09:55 AM
TV Commercials that make me dance

I absolutely adore that Office Max "Rubberband Man" commercial! It's a great song and it's great advertising, something that makes me smile and want to dance and also makes me remember them without annoying the piss out of me. That's GOOD advertising.

So many commercials yell at me, bang at me, and just plain make me scramble for the remote to hit Mute as fast as I can. Because so much of advertising is obnoxious these days, I end up taping most shows so I can easily fast forward the commercials. On the rare occasions I watch a show live, I have the remote sitting next to me so I can hit Mute the instant the commercials start.

Good advertising:

Those 7-UP commercials with the funky Up Yours guy talking to passersby on the street.

The McDonalds commercials with the Hispanic guy dancing his way there, it's all a bit unbelievable but still it's got a good beat and it's fun to watch.

Almost every VW car commercial made in the last five, six years, especially the ads for the Beetle when it came out again, I loved the UFO thing. And the VW Cabrio commercial with Nick Drake singing "Pink Moon" was brilliant.

Actually, there's a lot of good car commercials done by the carmakers, although I tend to like the ads for sedans since they tend to emphasize smoothness or fun, while truck and suv ads are more likely to be obnoxious as they emphasize their "toughness". The local ads done by dealerships suck rotten eggs tho, the majority of them yell at me and there goes that Mute button.

The Gap commercials led the way in commercials as art and music, although most of their Old Navy commercials didn't play well after the first viewing or were just plain awful to begin with.

Ikea, that's another good one, the Swedish guy is great, they've done enough variations that I don't get totally bored by any of them and I love the garage one where he finds a car buried under all the stuff the old owner left.

Target has some good ones, and they use their logo and color well in their commercials. The Target-Martha Stewart ads were pretty good although of course they can't run those anymore! ;)

Bad advertising:

Any commercial for any reality TV show. Granted, I don't like 99.999% of reality TV anyway but the commercials highlight the worst stuff.

Any commercials for local news on the three major networks where I live. Local news shows have gotten as bad as reality shows, everything they put in their commercials is based on scare tactics, scare the crap out of people about something, anything. This is why I rarely watch local news anymore, it's degenerated into really bad yellow journalism. I don't know if it's just here or if local news in most cities is like this now but it's been terrible here for the last six, seven, eight years now. The local news on WB and Fox is much better, they do more straight news without the scare tactics.

Hmmm, I guess I hit Mute so fast these days, I don't pay much attention to the bad commercials, I'll have to start actually watching them so I can critique them. Ugh!

Caveats: IMHO. YMMV. HTH. HAND. :)