Madvertisements

It’s been a while, so let me run through a couple of quick commercials that I found to be particularly ridiculous as I watched the NCAA Tournament this afternoon:

• There’s a current commercial for Sheraton in which people from opposing sides of bitter college rivalries are shown doing nice thing or each other.  An Ohio State supporter helps a Michigan man with his luggage.  A North Carolina fan shares his umbrella with a guy in a Duke sweatshirt.  What any of this has to do with staying at a Sheraton is beyond me, maybe because I was too busy wondering why they chose one of the rivalries.  Ohio State-Michigan makes sense.  Duke-North Carolina makes sense.  USC-UCLA makes sense.  Georgetown-Syracuse makes sense, at least in basketball.  Those are all great college rivalries, all known nationally as grudge matches of the first order.  So what other rivalry did they use to round out this great group?  Alabama-Auburn?  Texas-Oklahoma?  Kansas-Missouri?  Florida-Florida State?  No.  They chose Louisville versus Memphis.  Seriously?  That’s the best they could do?  Neither school even considers the other their biggest rival, but THAT’S one of the top-5 college rivalries according to Sheraton?  Wow. 
• Color me a bit confused by the Planters Peanuts commercial that shows men making fools over themselves as they try to follow a hideously ugly woman who rubbed peanuts all over her skin to she would smell like them.  Hey, it’s cute, I get it.  Ugly girl turning heads with her peanut fragrance.  Funny.  But kindly tell me the last time any product purposely associated itself with ugly women.  Hey, maybe women are thrilled that the standard formula of objectifying them if they’re beautiful has been reversed in this ad.   And maybe those same women are really the targeted demographic that Planters is hoping will buy its peanuts.  But considering that this commercial first aired during the Super Bowl, I’m thinking it wasn’t women that Planters was targeting.  I think they were hoping the tens of millions of men who watch the Super Bowl would get the urge to buy peanuts after watching a peanut-smelling woman with a hairy mole and a unibrow who picks a wedgie out of her fanny at the end of the commercial.  In which case I’m going to call this a curious marketing ploy.