Say, did anyone get a chance to see that football game Saturday night? I can almost guarantee you did. Because if you owned a television and had it turned on, it would have been difficult not to see the Patriots-Giants game since it was playing on two network stations. And a cable station. Yes, the NFL made sure America was able to watch the Patriots' pursuit of a perfect season. They also made sure that America was able to watch several pieces of excrement disguised as commercials. Here, reproduced for your convenience, are two:
Blatant male chauvinism just sells, okay?
Scene: Diner customers sitting around giving the cable guy a hard time because his company doesn't carry the NFL Network.
Guy #1: Hey man, what's going on with the NFL Network? How do you still not have that channel?
Here's why: because they took games you used to be able to see for free on network television and made you pay for them. Some cable companies, like Time Warner, are resisting the $0.61 monthly charge that the NFL Network wants their customers to pay. I guess carrying like 8 live games a season and virtually no other worthwhile coverage aside from hour after hour of hilarious Rich Eisen commentary isn't the most compelling television package.
Cable Guy: Not my call. The brass says they can't charge people for channels they don't want.
How dare companies not shove a shitty product down consumers' throats and make them pay for it? This is still America, isn't it?
Guy #2: Channels they don't want! You think I want four channels just for women?
You said it! Finally something we can all agree on. Who needs women and their four stupid women-only TV channels? I could do without Oxygen and the Oprah SuperStation and The Menstruation Network. Just let me have regular, mass-appeal, non-gender-specific channels like Spike and Versus and family-centered stuff like that. Now give daddy back the remote.
Guy #2: I was in Korea.
Korean War veterans hate women's television. Especially the female veterans.
Guy #3: You can have those shopping channels back if you want.
You can take anything back that's historically female-oriented and in some small, unquantifiable way prevents me from watching football.
Waitress (aka Token Female): All I see is makeover shows and cage-fighting.
Have you seen the cage-fighting on C-SPAN2's Book TV? It's so crazy. All I can say is, David Sedaris may write like a fairy, but in the Doom Cage he is 130 pounds of twisted steel. Appointment viewing, okay?
Guy #4: How is cage-fighting more popular than the NFL?
Not more popular, it's just less of a maniacal corporate scheme to bilk football fans out of the rest of the money they're not spending on season tickets, jerseys, FatHeads and the like.
If properly executed, I suppose this could have been funny:
This is part of a series of ads where Coors Light drinkers ask NFL coaches various beer-related questions and are answered by responses from actual press conferences. The technique of interspersing actual interview footage with fake questions is not a new idea, and people like Stephen Colbert have used it successfully. These commercials, however, just fall flat.
The main problem for me is that coaches do not take questions from non-journalist frat guys holding beer cans at their press conferences. And these guys are pretty obnoxious about interrupting, too. If you're not familiar with former Cardinals coach Dennis Green's comments here, they refer to a humiliating last-minute loss to the 2006 Chicago Bears. Green basically lost it in the post-game press conference and had a well-documented melt-down. Naturally, he wanted to profit off of his shit fit:
Guy #1: Hey coach! Those guys just took off with all your cold, refreshing Coors Light!
Wait, what? Why would a coach have an amount of Coors Light sitting around the press room? And why do you have to force in "cold, refreshing" in such a painful way?
Guy #1: Who do they think they are?
Dennis Green: They are who we thought they were!
What bothers me here is the corny, forced set-up "question." Isn't there a team of copywriters somewhere who can come up with a decent way to execute this?
Guy #2: They are who you thought they were?... Okay, well, if you knew who they were, why didn't you stop them?
Green: We let 'em off the hook!
I guess that vaguely answers the guy's question. The commercials ends with another unfunny line while the fratty guys stand around awkwardly clutching their beers. The weird part is there are funnier parts of Green's press conference that weren't used in this commercial (i.e. "If you want to crown 'em, then crown their ass!"), but for some reason Coors Light prefers the weak, obnoxious comedy that's been the hallmark of this campaign for the last several years. Maybe coaches will start acting like morons just to get a spot in the next year's Coors Light commercials.
Week 17 is almost over. Playoffs are starting up. Advertisers are editing their foulest, most over-produced commercials as we speak. Who's excited for the SuperBowl?
2 comments:
God, what a joke that NFL Network spot is. Talk about stacking the deck - I'm pretty sure if this happened in a real diner, and the cable guy explained to everyone there how the NFL refused to make their network part of the basic package but instead wanted it to be on a premium sports tier for which customers would have to pay extra, they'd settle the fuck down. The reason there are "four channels for women" is because Lifetime, Oxygen and We (and whatever the fourth is) don't charge the cable companies fees. I'm shocked - shocked! - that the NFL left out this pertinent yet rather damning bit of information, of course.
You get more laughs from ONE Bud lite commercial than all the Coors Light commercials combined.....actually you get more laughs from ANYTHING compared to those stupid stupid coach commercials.
Post a Comment