sjbooher: Too much boring stuff going on here. If you are going to have a long, drawn-out lead up before showing the product, you better grab the audience’s attention. Instead, all I come away with is a reinforcement that Beyonce did an awesome DirectTV ad once. Fail. F.
jtherkal: Maybe you’ve never heard of the internet. It’s a robot that takes all sorts of awesome things and grabs them and puts them on your futurebox. And now you can get it on your TV!? They got Chocolate Rain in there, SJB, Chocolate Rain! The one thing they forgot to tell us is…what about pornography? That, my friend, will sell some televisions. A-.
jtherkal: Show me just about anything in sports, at this speed, in HD and I will buy your product. Which in this case is the NFL. Which I buy from Direct TV. The fansThat song was used in the Where the Wild Things Are commercial. And I guess fans in HD aren’t as good as Reggie. A-.
jtherkal: I bet I watch over three National Lampoon’s Family Vacation movies per year. As a movie franchise, that puts it up there with The Bourne series, Rocky, and Rambo. Well ahead of Superman and Friday the 13th. Watching the Christmas Vacation is one of my favorite parts of the holiday, and some of my first tits were seen with Rusty in Europe. I even suffered through Vegas Vacation one a few weeks ago. So I’m sort of excited to see the Griswolds here. I didn’t love-love the commercial, and I can’t view the episodes on the website on this shitty laptop, but I can’t give this any lower than an A-.
sjbooher: I may have never seen a Griswold movie… but I still recognized them. I can’t say that added or subtracted from the value of this ad, for me, though. It probably did hit the age demo that typically rents hotelts, though. I love puns and cats, so I laughed at both the “complementary” and cat poster jokes. I may even have had that poster as a kid, and if I didn’t, David Proudfoot did. This product seems like a good idea. A+
jtherkal: Did I notice it? Yes. Was it funny? Pretty funny. Did I remember what it was about? Yes. Do I want to think about eating unborn chicken babies for breakfast? Not really. That’s the only flaw I can find here, especially when I think of the follow-up ads they did. A-.
sjbooher: Complete agreement. I love those screaming chickens! Denny’s even took a subtle jab at themselves, after last year some of their locations ran out of ingredients during this giveaway. A+.
jtherkal: It took this Heineken commercial to bring about a disagreement strong enough between myself and sjb to get us posting again. Me? I love it. It makes me laugh every time. The gag might not be that brilliant, but something about this just cracks me up. Something about the way the guys scream, and the way that one guy dances. And I’ll have to pay more attention to what’s on TV here, but I can’t find any versions of this on YouTube where the girl at the beginning is speaking English. Has this always been in German or whatever language that is? This doesn’t do anything to make me actually want to drink Heineken, but I remember it and I like it. A-.
sjbooher: I hate the way those guys act so much that it puts me in a bad mood and I don’t like talking about it. On the other hand, these guys do make me laugh:
It would be an F, but since it inspired LeBron to do good work, C.
sjbooher: I guess this is sort of memorable. I guess that guy probably does want a new job. I new the attempt at humor here fails with me and makes me angry. C-.
jtherkal: “I new the attempt at humor here…” What? Maybe you need a new job. This is a simple, memorable, instant classic joke. I didn’t see it coming, and I feel like that’s sometimes hard to do nowadays. And more than being a nice joke, it delivers the message. You get the ass end of the deal. Get a new job. The only problem is, I can never separate the Monster and CareerBuilder ads in my head. I think both sites suck. A-.
jtherkal: eTrade is holding on to the talking baby ads. And why not, they’re simple, funny, recognizable. And you can have that baby talk about anything. Do I remember what service they’re selling? Nope. But I remember the brand, and I remember “take these broken wings…” A-.
sjbooher: Yep, I give up. Count me in. My mom loves these too, if that counts. A.
sjbooher: This is “jammin’ on the one” as Theo Huxtable said back in the day. Love. And this is officially an Ad That Works, as I bought a 12-pack of Pepsi on Monday. Show the product in some more prominent way, and you get your A+. A.
jtherkal: That’s more like it, Pepsi. The only thing this could have used was a little refreshing sexy pour of the Pepsi onto some ice cubes in a glass. That’s what makes me thirsty. My complaint about the last refresh everything commercial was that they didn’t refresh the song, which they did here. That’s good enough for me. A-.
sjbooher: These are reminiscent of one my all-time favorite campaigns, the Johnson Automotive Badger — both involve local car dealerships, and both use animals in an attempt to be zany and funny. However, where the badger is completely original and awesome, these monkey ads are bit too easy, and not all that funny. A little bit of “joke in a can” syndrome. Teeanage boy making out with someone’s daughter? Been there, although the shotgun scene was a little funny. That being said, much of the masses love lazy comedy. I just feel like whoever wrote this campaign was given the leeway to do something great and original, and they did not kock the ball out of the park. C-.
jtherkal: The trunk monkey! This ad is a classic. If I’m not mistaken, the original trunk monkey ad came out about seven years ago, which makes it a pioneer in the monkey ad joke space. While I agree that the badger ads were funnier, they had years of monkey and puppet joke expertise to build on. You can’t deny the hilarity of a monkey leaping around with a defibrillator (a machine for which my brain could not remember the name–I had to Google “electric shock heart restart machine”). But you’re partially right. Even back then this could have been better. A-.