversive than eating a snack food that's mass-produced by a giant corporation. And, I guess, tossing it into the laundry of people who have slightly obnoxious, but seemingly not all that unfair criticisms for the Cheetos consumer. You're like the fucking French Resistance over there, guys.



I just don't think I want my spokescharacter to be this creepy. I mean, I don't write ads for a living - I just make fun of them as a hobby - so maybe I'm crazy. But come on. In voice and hair pattern, Chester Cheetah is apparently suddenly about 70 years old. Maybe in the first ad he disappears because he had to make his seventeenth trip to the bathroom that day.

Is this an appealing character? I feel like the "aging" of Chester is intended to aim the product at adults, but that seems like a losing battle. If you like Cheetos, you're going to eat them. If you've never had Cheetos, and you're older than your early 20s, what's motivating you to try them? I doubt it's the skeevy CGI cheetah giving the stewardess a backrub. Remember when Cookie Crisp tried marketing itself to adults? It worked about as well as I expect this to. I mean, what's the movement here, the "us" you'd be joining? The movement of adults who eat Cheetos? In "secret," by which I mean they use Cheetos to do vaguely inappropriate things that mark them as the obvious culprits?

You know what? Scratch the "vaguely."



"Fuck people with different behavioral patterns than yours! Eat Cheetos!"

Three ads, three unpleasant uses for a wholly benign snack food, and an off-putting, badly-animated cheetah with AARP membership who ties them all together. Brilliant. I can only hope that in the future, the revolution of orange-fingered douchebags will not, in fact, be televised.

Which came first, the stupid commercial, or the really stupid commercial?

It's possible that two people, completely separate from one another geographically, demographically, etc., could simultaneously dream up the same idea. People in ancient China and pharaonic Egypt, for example, both invented paper thousands of miles apart from each other. It's also possible, however, to completely rip someone off. One of these two scenarios occurred with these two similarly-themed commercials. The problem is, they both suck:

Burger King's Offering


Visa's Offering


Synopsis of both ads: Everyone engaged in fake juggling. Pointless, unbranded scenes of people juggling different crap -- heavy use of Power Rangers-grade CGI. All of a sudden, one person in ad does something totally normal (i.e. writing a check, being a klutz) -- everyone drops what they're juggling. Branded product to the rescue! Obnoxious juggling resumes.

Note to Burger King: Office professionals who are that busy probably don't eat at a grease trap like Burger King. They'd be bringing their own lunches and microwaving them to save time. Why don't you just stick with your usual pandering to the 18-25 fat American guy demographic?

Note to Visa Check Card: You've already been written up once before here in this blog for this very campaign. You have learned nothing. Now you're at it again, making what is, frankly, a creepy commercial. Look at the costumes for the clerks at this store! And the nightmarish robot? Which Russian Futurist did you hire to direct this ad?

Two ads, same concept, same plot, equally shitty execution -- each done by different agencies representing different companies. I can't really say which is worse. I'll probably go with whichever one came first (I think it's Burger King's), since that seems to have spawned this whole trend. I just hope we don't have to suffer another juggling commercial after these two.