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Interesting Commercials
So, I'm sitting here half-watching the Super Bowl and admiring some of the new commericials. So far, I think that the E*trade Monkey with Horse ad has been really good, as has the Kasparov vs. The Machines - the accenture and cingular ads have been, IMHO, as bland as Wonder bread. That, and the Cingular icon looks like a bold color version of the X icon, or something. The E*Trade Matrix rip-off ad was good as well - but with one quarter left, I'm not as impressed as in past years. What do you folks think?Update: 01/29 06:29 PM by H :Check out AdCritic's Superbowl site.
the pets.com puppet had a killer cameo, it's good to see he is still getting work.
The Bud commercials have been pretty good, esp the one with "What are you doing?," "Just watching the market, drinkin' an import" and "Hey Jimmy, pick up the cordless." Just shows that you have a sense of humor when you can make fun of yourself. BTW--anyone else notice that it is no longer the Budwieser blimp, it's the Budwieser.com blimp. I think they missed that bandwagon by a year.
the pets.com puppet had a killer cameo
Yeah, he looked great on Brittney Spears' arm during the halftime show.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
The commercials must be pretty boring if we're all here pushing reload on Slashdot. :)
This is exactly like how the News Agencies called the result of the election before it was truly over. We require, in a proper democracy, that our influential media hold its tongue and refuse to offer influential opinion before the contest is done.
I can only hope that commercials yet to declare will not be disheartened, and will show up to stake their claim despite this knee jerk reaction.
Shame on you Hemos.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
It's not ASCII, it's an accent. Musical notation uses a ">" character to indicate that a note should be accented (3/4 value and one dynamic level louder, give or take). An interesting use of symbols, but a poor choice if people don't get it.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
If you want to look at those comercials, you can always go to adcritic.
(I just want to be helpful, if you think I am a karma whore, mod me down).
Fh
If only superbowl.adcritic.com weren't superbowled... oh wait, posting this isn't going to help, is it?
The shareholder is always right.
I think I speak for everyone here when I say the Super Bowl super sucked. Unless youre a retard, in that case, you speak for yourself.
Pick your favorite mocking quote:
"This disturbing commercial was brought to you by...Pepsi!"
"Oh look! Its Sting, and his little portable Pakistani friend!"
"Welcome to Super Bowl 35! Here's Sting Singing A Song About A Prostitute!"
"Our fans might not like that we're on stage with a band like N'Sync...But..its like, we do that all the time."
"Ok, everybody! Lets Punt!"
"Let's kick! And kick some more!! We like kicking!"
"And now, for the useless 3D instant replay."
"New York - We Suck Balls."
"Accenture -- Even We Don't Know What We Make."
"I read PROPAGANDA
Reading in the local paper, the big draw of this super bowl were, as the paper put it, Matrix like replays. After having watching 3 quarters, I must say that it is a big let down. I guess a brief look at the technology is waranted:
They have setup thirty-some cameras around the stadium that allow a continuous feed of imagery to computer located in the bowels of the programming center. This is all done via fiber, and is supposed to create that cool camera panning effect where the camera stops, swings around, and you are behind the play.
That is a simple overview, but it gets the idea across. My take is that it is a little early to be seeing this. First off, only a select few plays even need this type of replay feature, and I believe the viewer only saw it two times before the half-time show. When it was used, it was jerky, and very, VERY pixelated. I don't see why they didn't just switch camera angles. This is specially true after hearing how much they spent to do something they hardly do. Maybe in a few years, computers can do interpolation, make it smoother, all that stuff, but for right now, leave it out of the game.
As for best commercial, I would have to vote for the new "Wassup" with the Wall Street guys. Too much fun!
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Lame. I'm sorry old guy in the bed with a destroyed trachea, but Phillip Morris wont change their product until idiots like you decide to stop putting a roll of burning tobacco between your lips. Quit bitching and accept responsibility for what you have done to yourself.
As for your foundation and that damn Truth campaign, take your frikking money and shove it somewhere where the sun _does_ shine. I'd rather see those billions of dollars go to finding cures for muscular distrophy or cancers that AREN'T self inflicted.
WTF was up w/ the 3d shit going on there.
"You can punt the ball, and stay in wonderland."
"Or...you can run the kickoff back for a touchdown and i'll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes"
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I'm just waiting for Aerosmith to get back on heroin and start rocking again. Their last three albums are all sound alike "sensitive" ballads. I mean, if you're going to wear vinyl form-fitting pants at sixty years old, you gotta have attitude, man. Drugs, songs about drugs, sex with barely legal groupies, songs about said groupies, and obscene lip/tongue gestures are what made them rock gods in the seventies. Had Steven Tyler molested Britney live on stage before an audience of millions, I would have a newfound respect for them. As it is, they suck.
Today's sig brought to you by http://www.swankypimp.com
They had a bunch of cameras at the top of the stadium and they could switch from one camera's viewpoint to the next.
The problem was it that looking down from that angle with that sort of zoom you couldn't see very much of the field. So they'd turn the view until it was directly behind the quarter back and then they'd say, "You can tell that he doesn't have anyone open from this view." But you couldn't. You could tell that he didn't have anyone open within 3 feet but you couldn't see anything that was happenning further on down the field.
Man, it was like the ad agencies conspired this year.
Ad: Computer Associates "Roosters on wall street"
Premise: A bunch of roosters mob a big city and then create a shockwave at sunrise
Subtext: You are such an idiot you don't even know you need us until a farm animal tells you.
Ad: Pepsi "prisoners steal our machine"
Premise: A coke and pepsi machine sit next to each other for months/years. Eventually the inmates from a nearby prison tunnel under and steal the pepsi machine.
Subtext: Convicted felons prefer Pepsi.
Ad: Budweiser "white men can't wassup"
Premise: a bunch of dorky white guys drinking heinkein look like idiots doing more or less the same thing as all the idiots in normal budweiser "wassup" commercials.
Subtext: White people are dorky and our customers look down on them. Oops, our customers are 85% white. Our customers are stupid and can't be as cool as our commercials.
Ad: Levi "corpse donor" 569 jeans
Premise: A "cowboy" kills himself on a coin-op pony and his jeans are delivered to a loser who can't afford his own.
Subtext: Idoiot cowboys buy our stuff, kill themselves stupidly, and if you're a loser you'll want their used jeans
Ad: CBS Becker "Airtime Abuse"
Premise: Two characters from a CBS show sit around commiserating about how outrageous it is that the network uses the superbowl to "flog" its poorer shows.
Subtext: Our show sucks, CBS is abusing its viewers, and isn't it funny that we come right out and say it?
Ad: Levi "corpse donor" 569 jeans
Premise: A "cowboy" kills himself on a coin-op pony and his jeans are delivered to a loser who can't afford his own.
Subtext: Idoiot cowboys buy our stuff, kill themselves stupidly, and if you're a loser you'll want their used jeans
I could go on and on. I sat there stupefied that almost every single commercial had a subtext talking about how stupid the company's target audience is. I mean, sure, you'd have to be stupid to drink Bud, but isn't it adding insult to injury to *tell* people that at the same time you sell them product?
The movie ads were ok. Too bad none of the movies themselves looked any good. But at least the ads didn't play the "morons will go see this movie" angle too strongly. Better than you can say for most of the ads.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
wait'll next year!
(I've been coding for quite a few hours this weekend)
I'm still working on a clever footer.
[Note: Details have been changed in order to protect the easily bored. Take nothing for granted, check all facts yourself, yada yada yada.]
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
when I saw a (bah!) M$ commercial. New one, about how _reliable_ thier servers are. It showed an empty office with servers in it and spoke of how everyone was home enjoying milk and cookies with no worries because Redmond was running the show.
I first saw it on Comedy Central, so I just figured it was part of the program.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
You've got to be kidding me. That Cingular ad was ludicrous, bordering on offensive. It really sickened me to see them take what was a very cool and eye-opening short and parlay it into a sales-pitch for fucking cellular phones. I hate their name, I hate their logo, and now, I hate their advertising department as well. You've got to wonder what kind of "genious" overpaid, MBA-type moronic PHBs would sign off on not only that stupid, annoying name, but then pick that stupid paint-splotch of a logo, and then, come back for thirds and sign off on such a stupid, frivolous, and sometimes insulting advertising campaign. I for one think that whoever the guilty party is should be promptly fired or demoted to the mail room.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
- SBC and BellSouth say: we aren't making enough money! How can we trick people into forking over more of it to us?
- Marketroid responds: let's merge and hire one of those big naming firms so come up with something distinctive that will stick in people's minds. Well pay them $2 million dollars in return for a 6-11 letter word. Just like Agilent! Yeah!
- Dumb, naive, MBA-educated, spoon-fed presidents of SBC & BellSouth respond: Yeah! This should help us maximize market capitalization through strategic synergizing while at the same time optimizing and streamlining our labor pool to eliminate duplicity (read: layoffs). Yeah!
- Marketroid responds: also, since the product we are trying to sell is about as common as, say, air, in the United States, we need to implement a new, metaphorical marketing campaign based on freedom of expression and personal liberty. This should help potential customers to forget that 3 out of every 5 of them already have a cellular phone. Yeah!
- MBAs: Yeah!
- Marketroid: one more thing: we're going to concoct some touching shorts using a gifted artist afflicted with multiple sclerosis. In their minds, people will equate this man's triumph of passion & communication over enormous physical difficulties with our cell-phones. Then they'll want to buy more cell-phones. Yeah!
- MBAs: Word!
... so who's up for steak?
Everything about this company screams of "profit-motive, profit-motive, profit-motive." It's like, how dumb do they think we are?--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Obviously the NFL is going for the all-important pre-teen girl demographic, with the Backstreet Boys doing the National Anthem, and *N'Sync & Britney at halftime.
At least they got Ray Charles to sing "America the Beautiful". Gotta love the way Ray sings it!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Couple of disclaimers before I get into this. First off, I didn't see the TV show in question. Secondly, I am a Gulf War veteran. Went over with the 1st TAC Fighter Wing out of Virginia with the very first deployments that occurred in August prior to actual combat.
I just love it when folks get themselves thinking they understand something about foriegn affairs and economics start talking about this war. You evidently don't quite appreciate just how important either oil or Saudi is to us.
Whether we like it or not, our entire way of life today is heavily dependant on a steady flow of oil. It affects pretty much every means of transportation, which in turn effects the cost of food and pretty much any other thing you might purchase. Ask anyone living in the north eastern part of the United States what happens to their quality of life when they can't afford heating oil. At a high enough cost, people die. When food is priced beyond the reach of the poor, people die. It sucks; our use of oil as a primary means for power is just stupid; but that's the reality in which we entered that war.
As to the political reasons, we weren't going there to protect Kuwait. We were there to protect Saudi. Aside from the bulk of the oil fields that the US buys from being there, this is the hub of the entire Islamic world. 2 of the 3 holy places in Islam sit within the borders of Saudi. They had a couple of thousand troops sitting at their northern border heavily armed. Had we let that area of the world go to a wacko like Saddam, do you honestly think we'd continue to be a player there politically? This is especially important to note as we continue our efforts to negotiate peace treaties.
Yes, we greedy American types went to fight a war about oil. Hell, I went to go fight a war about oil. And for that, the trucks that bring the food to your local grocery store can afford the gas to do so. Your momma can afford to actually by that food, and put the gas in the SUV that brought it home. Bunch of greedy capitalists.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Most of the As got together and franchised a name, Cellular One. They also created roaming agreements between them so they could compete with the less diverse B side (which is a good thing when you want seemless roaming).
Then the various PCS and GSM outfits came along, and Bs started buying As and each other. Verizon (a mish mash of a helluva lot of telcos) eventually bought a cellular one franchise in Southeast U.S. and with it somehow the rights to the name Cellular One. This forced the other Cellular One franchiesees to rename their franchise.
So now we have two of the biggest cell companies with two stupid names, Verizon and Cingular.
But I have a feeling they may not have had much choice. These days, you look for an available domain name first, and then name your company, not the other way around! There probably isn't many domain names left that are less than 10 chars with a few vowels in them....
uh, yeah. "I hate sports, but gee, they have sappy personal profiles of people I don't care about. better tune in!"
I know some women who were planning on watching the Bowl, and they either a) really REALLY liked football and couldn't wait to see the game, b) were in an office pool, or c) thought the commercials might be cool. In other words, the exact same reasons men were planning on watching.
Its possible that once they are watching, women like the profiles more than men (though hero worship is pretty thick amoung football watching guys, so I wouldn't bet on it) but you have the cause and effect mixed up. Women have constituted a good chunk of superbowl viewers for years, the sponsors are just now waking up and considering that part of their audience.
Like I said, the yuppies commercial was funny, but I wonder what the reaction would've been if parallel racial stereotypes would've been played with. Say, a takeoff of those student achievement commercials with black kids inventing a new kind of pager with which to sell drugs, or an Ebonics spelling bee. Somehow I don't think they'd be seen with such good humor...
yeah, funny how poking fun at people on the top of the heap is taken better than kicking those already at the bottom. Who would have thunk it? (sarcasm off)
Didn't see the commercial, but I'm curious how much "racial" stereotyping was actually going on as opposed to class stereotyping. The latter has always been very common in "blue collar" humor, the former much rarer.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...