I saw this commercial for Pedi Paws, a thing you use to clip your dog's toenails, and it made me scream out loud. The part where they show what "regular nail clippers" do to your pet's nails is so "AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!" But in a funny way. Because how can they show this? Someone actually had to sit down and draw this animation for their job:
I want to buy Pedi Paws now and I don't even have a pet.
Nokia is doing this thing where they put out a clip of banal surreality and are inviting consumers to solve its puzzle by downloading something using a Nokia-brand phone or something. That part is explained here. But they're calling the video in question "the weirdest clip ever," which means "the weirdest clip some advertising guys could bang out on a Friday afternoon so they could beat the traffic to the beach" because it's just cliche weird. It's weird we've seen a million times before, most recently in those "Your dreams miss you" Rozerem commercials. I don't know anything about surreal filmmaking, but I know it shouldn't involve a dwarf, because that's the #1 cliche:
Nokia is the David Lynch of cellular phone manufacturers.
I was catching up on Intervention this weekend (this was a non-Jeff Van Vonderen week and therefore not urgent), when I saw this extraordinary commercial for True North mixed nuts. If their official site didn't seem so boring and legit, I would be convinced that this is viral marketing for something else. Because at the end of the commercial, the guy says "extraordinary nutsnack" and it sounds just like "nutsack"! This clip isn't the highest quality, but it definitely gets the point across (nutsack!):
If you think that this was somehow innocent and unintentional and that the agency that made this commercial thinks "nutsnack" is an acceptable household word, take into account that even Google agrees with me on this one:
This new HBO commercial, "Surprise Party", was directed by American Beauty director and Kate Winslet other half Sam Mendes. It's about a surprise party gone wrong, and it won the Golden Lion award at Cannes this year:
They had to hurry and make it before the last answering machine was thrown away.
Jason Kottke was watching The Family Guy on TBS the other night when he witnessed what has to be the worst advertising strategy ever employed by a network. During the actual show, redneck comedian Bill Engvall popped up in what looked like a normal annoying lower-third ad, but then took out a remote and paused The Family Guy while he shilled his new show:
"How cool is that? I can stop and start any show I want." It's like he's asking to be beaten with that remote. I'm trying to imagine the type of person who would not be thrown into a fit of rage by this insult to the viewing audience, and all I can come up with is: "A very lonely person who thinks Bill Engvall is really talking directly to them." We can't allow this -- please boycott Bill Engvall's show. Just kidding, nobody is going to watch it, but don't, like, accidentally watch it. This cannot become a thing.
During last night's premiere of The Paper (more on that later), MTV ran a new trailer for Juno's DVD release that took up an entire commercial break and featured all of the parts of Juno that everyone, even fans, basically agrees are the worst parts: the groan-worthy catchphrases.
Or, alternatively, there is a massive generation gap and there are credit-card-wielding teens everywhere who believe the road to popularity is impressing their friends with their "Juno-cabulary":
Confession time: I've become so accustomed to the bleep sound being used in place of really bad words that when I saw the Reverend Wright video on TV the other week I totally assumed he said "Not god bless America, god fucks America!" I even got into an argument about it and felt pretty sheepish when Google proved me wrong: the bleeped word was "damn." I guess I should stop getting my political scandal news from Sesame Street.
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