Unsought Input

According to BusinessWeek, the Lunesta ad is one of the least-skipped commercials on TV. This is an important metric for advertisers. Ever since TiVo and other DVRs have made it easy for people to jump past commercials, advertisers have tried to find ways to get them to watch.

If you look at the rest of the the list, it’s hard to see what makes a commercial less skipworthy. I have a theory in the case of Lunesta. I think people don’t skip because they are mesmerized by the soul-eating Lunesta butterfly. Watch the video:

…And now you tell me: doesn’t it look like the butterfly brought that woman the sweet gift of a quiet death? Every time that commercial comes on, I point to the screen and yell to my wife, “That butterfly is going to steal her breath!”

Apparently I’m not the only one creeped out…

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Someone once said “Nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” That somebody was probably in advertising. This is the first in a periodic series of posts about the many insulting commercials that advertisers foist on the public, assuming the unwashed masses are uniformly stupid. Here is a commercial for some product called Head On that I saw recently:

There are so many annoying facets to this commercial I don’t even know where to begin.

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Today I read an article detailing how Electronic Arts (EA) has signed a massive deal to put advertisements into their PC and Xbox 360 games. This deal signals a lot of good and bad effects for the video game industry as a whole.

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