Lots of people have lots of opinions on Apple, iPods, digital music downloading, etc. But no matter what, you've got to give Steve Jobs and company some credit for marketing their product really well.
Part of the advertising venture is the much-parodied campaign with the colorful dancing silhouettes backed by hip, unknown rock bands. A few years ago they had an ad with The Caesars playing "Jerk It Out." Their latest commercial has a similar song, but by a different band. It's a scrappy, danceable rock song with a UK-sounding edge.
That song would be Flathead by The Fratellis and it's pretty darn catchy. The Fratellis are trio from Glasgow and their name was not inspired by The Goonies. So says Wikipedia.
Here's the video for the song in the iPod commercial. It's kind of similar to the commercial, but with a Bettie Page twist.
Don't bother making any plans tonight, because it's Ugy Betty, Grey's Anatomy, The Office, and 30 Rock, as always.
Jerry O'Connell and Lucy Liu guest star on Ugly Betty. And no more Walter! Yay! But Henry's got a girl! Boo! Did anyone else think, just for a moment, that Betty was going to start dating Henry and he'd turn out to be a crazy stalker? I don't want it to be true, but I wouldn't put it past this show.
It's the middle slog of the Grey's Anatomy thousand-part tragedy that I have yet to start watching.
Joss Whedon directed this week's episode of The Office, which is just so exciting I'm almost crying. If it's 2% as funny as this ad, all is right with the world (thanks to Ali for the link). At first I thought that this was just a promo they had shot to be funny about the whole Joss Whedon/vampire thing, but apparently it is an actual part of the episode. Coincidentally.
And then there's 30 Rock. Favorite line from last week: "I prefer to be called a Law Stylist." Or something very close to that.
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming: Seriously? None of that's good enough for you? Not even the Joss Whedon episode of The Office? Damn, you're picky. On CMT there's a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team marathon. There's a show on MTV called Juvies which sounds… interesting. Cristin — know anything about this?
And Cheryl Burke from Dancing with the Stars is dating Joey Lawrence's little brother. At first I thought, "Isn't she a little old for him?" Then I found out she was 22 (!) and he's 27.
Apparently this was featured on Ellen a while ago, but I just recently found out about it. Here is some local commercial production at its finest. No words, just watch.
There were many things to like about last night's Super Bowl. Prince was phenomenal. The first quarter was a hilarious fumble-filled mud fight. The ad for the Harmon Garmon GPS system was genuinely amusing.
But if you watched the ads, no doubt you saw GM's latest offering.
In this ad, a robot at a GM plant drops a screw, loses his job, gets depressed, and KILLS HIMSELF, before realizing it was all a dream. Before there were robots making cars, people made cars. Basically, the message of the ad is "buy GM, or robots (PEOPLE) will DIE."
In tone, at least at the beginning, it's reminiscent of this ad, perhaps the best commercial of all time.
But whereas the Ikea ad cynically embraces the buy-and-discard consumer culture, reminding us that technology is moving forward and we shouldn't be sentimental about all the crap we're accumulating, the GM ad encourages us to anthropomorphize the machines that are making our cars in order to guilt us into buying more.
Personally, I'm ready to pack it in for the holidays. All I want to do is post some videos while eating cookies, preferably wearing sweatpants and sipping on some hot-chocolate-and-rum.
Fortunately the Mythbusters do not share my laziness. They made an elaborate holiday-themed Rube Goldberg machine.
I'm so attached to the Mythbusters. Every time Jamie snaps at Adam I cringe, or when Grant displays his enormous nerditude I'm ashamed/proud, just as if they were my real family. (Just kidding, family! Love ya! See ya soon!)
This reminds me of a very cool Rube Goldberg machine.
But I'm supposed be thinking about the holidays, not about cars. Linus?
The fact that you can buy Charlie Brown pathetic trees at Urban Outfitters does not take away from the sweetness of that video. That's impressive.
It also reminds of me of this, which is slightly less sweet, but much more hilarious — and applicable to everyday life.
That's all I've got. Don't forget to watch this again. It only gets funnier. And if you're still struggling to find the perfect gift, just remember step one: Cut a hole in the box.
The whole idea behind this blog is that we have the DVR technology that allows us to skip over those pesky commercials. But sometimes you just can't wait through three minutes of silence to watch Veronica Mars, or everything on your List is old and the only thing on is a Friends repeat on TBS.
That's when you're going to run into one Marc Horowitz. That's the Nissan corporate site. He also has "blog," which is apparently supposed to be "not corporate."
First of all, there is no Marc Horowitz. I think we can all agree on this, yes? Marc Horowitz is played by an actor hired by Nissan to pretend to make a very stupid movie about how he lives in his car for a week. The fact that they expect us to believe in him is insulting. If he does exist, he clearly has no soul, so all the mean things I'm about to say about him are okay.
Marc's existence or lack thereof aside, I'm still incredibly sick of his shit.
His chipper grin. The adorably quirky ways he deals with the limitations of living in a car. The casual way he addresses us, like we're all just stumbling upon him on youtube. Those flipflops. That ridiculous sprinkler he uses to shower.
I'm just going to go ahead and say it: Marc Horowitz is a douchebag.
There is nothing funny or interesting about these ads. Every time I hear Marc cheerfully introducing himself ("hey, it's me, Marc Horowitz… it's the fifth day of me living in my Sentra…") I want to impale myself on something. I start to hope that maybe a Sentra will crash into my apartment and put me in a coma. Or that Marc's car will get mad at him and start pumping CO2 through his air conditioner while he's sleeping.
I remind you that it's okay for me to say that, because he doesn't exist and/or is soulless.
So. Stop please, fake Marc. And in conclusion: DO NOT buy a Nissan Sentra.
There seems to be a recent advertising trend lately wherein men are reasserting their masculinity by eating lots of dead animal flesh. I guess it's always been a pretty macho thing to flagrantly eat a lot of meat, eschewing the lovely plant kingdom, but I've been noticing it more and more lately.
First off there's Burger King's ad for the Texas Double Whopper, which gives me the shits just thinking about it.
The gist of this commercial is that some schlumpy guy is sitting in a fancy restaurant, eating a meager, protein-deficient portion and suddenly spearheads a revolution of similarly-emmasculated men. Curiously, the men choose to express their masculinity through song. References to "chick food" abound as they thrust lots of burgers to the sky. And they break things.
The next commercial is entitled "Restore Your Manhood" and involves a guy buying "chick food." You know, tofu, leafy green vegetables, pickled ovaries. Whatever. The guy's at the check-out when the guy behind him puts down a divider and proceeds to put an entire cow on the conveyor belt.
So what does the man do? Of course he drives straight out of the supermarket, into his Hummer dealer where he drives off the lot with a brand-new gas-guzzler. It's just really disgusting on a variety of levels. I heard Ralph Nader watched and exploded. (And no one cared.)
The last instance of this I've found (although I'm sure there's more out there) is for Nutrisystem for Men, featuring celebrity pitchman Dan Marino. The commercial starts out by asking "Are you sick of feeling fat and tired?" To which, I immediately respond "Yes!"
It's a pretty typical weight-loss commercial, with old pictures of chunky people smiling with heaping plates of barbecue and the person, present-day standing next to them, relatively svelte and wearing a fetching turtleneck. The commercial isn't quite as meat-centric as the others, but definitely emphasizes "eating like a man" as well as the sexual benefits of the healthier lifestyle. There are some incredibly awkward, incredibly staged testimonials of nerdy guys throwing around a basketball saying "My sex life's great!"
The whole timing of this trend is what I find a little perplexing. I'd understand it more if it were an immediate response to the post-Queer Eye man. In a response to the Ryan Seacrest metrosexual. I'd even understand it if it were part of the whole election year, NASCAR Dad phenomenon where vaguely southern men are reasserting their male pride and power in response to "the feminists" and "the gays" and everything else that isn't covered in a thick film of testosterone.
However, it all seems to be coming out of nowhere and, as a result, it just seems stupider.
Oh well, at least it's not as disgustingly irresponsible as Taco Bell's fourth meal schtick.
Lately, Ameriprise, a financial services company, has been running a series of irritating commercials aimed squarely at the baby boomer demographic.
The spots feature grainy, 60s- and 70s-era home video footage (fake?) of young people being young. They dance in decade-specific garb, sport ridiculous hairstyles and ride motorcyles (because that's what you did back then). Halfway through the longest commercial, entitled "Back Then," it switches to the present day, with average-to-good-looking fiftysomethings kayaking, swinging at baseballs, rollerskating with teenagers and going on safaris (because that's what they do now). All the while, a narrator says "a generation as unique as this needs a new generation of personal financial planning."
While this commercial is indeed ass-kissy and vexing in its own right, the worst commercial is the one entitled "Meaningful Relationship," which features similar stock footage, this time of nuzzling lovebirds with narration saying that "you're a generation that gave new meaning to the meaningful relationship."
Blah, blah, blah, buy something from Ameriprise.
It's all really condescending and irksome, and I'm not even the one being talked down to.
In thirty years, I'm looking forward to seeing similar pieces of nostalgia: in the eighties you see kids watching The Smurfs while wearing pajamas with feet; in the nineties you've got greasy-haired, flannel-wearing teens trying to form guitar chords; in the 2000s you have people amazed at the novelty of the blogosphere; and in the 2010s you have thirtysomethings revelling in the newfound economic stability of the first term of the Obama/Affleck administration.
So for a blog dedicated to the joy of watching television without commercials, I've been posting a lot of commercials lately. Why? Because I like good commercials, and commercials are television too. And maybe I feel like I want to give something back to the hardworking folks on Madison Ave. And maybe I was sick of linking to YouTube and I finally figured out how to embed the videos within our fancy graphical editor.
