Thursday, November 10, 2005

Commercials worth watching twice

I have a TiVo. Commercials I don't like disappear at the speed of fast-forward. Commercials I like, on the other hand, I can play over several times in a row.

Take for example the Amp'd Mobile ads, with the tag line "Try not to die — Amp'd Mobile is coming" over such scenes as a maid standing over the body of a still-twitching young O.D. or a prostitute desperately doing CPR on a Senator on a cheap hotel bed.

Or take the ad for the new 2006 Mitsubishi Eclipse. It's a car ad that is incredibly sexy without being crass about it, which is quite unusual for a car commercial. It has a drum beat that commands your attention as much to the images of the car and its engine as to the drummers, and as much to the drummers' faces as torso and beyond. [Free word of advice to the Mitsubishi folks, though: I had to wade through about five levels of web site to find that URL, so, like, you should make it easier to get from "Mitsubishi.com" to "MitsubishiCars.com," 'kay?]

I have no idea if the underlying products are superior or utter crap or somewhere in between, but the ads totally rock.

My point is, you want me to watch a commercial for your widgets or your Wonka bars, you need to provide me with something that makes the commercial worth watching even if I know nothing about your product. Then it's just up to the product guys to make something worth buying....