:30 Red Devil spot #1, @ 1 MB

Creating an ad that is bad, corny, or low-budget looking can be one of the trickiest things to pull off. Red Devil Games of Red Bank, New Jersey pulled off the low budget thing relatively well in this first spot which spoofs an old school anti-drug advertisement. Of course they most likely had a small budget to work with, as it is apparently a local advertisement. I’ve re-encoded the ads they had on the web site and placed them on my site just for ease of download, you can check them out at a higher size on their site, though at least two of them are over 20 MB to download.

The link to watch the spots locally are located below each still frame.

The first spot is over the top and completely corny and it works really well. The editing is snappy and the actors are into what they are doing. It comes off really well, and it’s something I think a lot of advertising firms could throw thousands of dollars at to recreate and never come anywhere close to anything this good.

:30 Red Devil spot #2, @ 1 MB

This second ad isn’t quite as good. It seems more shocking than anything. They’ve paid homage to some of the more obnoxious production techniques of yesterday, including the cut to another camera that the host follows over, followed by the telescopic zoom in to punctuate the point.

Mentioning crabs and having a woman in stirrups at the end seemed more juvenile than clever.

:30 Red Devil spot #3, @ 1 MB

The last spot for Red Devil spoofs the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veteran ads from the 2004 election. Being a local ad, I think they can get away with spoofing something so timely. Were it a national ad I might say it would be a terrible idea.

It does a good job getting a viewer’s attention, and the inside joke about the Contra cheat codes should hit a home run with their intended demographic.

All of the spots are cheap, but don’t try to be anything else. The ads pulled off something that is rarely done correctly.

The ads, as always, belong to their owners, and I present them for editorial purposes only.

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yeknominc.com

I am reviewing the viral marketing attempt by CareerBuilder that supplements their Super Bowl ad I mentioned previously.

They have built what is supposed to be a company site called yeknominc.com for the monkey company featured in the television spots. Like I said, I liked at least the spot I saw on the Super Bowl. As a viral marketing piece I don’t know how successful this will be. I guess it’s supposed to look like it was designed by monkeys. So it’s hard to get around and it doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t seem like much of a joke, I don’t know what incentive someone seeing this will have to send to friends and coworkers. By the way, if you are a friend or coworker, don’t send me funny stuff. Seriously, cut it out.

The difficult page design is supposed to be part of the “joke”. Ha ha, monkeys make bad sites. It really gets in the way of the joke because a visitor would probably just leave in confusion before he or she figured out what was going on.

Why did I order a thousand of these damn shirts?

They have some bonus videos, but again, they are hard to find. Here is one and another training video. Both are pretty forgettable unless you think chimps in and of themselves are funny to look at. I was a little impressed at the number of avenues they left open for the site to get around, like with the e-cards and the CafePress storefront, but all in all you would really have to be a huge fan of the commercials to give enough of a damn to send one of the e-cards, much less pay $14.99 for a t-shirt with a CareerBuilder chimp on it.

One plus to the design is the individual URLs for the different sections, so that it’s possible to link to different pages. This is a problem with a lot of Flash-driven sites that leave you unable to link to any page within the site.

Creating something that is purposely cheesy, either in video or on the web, can be very difficult to pull off and requires a lot of nuance. This is just bad design and the content is purely nonsensical.

When you think about it, if a chimp managed to write and produce content like this, it would still be quite amazing. The idea was good, in theory. Luckily their Super Bowl ad was much more effective.

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I don’t get it, the Dolphins weren’t playing and the Super Bowl wasn’t in Miami

Monday I presented ads, good and bad, that had an annoying premise or pretense. Today I’ll show some of the ads companies probably spent a lot of money on just to be disappointing on the big game day.

:60 Ford spot, @ 2 MB

The initial running of this spot for Ford lasted sixty seconds, which might have been its biggest problem. I was sitting around waiting for the punchline, and it turned out to be “Ford Trucks make YOU tough!” Great, hilarious.

This will probably be cut down to thirty seconds but it seems mediocre at best. Also bikers don’t ride around terrorizing family sedans. Me and my other biker buddies have had our feelings hurt and we are drafting a letter to share our feelings with the maker of this commercial.

:30 Olympus spot, @ 1 MB

I have a big problem with special effects used incorrectly, or worse still, being expected to carry a commercial (or tv/movie production for that matter). Take a look at this Olympus commercial.

On top of the effects being unnecessary, they just aren’t that good. This is one of at least two similar spots they ran during the Super Bowl. The link to the video is below the still frame.

:30 Lays spot, @ 1 MB

This Lays spot featuring McHammer was disappointing because I knew ahead of time Spike Jonze was doing this commercial, so I had pretty high expectations. It’s a probably an example of a lot of money thrown at a problem that could have been solved with a little work. If your idea is flawed to begin with, hiring the most expensive director available probably will only make it a little better.

The time capsule commercial for the Trivial Pursuit 90’s Edition pretty much did this idea already, and a lot better.

That’s it! No more! All video, as always, is presented for editorial purposes only. I do not own the content and the videos and images may be subject to copy right protections. I will not sell you copies of commercials.

I said no!

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:30 godaddy.com spot, @ 1 MB

Some people call the Super Bowl the Oscars of the ad industry. Not me though, it’s other people who say that.

There wasn’t a commercial that stood out as fantastic for me this year, but you can’t really expect that every year. There were a few good funny ones, including the two McDonald’s spots and the CareerBuilder spot. Man I love chimps.

But for the most part the spots were disappointing. A lot were good, but not great. The main theme seemed to be self-reference, which even if done right I tend to think is a bad idea. It can date the commercial or make it too inside-jokey, and usually seems like a short cut around creativity.

At the top of the list is the godaddy.com Janet Jackson spoof. It’s well done and pretty funny, but a lot of the punch of the humor relies on the scandal of the Super Bowl half time show of last year. Otherwise this still gets an A minus because I am grading on a curve. And I can be bought off with beer. The link to the video is below the still frame image.

:45 FedEx spot, @ 1.75 MB

And then a bear kicks Burt Reynolds square in his junk.

“FedEx is determined to have the best commercial on the Super Bowl,” the narrator says. “So we hired Old Navy to do our commercial!” The spot is sort of amusing, but there’s more of the same self-awareness in this spot as the previous one. They set out to make an ad to go on the Super Bowl and didn’t set out to make a really great ad and it’s pretty obvious. Also their commentaries on the previous Super Bowl commercials really aren’t that savvy. There are a lot of talking animals in commercials, but I’m not sure if they were really dead-on in their research. A groin kick? I think at some point they started watching America’s Funniest Video and mixed it up with previous Super Bowl Commercials, because I can’t think of a single recent Super Bowl commercial that featured a groin kick.

I wonder if this would have been better with the narrator reading the points that popped up on screen.

Oh well. Uh, B plus if you throw in a cookie for free with the meal deal. Otherwise B minus. The link to the video is below the exciting still frame.

:30 Bud spot, @ 1 MB

This ad continues to build my case against the theme of bringing up the Super Bowl in the Super Bowl ads themselves. And it’s pretty terrible as well.

The message is..drink Bud Light and break into your friend’s apartment..and sleep with his woman and send him the pictures? Well, ok, if Bud Light told me to, I guess it’s ok..

The link to the video is below the picture.

:30 MBNA spot, @ 1 MB

And another Super Bowl ad that mentions million dollar commercials in the script is what we have here in this commercial for MBNA. It’s atrocious and doesn’t make any sense, and they just throw in Gladys Knight for some weird reason. Maybe the British will understand this better than me.

:30 American Idol promo, @ 1 MB

Perhaps the most obnoxious things on TV during the Super Bowl are the ads, bumpers and promos Fox puts on to promote their network and upcoming shows. Did they just shoot these an hour before they had to go on? Who could blame them, it’s not like they had like a year to get ready.

This promo for American Idol is just stinky.

Well with these spots “tackled” (get it? tackled?) I’ll take a “half time” and come back later this week with the non self-referential ads that completely under whelmed me. And now to nurse my “hangover”!

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The face of evil and of big car insurance savings

Some local commercials are wretched simply because they air all the damn time. These people run ads non-stop in the state of North Carolina. The ads aren’t that bad, except for the people and their goddamn accents. When I hear this come on I feel like I’m sitting through The Devil’s Advocate again and listening to Keanu Reeves plod through a southern accent with as much ease as he would have scoring well on the LSAT.

HURRHH

If you don’t watch the video and hear this woman’s voice, this second still shot should be pretty representative of how annoying her voice is.

These spots never disappoint me in terms of their grating, life-sucking qualities. Beware of more to come; I currently have many more of these archived, each more terrible than the last. Though my network of rogues inform me that a motley and unlikely band of adventurers have put aside their differences and now journey to my lair to kill me and throw these Direct video spots into a lake of fire on top of some mountain or something, I remain confident their group will be torn apart by petty squabbles, shifting alliances, and maybe one of my Commercial Wraiths. Or maybe I made those things up.

Watch the video..and it will watch you back! Link below.

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