commercials
Voyeur: HBO Makes New York Look More Exciting Than It Really Is. Again.
Jul 5th
I was not fortunate enough to catch the building-side broadcast of HBO Voyeur, which is a shame, because it seems the only appropriate venue for the undertaking. The much ballyhooed project is basically an ambiguous commercial for the network – a four-minute looped reel of the sensational/mundane events that transpire one night in the stairwell and eight apartments of a lower Manhattan building. It serves as a reminder to us all that that drama can happen anywhere, but it’s an effing guarantee on HBO.
Voyeur is an exciting idea. Aside from the fly-on-wall kicks of seeing people fight and make out, there’s also real estate scoping, a favorite pastime of city-dwellers everywhere. Seeing it broadcast on vacant walls or billboards would be an experience, but watching the same events compartmentalized on HBO On Demand or in poor resolution on the website is just boring.
It’s also BS. Most of this stuff would never happen, and the suggestion that it’s all happening at the same moment, in the same building, is funnier than it is intriguing. HBO’s big ploy is to appeal to our lust for real, accessible drama, but what they’ve given us is comically overdone. I have a friend whose old neighbor did nude calisthenics while he waited for his popcorn to microwave. He could have had his own show.
Commercial Break: Sauce-Shillin’ Spice
May 2nd
Poor Spice Girls… back on the American radar for the first time in years, and for what? A forced tabloid coup d’état, Eddie Murphy’s bastard child and now pasta sauce. President Bush wasn’t the only surprise cameo on last night’s American Idol – Baby Spice, Emma Bunton, showed up in a Prego ad that premiered during one of the breaks. I would say that it’s more respectable than Dancing with the Stars, but apparently she’s already gone down that road. How the mighty have fallen.
Super Bowl XLI & the Emo Robot
Feb 5th
The state of the televised commercials in the United States is a precarious one. While the Super Bowl used to be one of the few times a year we’d see the premiere of truly entertaining spots, the rapid growth of TiVo-culture and our decreasing attention spans demand dynamic commercials year-round. Generally speaking, commercials are more entertaining than ever, so it seems that the Super Bowl would be showcasing an even creamer cream of the crop. In recent years though, this has proven to be quite false. Instead of focusing on the inexpensively brilliant and absurd (the spots that became viral – is anyone paying attention?), we get CGI crabs worshipping coolers and, and, and twins. We’re growing accustomed to mediocrity and settling for unintentional hilarity.
So while my prayers for an evening of nothing but Geico commercials and Harry Potter trailers were not answered, there was one reason to be happy. Wait, make that desperately, desperately sad.
If anyone you know seemed lost in a thick, melancholic fog today, it could have been the weather; it could have been their loyalties to the second city, but if they’re anything like me, it was their deep sadness over the state of the American auto industry. And the bringer of the gloom? General Motors’ paranoid, suicidal and adorable robot.
When the commercial starts, one of many yellow robotic arms is plugging along, putting together a Chevy (picture a proto-Johnny Five without the heinous voice). All of a sudden, robot drops a bolt and halts the well-oiled machine that is the GM assembly line. Foolish robot, there’s no room for mistakes here. You’re fired! The heartbreaking piano plinks of “All By Myself” start and robot spends the next thirty seconds trying his mechanical arm at a few odd jobs, while making drill noises that sound like little puppy sighs, before deciding that a life without car making just ain’t worth livin’! He jumps to his death, only to wake up back in the plant. It was a just a dream, robot. Or was it?
They may have disguised it as an ad for the how seriously they take their 100,000-mile warranty, but what GM is really trying to sell you is guilt. The rapidly declining sales of American cars are putting thousands of autoworkers in the unemployment lines, and though they may not be as cute as robot, they’re just as hopeless. The ones that still have jobs are all just a few dropped bolts from the same circumstances.
A little research shows that GM is also making a darling little go at viral marketing. Robot even has a blog under the id “Robot 2407.” Get it? He never stops working to bring you quality. Though only five or so entries deep, “GOTO ROBOT” is almost as endearing as the commercial. Robot reads Ayn Rand, watches Futurama, sleeps for exactly 11.5 hours every night and types the same entry every day! That is precision. HE EVEN TYPES IN ALL CAPS LIKE A ROBOT TOTALLY WOULD.
But online chatter says that people liked the crabs much better. In fact, in all of the coverage of last night’s commercials, I haven’t seen one mention of Suicide Robot. Whether it’s poor taste or the shame of that Toyota in the garage that’s keeping everyone from acknowledging the triumph of this commercial, I do not know. Buy American, my friends, or Robot 2407 will die.