Must..poop out..Toyota..

My dislike for this :30 Toyota spot is probably more personal taste than rational criticism. That’s why I’m dumping this article onto the web site over the weekend where no one will notice.

The beginning of this spot, with the guy chained to his car and pulling it, is so dramatic it just makes me want to change the channel. Also the two junk cars shown in this ad are a little too junky. You aren’t going to be able to keep driving a smoking pile of rust for very long anyway.

After the guy breaks his chain the music breaks into some kind of weird techno and I think it is a bad shift. I think shifting to a more upbeat orchestral / movie score song might have marginally helped. I must point out that after the guy breaks his chain it looks like in his new car he also has a new woman. We’ve all been there, right guys? Eh? Ehhh? Uh, anyway, my point is the shift in the commercial is from intolerably slow to just sort of slow, and there isn’t much of an emotional reaction.

During the dance-techno-whatever song there is some kind of intermittent beep that sounds like my cell phone when I have an unchecked message. Most of all I hate this commercial for making me check my phone every time it came on the air.

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GREAT. I’m telling MOM.

This is another of those weird ads that just tries to grab your attention with how weird it is. Man is this ad weird.

Being strange aside, this ad doesn’t really do anything for me. I also have a problem with the spot that took me a bit to even notice. I thought that the kid’s head was shrunk for no apparent reason, but when I was capturing the spot I noticed that the guy chasing the kid is supposed to be a magician. They do a really bad job making this premise obvious, and could have fixed it with a better establishing shot, maybe prominently showing a magician’s hat and costume. Instead they assume we’ll figure it out from a poster way in the background. And if you freeze-frame you can see the man has a pet rabbit. Another Blue’s Clue.

This ad gets a C- but could bump that up if it would just participate in class once in a damn while.

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When Mad TV won’t even hire you

I have graciously chosen t0 spread out the 1-800-COLLECT commercials to avoid causing an unintentional overdose of Carrot Top. In the first spot I posted, we see Carrot Top being smashed into the ground by an angry giant.

In this spot Carrot Top is somewhat unlucky with the ladies. If my memory is correct I am pretty sure the earlier COLLECT spots were more along the lines of this spot, featuring an unloved Carrot Top. Over time Carrot Top became more and more appealing to the hot women in his commercials, leading me to believe he threatened to quit (or maybe just threatened suicide) unless he got some in the script.

Aside from being vintage 1-800-COLLECT, this spot is somewhat rare as it is a full thirty second spot, instead of a fifteen second cut. Because of this you get to see absolutely priceless extra footage of Carrot Top clowning around at the beginning of the video. I say “priceless” in the sense that the price is zero.

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Pictured above: White men

This “ad” is for..well it’s for nothing. It’s part of the Truth campaign, which, as far as I can tell, is marketing spite towards “Big Tobacco”. I’ve mentioned them before in this previous article.

I have so many problems with this ad it’s hard to find a place to begin. Like I’ve said before, it’s easy to come up with an ad when you are not beholden to producing any sort of result. The whole Truth campaign has this wonderful task. I am reminded of Ad Busters magazine in that all they seem to peddle is a mindset of hating whatever the creators hate. As Ad Buster magazine seems to hate any form of advertisement (guess they chose the wrong industry to work in), this ad seems to think any form of targeted marketing is racist.

(Oh there is more…)

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