Failure: It's What's For Breakfast

First off, I'm just going to ignore the fact that the mailman sings about rottweilers and pitbulls despite the fact that the dogs in the commercial are definitely not rottweilers or pitbulls because that's the kind of stupidity reserved for a Snickers commercial or something.

I actually didn't even notice that at first. What really annoyed me was the whole premise of the the commercial. I imagine the brain trust over the BK headquarters (castle?) sat down to discuss ideas for their new breakfast commercials and decided on this whole negligent public servant thing as they have another spot featuring ambulance drivers. Here's my best guess at a reenactment of the marketing department's meeting after they decided on their angle:

Guy A: So the ambulance idea is good, what else can we do?
Guy B: How about a fireman who is chowing down on BK breakfast while a house burns down in the background and the family watches on in horror as the dad runs out of the house on fire and has to roll around to put himself out?
Guy A: I think we can do better than that....
Guy B: How about a cop watching a bank get robbed while he eats breakfast and watches the robber get away......wait for it.....and then we cut to the robber at the drive through ordering breakfast with his loot?!
Guy A: Now that is an awesome idea! Let's think of some others though.
Guy B: How about a mailman that is kind of a jerk and he apparently delivers mail in the morning at breakfast time even though I don't personally know anyone who gets their mail delivered in the morning?!
Guy A: Perfect!

Duracell And The Plight of Adulterers, Drug Dealers

Behold the Duracell myGrid. Charge all your devices at once! How cool! As an aside, all these products that can wirelessly charge your phones are dumb because you have put a huge case on your phone that connects to your battery to allow your phone to charge. But anyways.

In the second version of the commercial in this video the commercial asks us if we think we can only charge one device at once (my response was "actually no, I have this super high tech thing called a 'power strip' that lets you plug a lot of things in at once" but that's besides the point). They proceed to show the myGrid charging 4 devices at once...but wait, they're all phones! Off the top of my head, I can only think of 2 types of people who might have 4 cell phones:

1. Adulterers (the careful, not Tiger Woods kind)
2. Drug dealers

So what's going on here Duracell? Whose phones are those in the ad? It looks like some guy who has 3 cell phones charging and one of his mistresses is charging her phone with the pink case.

I just don't understand....won't you explain Duracell? I highly doubt you see this product being a communal charger for the family, because what family is gonna park all their phones in the same place to charge them? Surely this is what you must envision though, because you wouldn't market your product to the immoral.

But then at the end of your commercial you say "trusted everywhere." If you have all your cell phones with their separate numbers always charged up so you can answer calls from your wife or one of your mistresses and lie through your teeth, you won't lose anyone's trust. I see what you did there Duracell. Sneaky.

What You Didn't Know About Satellite Dishes

I really don't have an issue with this commercial in its concept. He's a satellite dish! He fell over! He..........walked away? You had me going there for a second, Allstate.

Satellite dishes can't walk.

I don't know if I can trust you now.

Bank of America Will Figure It Out....One Day

So I just saw a commercial for Bank of America and some fraud protection program they have or something else that I didn't care about. And as I had seen in previous Bank of America commercials, they had a gaffe that is perennially annoying. I went in search of the video for it online and could not find it but instead happened upon this commercial instead. Lo and behold, B of A has been making this mistake since at least 2008 as they made it here too!

Bank of America loves to show people in their commercials using their debit/credit cards....and EVERY single time they do so, the person swiping it swipes the part of the card without the magnetic strip! Yes, I understand that this is done so that the card is legible and not upside down when you see it used in the commercial, but I don't care.

I think Bank of America's fraud protection program is designed to make non-Bank of America customers think you swipe your card upside down....therefore credit card thieves will be baffled when they try to swipe it to no avail.

Sorry Bank of America, the secret is out.

Sofia Coppola Pees on My Leg, Tells Me It's Raining

First of all, I'm just going to ignore the fact that this is one of those movie trailers that tells you absolutely NOTHING about the film despite my burning desire to rant about that.

I saw the trailer for this movie over the weekend at a theater during the previews. One of my favorite pastimes is being an elitist at the movie theater during the previews and passing judgment on almost all of them in douche-like fashion. I watched this preview and thought 'I hate this style of trailer, but they're scoring big points with me by setting it to this great song by The Strokes.' Then I got to the end of the preview and saw that even though they didn't want you to know very much about the movie, they thought there were two important things to know about the film:

1. It was directed by Sofia Coppola
2. It features music by Phoenix

Wait........what? Music by Phoenix? Then why on earth are you featuring a Strokes song for the majority of the preview?! How does that make sense?! To be fair, the first 40 seconds or so of the preview is Phoenix's "Love Like a Sunset Part II," but that becomes an afterthought by the end of the preview.

Watching this preview and hearing the music will garner about three reactions, all of which are dumb:

1. You have no idea who Phoenix are but you liked the song featured in the preview so you look for it online only to realize it's not a song by Phoenix and you're wondering why you were deceived.
2. You are familiar with Phoenix (which almost certainly means you are familiar with the Strokes) and you're expressing how annoying the preview is out loud in the movie theater to the point where your girlfriend tells you to be quiet (that's what happened in my case at least).
3. You don't care and the fact that the movie features music by Phoenix means nothing to you.

So why this nonsense? Well, Sofia Coppola is dating the lead singer of Phoenix so she probably thought it would be nice to plug her boyfriend's band in the preview....but then she turns around and uses another band prominently in her preview! Isn't this kind of like cheating? I think so.

I guess ruining The Godfather Part III wasn't enough for you Ms. Coppola. You got out of my doghouse with Lost in Translation (As an aforementioned movie elitist/douche, I liked that movie even though probably the 3 people that read this blog are thinking 'omg that movie was so boring!') but now you're back in it. And you're probably in the doghouse with your boyfriend too.

Dish Network Suggests Its Customers To Stop Complaining

So I just saw this commercial air on FOX. As you may know, Dish Network and FOX are at odds over a contract and FOX is slated to go off the air for Dish customers at the end of the month. On top of that, several of the Fox Sports channels have been off the air for a couple weeks now and Dish customers are predictably outraged. I really have no clue who is more at fault for not getting the deal done and robbing people of programming they're paying for, but why on earth is Dish airing this commercial still?!

The commercial was uploaded to Youtube in July of this year so I know at least it wasn't made specifically in response to the FOX fiasco....but now it's gone from simply a bad commercial to a complete slap in the face.

After the numerous and pointless cliches thrown out by the CEO, he ends with the fact that Dish isn't perfect, but they're #1 in customer satisfaction! Hooray!

So let's first ignore the FOX disputes and look at what the CEO had to say. Given the cliches he had already thrown out, wouldn't you have thought that he was going to say "we're not perfect, but we strive to get there every day" or some nonsense like that? It would have been a generic promise, but it's better than saying "we're not perfect, but we have the most satisfied customers." To me that implies that Dish and the CEO are ok with the fact that they have shortcomings. But this is all besides the point.

The real problem is Dish continues to air this commercial while it is apparent that Dish customers are not satisfied! At the moment, the commercial reads like this "Yeah, we know you can't watch your favorite teams on Fox Sports Net right now and you might lose Fox in a couple weeks, but hey, we're not sweating it because we're already ranked the best in customer service so you shouldn't be complaining." Seems to me like Dish wanted to address the current situation and felt too lazy to put together another commercial so they said "what the hell, this is the most relevant commercial we have."

It will be even funnier if Dish loses Fox and the commercial continues to air on Fox. They're not that irresponsible....are they?

Gillette Is Too Sharp For Their Own Good...Kind Of

So in walks the guy who is having problems with his razor....who looks like he just shaved about 30 seconds ago. Wouldn't it have made more sense for him to at least have the 5 o clock shadow?? Then again, why would you want a guy in a commercial for razors to be a visible victim of a shoddy blade?

Herein lies the problem for Gillette: they have a product that's too good. I've been using the Gillette Fusion cartridges for a while now and they literally take forever to become dull and unusable. Granted I'm not anywhere close to "Teen Wolf" status in the facial hair department, but I still shave almost daily and can't see why anyone would go through more than a cartridge a month.

So what is Gillette to do when they realize no one is buying replacement cartridges? They run an ad campaign essentially stating that their product isn't as good as you think it may be! I can't think of another instance of a company doing this. It would be like Penzoil not just saying "change your oil every 3000 miles" but instead having commercials with a car running poorly because the oil hadn't been replaced.

I'd love to know if Gillette has actually sold more cartridges since urging people to replace them. If I were them, I would have definitely considered pointing out instead that the five pack of replacement cartridges will last you over 6 months, because I'm sure plenty of people balk at the 12 or so dollar price tag and reach for the $5 pack of disposals that will last a lot less time. I would give Gillette the benefit of the doubt on this one, but they just showed me a guy who magically shaved despite the fact that his razor was in the shop.

A Bad Day for Goodyear

Unfortunately I couldn't find the long version of this commercial on Youtube. The expanded version of the commercial goes a little more in depth about how great it is to save gas and that "it's a beautiful thing." That's a great message...but it's kind of hard to believe when it's coming from a guy joyriding around in the Goodyear blimp and burning up fuel for no apparent reason. I don't see any fuelmax tires on that thing saving a ton of gas either.

It almost seems like they're making up for fuel they're saving by making special tires by hemorrhaging fuel with the blimp for sightseeing purposes and to creepily watch people at tourist destinations. Is there some kind of alliance between 'big oil' and Goodyear? Stay tuned.

This Guy Must Take Really Small Bites While Eating

You can barely finish it? Um................YOU DIDN'T EVEN START EATING IT YET! YOU HAVE A FEW MORE BITES LEFT?! WELL I WOULD CERTAINLY HOPE SO! If he started eating that thing already, then he must have taken an awfully small bite or two that left that chalupa looking untouched. I see no evidence of any taco wrappers and it doesn't look like he had any cinnamon twists that he couldn't resist waiting for dessert to eat. He must have had gastric bypass surgery and could only manage a small nibble before he was stuffed. Marketing to formerly obese people who think it would be a waste to order an XL Chalupa....well played, Taco Bell.

You Almost Fooled Me, AT&T

So I just saw this commercial for the first time and was amazed at the existence of life size paper dolls that traveled and had cell phones and paper doll families. I wanted to go to the airport and see one for myself and I got all excited about it....and then they drop the "screen images simulated" disclaimer on the bottom of the screen 10 seconds in. Don't play with my heart like that AT&T. Either tell me at the beginning or let me live in blissful ignorance.

........wait, what do you mean you meant screen images on the cell phone's screen?!

Liberty Mutual Defies Time, Space

Awwww well isn't this a cute commercial you've seen about 1700 times. I have, and around viewing number 6 I realized I was witnessing some type of good deed wormhole situation.

So the "pay it forward" concept of the commercial is pretty basic--someone does a good deed and someone else is inspired by it and does the same in turn, setting off a chain reaction. So how does the commercial go back to the woman at the very beginning, only this time we see her inspiration came from a guy who wouldn't have put money in that meter in the first place if not for the woman and the pizza guy?! We're trapped in an infinite loop. You've blown my mind, Liberty Mutual.

On a quick side note, is it really considered an out of the ordinary good deed to grab a guy to prevent him from walking into a freaking car?! Who sees that and says "oh wow that lady saved that guy's life, I should probably help this lady get her stroller off the bus." Liberty Mutual clearly has a skewed sense of time and of human nature.