Don't be Silly, Adrian Peterson: Grading Recent Commercials (Part 2)

Since the post I wrote about two weeks ago cutting apart some TV commercials was well-received, let's move on to a new set of snark.  Again, all commercials are graded using a standard rating scale, where A+ is "The Godfather, Part II" and F is "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes."

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Commercial #1: The One Commercial That Gets the "Smarmy Dude, Hot Chick" Trope Right

If you are like me, you watch tons of football.  In fact, I watch so much football that (a) sometimes I spend the equivalent of a workday sitting on the couch watching football, and (b) sometimes I watch football games where I know nothing about the teams at play.  Division 3 football, high school football, you name it, I'll watch it.

(I'm writing this during the BCS Championship game, though, because I hate both the University of Oregon and Auburn University with equally fiery passions.  The University of Oregon is douchey, in bed with Nike, has annoying uniforms and a not-deserving-of-pretense pretentious fan base.  The school barely cracks the top 100 in the nation academically, and you'd think it's fucking Yale if you listen to its students enough.  Auburn is a bunch of backwoodsy, incestuous assholes who have no academic standards, love Sarah Palin and have a quarterback straight out of a terrible '80's movie about cheating in sports.  Both of these teams, and all of their respective fans, can choke on the same Chicken McNugget.)

At least in professional football, most of the commercials are really, really stupid.  The NFL assumes that a big part of its fan base consists of Neanderthal males, and appeases this demographic by presenting lots of commercials for domestic light beer products that are designed to state man's superiority to woman (usually using third-grade humor to make the point).  I hate these commercials because they're not subtle and they actively lead the people with money in their pockets toward hating the product being sold, but that's not my point here.

My point is that the NFL itself, who probably knows more about the commercials being shown during its games than anyone else, has turned this system on its head with a quirky and extremely funny commercial for its NFL Mobile product.  I submit for your approval the following:

A few things to note about this commercial:

1. The dude is extremely smarmy and the girl is extremely good looking.  This is a trope, it happens a bunch in commercials; the goal here is to attract the attention of loser-like, ugly dudes, by instilling a brief millisecond of hope that they, too, might score a babe one day.  (Sorry, ain't happening.)
2. There's actually a plot to this commercial; girl walks into the water.  Dude checks NFL highlights.  Girl (Adrian Peterson) walks out of the water and Peterson - who must have a FANTASTIC sense of humor because he allows himself to be made fun of often in commercials - putting a towel around his helmet, speaks in a girl's voice, "You're imagining me as Adrian Peterson again, aren't you?"  Cut to the punch line of the entire commercial, guffaw guffaw, the end.

I remembered this commercial - and what it was for - immediately, because it does so many things that are both unexpected and also demands a great deal of attention on the behalf of the viewer to comprehend.  Extra props for manipulating the shallow, sexist tropes that dominate the media marketplace for commercials shown during football games.  Kudos for NFL Mobile for a commercial that scores a touchdown.

Grade: A-

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Commercial #2: Mayhem, Like Me

If you watched "Oz" back in the day, you know character actor Dean Winters as the completely awesome Ryan O'Reily, the lead character on the show.  He's also been in a bunch of other stuff, including a recurring role on "30 Rock," but you most likely only know him as "Mayhem," the real-life manifestation of problems that can occur while driving.

In the above commercial, he represents one of the worst drivers in the world - the emotionally compromised teenage girl.  Several things are hilarious and effective about this commercial: the deadpan "OMG", the pink Dodge Durango with matching sunglasses, and the obviousness that - holy shit - there are a lot of terrible drivers out there and maybe you do need effective insurance to protect yourself.

This is the type of ad campaign that must have taken a great deal of patience (as well as balls, when you think about it) to pull off.  It, like the earlier commercial for NFL Mobile, requires an active viewer to get the point.  It essentially bets on the weirdness and comic quality being enough to draw people in, and to understand what the commercial is trying to sell.  It's a big swing, but it works, and it's resulted in one of the most memorable ad campaigns in recent memory.  The above video is, in my opinion, the funniest one of the lot.

Grade: A-

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Commercial #3: Where Smarmy DOESN'T Sell (a/k/a The Power of Likability)

Where Allstate hit a home run with its most recent ad campaign, one of its major competitors - State Farm - hit a dribbler down the third base line.  There might be people, somewhere in the United States, who actively like the following commercial, but I haven't met any of them yet.  (And yes, I've had many conversations with people about these commercials, and they ALL hate them.  Watch the below commercial at your own risk.)

The skinny of this commercial is as follows: douchebag pitchman walks into a cafe and talks about how great State Farm insurance is.  Holds the door for someone on the way in - that must have really sold Middle Fuckin' America, right there.  Speaks a couple of incredibly false statistics (e.g., "Discounts up to 40%"... yeah, right) as the camera nonsensically pans around the cafe while workers... do their jobs?  Not sure what the point of this pan-around is.  Camera cuts back to douchebag pitchman who spouts some more drivel about State Farm, all the while with very soft and boring music playing in the background.  Fade to red.

So, this commercial is extremely problematic.  First, the pitchman is completely ineffective.  He's too slight, too tenor, too... girly to get the job done.  He's not convincing, and insurance is such a saturated marketplace that false discounts aren't enough to get people to switch - they might get people to get a quote from State Farm, but once they see that the stated discounts are lies, and they are lies, they won't switch.  Anyway, where Allstate has Pedro Cerrano/President Palmer and Ryan O'Reily pitching ads, State Farm has My Big Fat Greek Pitchman (I would have also accepted the homeless man's Steve Perry from Journey).  So there's an epic fail right there.

Second, what's with the hokey nature of this commercial?  It seems corny and contrived.  The cafe setting doesn't make sense, and the pan-around doesn't do anything to help firm the message (if anything, it detracts from it).  Other commercials from the same ad campaign show the pitchman in front of a newsstand.  These settings all have something in common: they have NOTHING to do with insurance.

State Farm has clearly forgotten the cardinal rule of selling insurance products: the products themselves are so ugly, and people think so little about insurance in their day-to-day lives in the first place, that you've got to get really creative in order to sell them.  These commercials fail to accomplish this.

Grade: F

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Commercial #4: Selling Ford Cars to Girls

I'm going to take off my misogynist hat for a minute here and attempt to be objective.  Such a high percentage of car commercials are tailored to men (have you seen that Dodge Challenger ad with George Washington, the one that says in a voice over: "Here are two things that America got right: cars, and freedom"?  Holy smokes, that one might as well be sponsored by the goddamn Tea Party).  Additionally, Ford was in such a perilous market position just a couple short years ago, I feel that having a series of TV spots that are specifically designed for women is extremely unique, extremely daring, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up being extremely effective.

What I think Ford did, at a very high level, is the following: they realized that they would never beat Honda or Toyota in perceived quality (although, paradoxically, in some instances they have rivaled them recently in actual quality).  So they teamed with Microsoft to add some really cool multimedia features to the cars, and decided to focus their marketing efforts on the "Car is a Cool Toy" market.  Good call here - that's exactly how my generation thinks, for the most part.

This, I think, leads naturally to an ad campaign that's more or less designed to get women to go alone into Ford dealerships to buy cars.  (You might disagree with the basic premise of my argument, but before you fly off the deep end, remember this: if a commercial for Grands biscuits shows a black family sitting around a table eating said biscuits - and this is an actual example from a recent commercial - it is a commercial targeted toward the black demographic.  It's not racist - it is racialist, I would argue, and there is a difference - and commercials are allowed to target genders, races, etc.  In the quest for the almighty dollar, many baseline rules of American society do not apply.)

[NOTE: I can't find a Youtube link to any of these commercials, which means that I fail at blogging.  I wrote all of the above before searching because usually, I can find what I am looking for.  But you know the commercials I'm talking about: Mike Rowe of Discovery's "Dirty Jobs" alongside a typically-attractive woman, he talks her through the Ford car of note in VERY shallow fashion, and then she decides she doesn't want to drive her Camry or Civic any more.  To me, they're pretty terrible because they don't go into any detail about the car - but I'm a details kind of guy.  I could see these commercials working very well for the people whom they are intended for.]

Anyway, as I mentioned in a previous post about commercials, everyone thinks they're an expert when it comes to cars.  More than half the battle in getting someone to switch brands is to just get them to think differently about the product itself.  These Ford ads succeed in that you stop thinking about your car as a means of transportation, and start thinking, "Hey, this is cool, this is fun!"

And the female focus (no pun intended) is probably a really good idea, too.  Women must feel maligned in the super-macho car market - I've noticed anecdotally that so many car commercials are tailored toward men, and most of the ones tailored toward women are pedantic and assume women are stupid, which is no fair - and (in my male opinion), these Ford commercials don't do that as much as others do.  Whether this translates to more sales for Ford is an open question, but certainly something to keep an eye on.

Grade: C+