Monday, January 11, 2010

Those Darn Commercials: Enough of the Allstate Guy


Television advertisements certainly are designed to influence what we think about companies, but the reverse consideration is perhaps more interesting, how a company pitches to the public tells a lot about what the company thinks about us. They think we're pretty dumb, don't they?

Think of the television ads you’ve seen recently. How do they attempt to reach you? What is their message?

1- Do the ads attempt to humor or entertain you?

2- Are they informative or deceiving and misleading?

3- Do they talk down to you or insult your intelligence?

4- What kind of view of society do they provide with the characters who they portray in their commercials? Are they patronizing? What kind of stereotypes do they create?

5- To what extent do they pander to obscene political correctness?

6- How many are just plain stupid?

January is a big television month starting with the college bowls then the NFL playoffs. The bigger the event, the more conspicuous and time consuming the ads appear to be.

Right Minded Fellow gives Allstate Insurance with the pompous holier than thou black pitchman as having the most offensive ads on television. The combination of message and messenger with obvious political overtones written as the perfect template for political correctness makes their ads the most obnoxious ads of all. Who do they think they are trying to lecture us on how we should live our lives, what are values should be, and then try to rip us off for auto insurance spoken by a pitchman who is so over-the-top in playing up the all-knowing authority figure is beyond contempt. There’s also a sickly manipulation of racial perceptions that is even more offensive.

How would this writer love to see their pitchman starting to deliver his sermon then get whacked upside the head with a big club swung by one of the GEICO cavemen and then get scolded by that idiot (talk about bad stereotypes) cashier from the Progressive insurance ads.

Okay, this blog is a little off our regular course, but after a month of seeing these ads, it was time to say something. Somehow even the late great Billy Mays couldn’t illicit such passion.

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