I RATE ADS

jtherkal: Someone has been trying to sell a Christopher Guest script forever and they finally did it. Congratulations! You’re an unimaginative failure! Since it’s my job to know something about advertising, I read the trade publications and this has been a bit of a hot topic. The fact that this director appeals only to a certain high-brow, liberal audience, when really something much more mainstream is called for has been stated over and over. And rightly so. Not so much because only a certain type of people like this humor, but rather because it’s so dry and so subtle that you don’t even know what in the world they’re talking about! You don’t know what it’s asking you. And you don’t care. If your job is to tell America the census is happening, explain what it is, and why it’s important, you should never, ever put this on TV. F-.

sjbooher: The Census has a much better ad that appeals to the need of communities to get their proper funding based on the Census info. That one is a win, this one is a fail. D-. I do like Ed Begley, Jr. though, if that counts.

jtherkal: Ugh. This is terrible on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin. Nothing like a good joke about leaving your wife to get raped in a future world to save your tires. What an absolute load of crap. This basically says nothing about the tires, only about the Bridgestone tire marketing department and whatever sorry agency churned out this abomination. F-.

sjbooher: AND I JUST BOUGHT GENERALS! SUCK IT! F-

sjbooher: I admit to being totally biased here… I hate Lance Armstrong. F-.

jtherkal: I guess you’re not accepting the old one-nut sympathy card. I don’t like this for reasons other than Lance. First, I’ve always hated the beer-for-trim-lean-athletes-that-you-should-drink-after-exercise positioning. Although I guess it works, since I can think of at least two people who buy this shit. Second, where’d you find that song? FIFA ‘98? Come on! You spend all that money to get Lance Armstrong, go shoot him in the mountains and then pick that tired piece of shit song? Ugh. F.

jtherkal: I hate KISS. And even though I can’t deny the “little kiss of cherry” in Dr. Pepper leading into a little person KISS band is marginally clever, if offensive, I still hate KISS. I hate little KISS just a little less. D-.

sjbooher: Sometimes I don’t “get” things. I didn’t “get” “little kiss of cherry”. When you couple that with my similar hatred? F-.

sjbooher: Booooooooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing. F.

jtherkal: The ONLY thing these ever had going for them was that they’d put girls with huge cans in really skimpy tops. This year’s crop of girls didn’t lead me to believe a breast was going to pop out. And there were no jokes about getting oiled up or anything? No redeeming qualities here. F-, for not delivering the goods.

sjbooher: This ad stirred up so much pre-game controversy that I could not even find the ad itself on youtube — only a bunch of responses, parodies and spoofs. Here’s the thing… what’s the big deal? If there had been no new reports prior to the game, I would have watched this ad and said, “Huh? What was that for? Is Tim Tebow’s mom trying to get him drafted higher?”. F-. Extra emphasis because of the all the wasted time talking/thinking about this by everyone. Extra extra emphasis because when I hear the name “Tim Tebow” I can only think about circumcisions, so I’ve been thinking about them all week. Boo.

jtherkal: I’m going to agree with everything you said, except the circumcision part. Even after I watched this, knowing what it was about, I couldn’t figure out why THIS was what they decided to do. I thought maybe 30-seconds of a lockoff shot of a little jar with a fetus in it, labeled with masking tape that said Tim Tebow, while you listened to audio highlights of Tim playing would have been more striking. Instead they made a joke of it. Tim tackles mom. Nice one. I guess it’s better that than a giant hanger coming down from the sky and stabbing through Tim as he runs towards the Florida end zone. Man, I could write a million Tim Tebow pro-life commercials. F.

sjbooher: Give this man a soundtrack! Also, in my memory, now, this lady is Tim Tebow’s mom. Since she is the go-to comedy movie mom in Hollywood right now, we have the makings of a nice little summer comedy — Tim Tebow: Evade and Snip

sjbooher: In the words of the great Scott Huff, this ad is a complete dumpster fire. PTI’s Michael Wilbon put it best, I think: “The Troy Polamalu Coke ad was so bad. They desecrated a great ad, and the people who did it, should be fired. Ok? I know in this economy, I shouldn’t recommend that people be fired. They brutalized the greatest sports commercial of all-time. Mean Joe, ‘here kid’. They just killed it. GET OUT! GET OUT!”. F. F-.

jtherkal: The joke was that they were butchering the commercial. But that doesn’t make it okay. I loved those two guys in the original campaign, where they wanted to file a lawsuit against Coke Zero. But they’ve lost it here. And for the record, I love Wilbon and Kornheiser! I would say let’s get them in an ad, but that might ruin them as well. F.

sjbooher: Ok, everybody, I’m pretty sure I’m throwing this in Ad Exec Masturbation. Ad Exec 1: “Hey, we’ll get big football players to do ballet!” Ad Exec 2: “Yeah, and we’ll have them dance with our colorful lizards, and the lizards will act cool like you’d expect the football players to be!” Ad Exec 3: “Yeah, and it’ll be colorful! And 3-D! And no one will know! Let’s spend millions! Awesome!”. Nope. Terrible. F.

jtherkal: Ugh. Ray Lewis, really? You need to ask for a bigger contract or something, because this is downright embarassing. I’ve never been a fan of these stupid dancing lizards, and this spot made me want to rub hot wing sauce in my eyes and punch my TV–and I love my TV. F-.

However, I think the 3-D thing needs to be rated on its own. While I agree that not many people knew about it, if you did, it was the probably the biggest phenomenon at your Super Bowl party. At my house, someone brought enough 3-D glasses for everyone, so people were wearing them around all night. And then when the commercials finally came on it was a moment of great excitement. Until the Sobe commercial. Then it was a moment of great disappointment.

Still, they did a bad job letting people know they needed glasses. B.

sjbooher: This is like a serial killer telling kids not to litter. Or like a child molester championing the spaying and neutering of animals. Or like Hitler being the face of an anti-smoking campaign. I don’t want to hear this garbage from Wal-Mart, one of the worst corporations in existence. Get the hell out of here with all that noise. F-.

jtherkal: Wow. I had no idea you hated WalMart so much. How do you feel about K-Mart? Kwiki-Mart? The truth is, I don’t hate WalMart and I don’t like WalMart. If I were going shopping for my militia, I think I bet I’d head there. I could probably pick up a few recruits along the way. There is some sort of documentary about WalMart that I should probably watch.

Here’s one thing that bothers me: Listen to this claim “If every WalMart shopper, all 200 million of us, used just one bulb, it would be like taking over 11 million cars off the road.” Ok. For how long would those cars be off the road? For as long as the light bulbs lasted? For .5 seconds? Why not claim it would be like taking 5 billion cars off the road, as long as you’re making outrageous claims. D+.

sjbooher: I despise these board room ads. They are boring and have been done a million times, so anything said is just a bunch of BLAH BLAH BLAH white noise. There are least two of these in circulation right now, the other being a Southwest Ad with the actor BKA Clay Davis, from The Wire. This raises another question… why are these second-rate actors sought for these? Do they get paid more than the standard commercial actor? If so, that makes these even worse, as I can throw “waste of money” into the mix. F-.

jtherkal: Overused formula, yes. Effective formula? Absolutely not. This is almost entirely irrelevant to me as a consumer. They completely bury the selling point (that DirectTV has more HD channels), meaning I walk away from this with zero understanding of what they were trying to tell me. It’s hard out there for a satellite provider. As a DirecTv subscriber I can tell you the only reason to get DirecTv is if you can’t get cable. There it is. The foundation for the future of DirecTv’s marketing: When you can’t get cable, get DirecTv. I will say that I laugh at that guy’s suggestion of making their channels louder, and then shouting the nightly news line. That keeps this from an F. D.