I've Ad Just About Enough

With Super Bowl Sunday rapidly approaching, millions of Americans are eagerly looking forward to the day when we gather around the TV, watch a pitched, four-hour (or, if you include the pre-game show, 17-hour) battle and then crown, indisputably, the nation's top TV commercial.

The proliferation of Digital Video Recorder (DVR) devices like TiVo make watching the Super Bowl even easier, since we can now blithely fast forward right through all that boring football. By 2035, experts predict, Super Bowl broadcasters will stop airing football altogether, in favor of running a full day of commercials, only occasionally interspersed with a close-up of a cheerleader's cleavage and a halftime show performed by the fossilized remains of the Rolling Stones. So not that much different, after all.

Of course, just a few years ago, the experts were predicting that DVRs would kill television commercials entirely. Because with such a "magical" remote control in hand, who would be dumb enough to sit through all those dimwitted ads for products only idiots would buy, like the ShamWow towel? Especially since, if you're like me, you already own a dozen ShamWows?

Well, it turns out that the experts were wrong, and we are that dumb. According to industry studies, nearly half of all DVR viewers choose to watch the commercials anyway.

To me, this seems crazy. I can't stand commercials. Since getting TiVo, I've spent every commercial break aggressively honing my remote control skills to the point where I can now consistently fast forward right to the precise moment when the show starts again, often within a few hundredths of a second. And to think my in-laws said I'd never accomplish anything.

But I realize that I'm in the minority on this one. Many Americans are perfectly happy to watch commercials, believing that ads provide them with essential consumer information. This may explain why celebrity endorsements are so popular. Because lord knows when you're on the brink of buying, say, a new cell phone plan, you don't want to stand there, immobilized, wondering, "Wait, what would Luke Wilson do?"

Personally, I prefer it when a celebrity misbehaves and gets dropped, as with the Hanes Corporation's recent canning of Charlie Sheen.

"Gee, I used to think that Charlie Sheen was the kind of guy who could be trusted to steer me to the right brand of underwear, but since he's been implicated in some sort domestic dispute, well, now I'm just not so sure."

But maybe I'm just jaded from a lifetime spent listening to advertisers' come-ons featuring meaningless claims of "special" ingredients like Certs with "Retsyn," Scope with "T 2-5," and, of course, Pennzoil with its "patented PennzStar Molecule." I always wondered whether the Pennzoil people genuinely expected viewers to compare competing motor oil brands on the molecular level. We're the same people who buy all those ShamWows, remember.

But by far the worst offenders are beer commercials, which go to great lengths to persuade us that their mass-produced products are vastly different, when in fact they all taste essentially like carbonated goat urine (don't ask how I know). In my viewing career I've been told that I should buy regular beer, light beer, dark beer, ice beer, dry beer, fresh beer, red beer and wheat beer; that a certain brand of beer was better because it's cold-filtered, beechwood aged, brewed in glass-lined tanks, shipped cold, made from Rocky Mountain stream water, or even because it comes in a can that tells you when the beer is cold enough to drink. Who knows, we may one day see the development of a can that tells you when it's empty.

My favorite, however, is the current ad campaign promoting Bud Light for its "drinkability." I think we can declare that a beer company has officially run out of ideas when the latest claim about a particular brand is, essentially, that you can drink it.

But the good news is that the beer advertisers can still win me back. They just need to inject some actual honesty into their ad campaigns, perhaps by adopting the style of those prescription drug commercials that consist mostly of disclaimers:

Actor: "Looking for a good time? Drink Schwartz Dry Ice Light Beer!"
Narrator: "Warning, drinking Schwartz Dry Ice Light may cause lightheadedness,  headaches, nausea, aggression, slurred speech, vomiting, impotence, wistfulness, melancholy, embarrassing revelations, sexual promiscuity, drunk dialing, drunk texting, drunk tweeting, unwanted expressions of affection, pregnancy, liver disease, bulbous reddening of the nose, memory loss, loss of employment, loss of social status, alienation of loved ones, incarceration, regrettable tattoos and/or piercings, and manic interruption of award show acceptance speeches. If any of these symptoms persist, consult your local Alcoholics Anonymous chapter."

Now all they need to do is find the right celebrity spokesperson. I hear Charlie Sheen is available.