Tuesday, May 11, 2021

TV Commercials

What do you find most annoying about commercials on TV? This came to me when a friend posted a rant about commercials on Facebook yesterday. Specifically he mentioned the ads for Liberty Mutual Insurance, the one with the wet teddy bears. That one is pretty silly, in my opinion. But I find all the commercials for Liberty Mutual a bit annoying. 

Various comments appeared on his post, including one from me about the Salonpas commercials with the "Hisamitsu" line at the end. When I first saw those commercials, I was reminded of a series of 80's commercials for Nabisco products that ended with a voiceover and chimes reciting, "Nabisco." Here is one such commercial:


My friend let on how he hates commercials with taglines at the end, like the Liberty Mutual ones and the Salonpas, as well as others for Safelight, Wayfair, and Farmers Insurance. If you're not familiar with any of these, check Youtube! I don't want to have to flood this post with links and videos of these!

I was also reminded of the use of songs in commercials. Such songs were often altered in the ads, and there were some I did not know were an actual song, having first heard them in the commercials. For many years, I did not know the the song in the Clairol Loving Care commercials was a spoof of a song from South Pacific. And I still remember the ketchup commercials that used Carly's Simon's hit "Anticipation" and those for Kmart Photo that used the song "Personality" by Lloyd Price, who recently passed. I can't seem to find any of these ads on Youtube. And Wikipedia made absolutely no mention of the song's use in the Kmart commercials. And when watching the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding in 2002, I had flashbacks to this commercial:


 

 After the main character in the movie sang the real song:

 

Do anyone of you find any particular commercials annoying? There are more that were mentioned in the Facebook post than I care to mention. And what are some other sings you can recall used in commercials?

3 comments:

Margaret (Peggy or Peg too) said...

I too dislike that wet teddy bear commercial, it is so dumb.
I dislike with a vengence Drug Commercials. I wish they weren't even allowed to be shown like cigarettes aren't allowed. Listening to the side effects is enough to want to mute your TV!

Yamini MacLean said...

Hari OM
I object wholeheartedly to all advertising interfering with my feature viewing... so I skip the ads altogether! Either by having recorded the show/film and f-fwding through the ads OR by muting them and doing something else for the duration. Crossword or email-check for example. YAM xx

Elephant's Child said...

I really dislike the ads. Not least because they are noisy and repetitive.