Thursday, October 8, 2009

what are you selling me?

Normally, I don't pay much attention to adverts. They are obnoxious fillers, landmines in the television viewing experience. But there are three that I've noticed with great horror...

Ad 1: Windswept plains with dried grass bending under the force of chill gusts. Dried crystalline snowflakes pelting the ground like a dandruff laden heavenly being, flinging her hair at the earth. Off in the distance jagged mountains abrade the sky with stony flinted blades, unfinished in their artistry from ancient pre-history, unyielding and unsoftened through time. In come the thunder of hooves. Clydesdales tear through the scene, all powerful and warrior-like: there is nothing too barren, too cold, too earthy for them. Cut to the shot of their regal hooves kicking into the snow as crystals fly forth in all direction. A whinny, a neigh, some scrubbing of hooves to hard, cold earth... and then... the screen fills with the thick pouring sound of golden foaming liquid.

I'm sorry. You want to sell me Clydesdale pee?

Ad 2: Cue the happy bouncing polka rhythm. Enter a lumberjack in the foreground in flannel black and red tucked into his jeans. Men work behind him and in the distance ancient trees stretch toward a blue-bowl sky and whispy clouds looking like feathers and all things natural. Flannel guy holds aloft a cylinder and proclaims that he has no more blockage. Behind him a strap breaks and giant logs spill in kamikaze fashion toward the pantomime of screaming men. Cut to builder in the foreground, leg propped on a cement cube, yellow builder's hat on his head. He's safety guy. In the background steel framing and men hard at work building America, one building at a time. Bob, our builder, holds aloft a cylinder and says he no longer has trouble. When it's time to go, he goes. Still smiling, chaos abounds behind him. A truck backs into the scene. Bob, clueless, smiles on. The bed of the truck lifts and load upon load of brown dirt, falling in chunks and clumps pile swiftly while builders scramble to get out of the way.

We get it. The stuff in the cylinder helps you take a dump. Fast. Perhaps the warning label should read that those standing in your way might wish to run for cover?

Ad 3: Pretty brunette pulls a brush through her long silken hair. She's smiling and sweet, carefree too as she steps from her bathroom, grabs her purse and leaves her first floor apartment. As she passes her be-skirted hips are obstructed by a topiary in the foreground. Its greenery suddenly changes shape to an inverted triangle. Another woman, smiling happily, bikini-clad, circles a pool. She calls out to a friend, half-turning, half-angling her hips. Once again a shrub in the foreground obscures her lean abdomen and it too magically reshapes into a slim strip of greenery. A beach scene, a blonde in shorts is actively leaping toward a volleyball. Her smile is wide and sure. As she flies through the air, her lower body is obscured by a tree in the foreground. This time we are prepared as it becomes an oval of finely trimmed leaves.

Thank you. Now I not only know that shaving my genitals with your product leaves me carefree and active, but I am intimately aware with the sculpting preferences of three strange women. Or perhaps it's a tutorial? This kind for short skirts, this for your swim suit, and this for active wear. I half expect the announcer's voice over, "How do you trim your bush?"

Classy.

1 comment:

Molly Daniels said...

OMG...I bet the guys at Anheiser Busch never thought of THAT!

Ummm...I've not seen the other two. But eeuuu...