Let us begin. Some TV commercials are good, some are stupid, and some are insulting. In the insulting group are some of the current crop of Twix commercials. I've linked to those I could find online.
The one that is pissing me off most shows some guy out drinking and partying with his buddies and getting home in the wee hours. His wife/girlfriend wakes up and, annoyed, asks if he is just getting home. He takes a moment with his Twix bar, then lies and says, no, he's going in to work early, and starts redressing. She says, poor baby, and he's off the hook. Nice. Lie to the bitch rather than just tell the truth. No doubt it's her fault he had to lie, after all, she's just going to make a scene, so why not take the easy way out? Why develop any integrity? Another one shows a baseball umpire flirting with two women instead of doing his job. I guess it's supposed to be funny.
Now I'll give them the fat booty commercial, that one actually is funny. She asks the impossible-to-answer-correctly question, and mumbling while chewing on his Twix bar suffices for a good answer. They've even got a slap scene from a soap opera on tv. Well done. And the laundry commercial is very cute, just the sort of situation you can imagine someone getting in, and for a change, the girl actually isn't the butt (no pun intended) of the joke. Hooray, Twix got one right. So what's up with the insulting and stupid ads? They've shown they can do better.
7 comments:
Women beware of any man eating a Twix bar!!
Let it be known.... it's isn't about "taste".
Hey, you may be on to something there - a Twix bar could be a jackass 'tell'!
I find virtually ALL commercials offensive on account of their disruptive intrusions on my consciousness. I hardly ever watch TV on account of that, so I'll be among the least informed here on this subject. The Twix ads are simply puerile, concoctions of guys who still find terms like "poop" funny. Casting characters in ads as stupid is a favorite device, whether it's the fool with the Twix or the husband being lectured about laundry protocol. It's amazing that the ad men's clients buy into their jejune tripe.
That's the thing that never ceases to amaze me about TV commercials. There are SO many stupid ones, and yet they must work. Companies pay big money to the ad agencies for the commercials they use, there has to be a reason.
Maybe we're the anomalies.
Regardless, I like TV commercials, I look at them like the poetry of visual entertainment. If you go from novel to short story to poetry for length of time you have to get your point across, you can accept that a poet has a bigger condensing problem than the other two. Similarly, a TV commercial has to get your attention and make an impression in as little as ten seconds. Some manage to pull it off with aplomb, others just bomb. The beauty is in the brevity. You don't have to sit through 22 minutes or 2 hours of tripe to get to the point.
It's true. Some commercial productions show tremendous art and creativity. Those shows that feature the year's award winning commercials are always enjoyable. Still I say there's a time for everything. When I'm watching a movie or a performance, I don't appreciate the abrupt break in continuity. So I've drifted away from TV viewing as a routine way of life. But I break down for special occasions. That's just me.
I entirely agree with your equations between literary and visual media types, with the condensed poetic form being equivalent to the 60-second commercial. But as in literature, so in the advertising world: there's a lot more crap being generated than excellence. Have you seen this one? http://tinyurl.com/2zzn89
LOL!! You'll never see that on TV here (unless it's in a movie on cable).
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