Oscar ads - why bother?

Well, I was going to write about some of the ads - good and bad - during the Oscars last night, but frankly, once I heard Chris Rock open by telling everyone to "sit on their asses", I switched to FOX and watched a rerun of "Independence Day" instead. Get them aliens, dude!

Okay, I'll mention one good spot - Domino's Pizza ALWAYS seems to have good funny spots. They have this special 3 for 1 deal, and this funny guy gives a big self-confident spiel about how cool it is, because "If I want pineapple, I can order pineapple! If I want olive, I can order olive!" Then his wife points out that he just ordered 3 pepperonis, to which he replies: "I fear change."

Funny! Be funny, advertisers, that's what we like! Oh, all except - MASTERCARD! Mastercard, you are currently TRYING funny by parodying your own "Cost of whatever: Priceless" ads. But here's a little tip: it doesn't work when the original ad was ALREADY a parody. (Of itself, I mean. Whether it meant to be or not.)

Maybe I just have it in for credit card companies in general because I'm so heavily in debt myself. But still. I'm just saying.

Party Poker in your Elevator!

Party Poker (www.partypoker.com) runs some funny ads on my elevator (via http://www.captivate.com/) - in a series of still shots, you see a woman coming home and finding the house in a shambles - vases and lamps broken - and her teenage son is sitting on the couch, tossing a basketball back and forth between his hands - till he sees her, looks up and OOPS! and the tagline is "Do you have a "poker face"?"

That's cute. Though be warned that if you click on the link to their site, you get a whole bunch of annoying popup ads which I HATE!! Interesting how many annoying products have such great ads, isn't it?

Who is April? 'Cause she has a great spot!

I don't know her last name and I can't find anything about her on the Internet. But there's a series of TERRIFIC radio spots running in the Los Angeles area, for Mercedes Benz of Beverly Hills.

They consist of a woman named April who's reading the ad copy, about how this Beverly Hills car company is making deals, and she keeps interjecting hilarious comments - "In Beverly Hills, a deal is buying a $600,000 right shoe and getting the left one free!" And, "What do you do, throw in the doors for free?" And the dealer, in an increasingly annoyed voice, keeps having to reassure her that, yes, they really do make good deals, because "if you get a good deal, you'll be happy, and if you're happy you'll come back." Which really GETS April - "Oooohh ... oh, you're GOOD!"

Now THAT's a good car ad - Mitsubishi, are you paying attention? (Not that I could ever afford to buy a Mercedes Benz now matter HOW great the deal is - but then I can't afford a Mitsubishi either, so, moot point, right?)

Another good series of car ads, these on TV, are the Toyota Sienna spots where the little boys keep encouraging the engineers to crash the cars - exactly the sort of thing little boys like to do, right? The Toyota guy finally tells them they're out of cars and one of the boys says, "How about your car?" Funny!

For disclosure's sake I should mention that I did recently buy a new car, and it's a Toyota, but I didn't buy it because of the commercials. I bought it because my old car broke down in front of the Toyota dealership. 'nuff said?

Another day, another hit at Mitsubishi's stupid ad!

I hate to keep harping on the same bad ad over and over again, but would someone please tell me what the stupid blonde is doing with her arms, at the end, while she's saying, "It seats five!"? It looks like she's just dangling them in front of her, like I do after my exercise class. You know, the ol' "rag doll" stretch.

But maybe not. Maybe she's holding something in her hands. Like a purse. Or a gun. Any ideas?

Thanks, Mitsubishi! or Why I Created This Blog

Thanks, Mitsubishi!

I had been thinking about starting a blog. I even created one under another name about a year ago. But it didn't last, because I couldn't think of anything productive to say, day after day after day.

However, last night, during 24, when that stupid Mitsubishi ad came up AGAIN, with the stupid blonde woman and her scruffy husband who can't think of anything to say to his woman without reading a sign with letters 10 feet tall - in which his stupid blonde wife is too stupid to turn around and SEE that he's obviously just reading words off a sign and not giving her a good reason why they should buy this stupid car - - it came to me:

Why not write a blog about commercials? I'm just as qualified as anyone else. Granted, I'm not in the hot 18-to-35 target market, but hey, on a good day I FEEL about 18 - well - maybe 35 - but I watch a lot of TV, and therefore see a lot of commercials.

So, I said, why the heck not?

But not just about BAD commercials, which are all too easy to find. There are GOOD commercials out there as well. In fact, as we all know, sometimes the commercials can be more entertaining that the actual programming! I could be wrong but I think it was Steve Martin who commented that after weeks of "Reality TV", it was so refreshing to come across a "DiTech" (home loan company in Southern California) commercial - because it had real actors, a script and a story!

One of the GOOD commercials I saw last night, which almost made up for the bad commercial, was the latest "Jack in the Box" ad - it's the one where Jack has brought this helpless Italian woman over to America to cook some new sandwich at his restaurants. She can only speak Italian, and keeps begging him to give her back his passport, or tells him how much she misses her children, but he acts like she's just saying, "I love you"! Now that's funny!

More humor, less stupidity. More GOOD spots, fewer BAD spots. That's the mission of this blog - to give credit where it's due, for better or for worse. If you know of a really BAD or really GOOD ad, please let me know and I'll keep an eye out for it and review it.

Oh, one more thing - I can't promise to make an entry every day. I want to, but know from previous attempts at keeping journals that I won't. Also, I read a lot of good blogs that haven't been updated since the Bush 41 administration. (Just kidding - I'm well aware that Al Gore was the only one who had a blog back then.)

But anyway, what I'm saying is, I'll try to make an entry at least once a week, if not more often. How's that sound?

Oh, as for me personally, what do you want to know? I'm female, I'm over 40 (well over 40, but you don't really need to know that, do you?), short, dumpy, bespectacled and kind of a nerd (you didn't really need me to tell you that, did you?). And I also like the Three Stooges, but they probably won't enter into this blog. Much.

More tomorrow (or when the boss takes a day off, whichever comes first!) Thanks for checking in!