Commercial

Tropicana’s ad brings light to the Arctic, but not everyone is smiling

I saw this commercial yesterday, and while I know it’s not uncommon for medicine ads to have long lists of side effects in voice-over, this one seemed to stand out for me. It’s not all that long a list of side effects by the standards of other commercials, so it might have just caught my attention because the subject interested me personally (I have asthma). But mostly because I just found it such a mind-scramble that a commercial for an asthma medication would warn us that this very product might “increase the risk of asthma-related death.” (The regulatory agency forced them to include this warning due to a study that was published in 2006.) It’s like if Mr. Clean had a voice-over saying “Warning: may actually make your counter-tops dirtier.”

Some things don’t make sense to anyone but you, but you have to share them anyway. So it is with this commercial, one of my most vivid TV-viewing memories from my childhood: a Canadian commercial for Sinutab with two cops, one of whom can’t perform his duties because he’s too busy stroking his face and groaning about his headache. Fortunately his bad-ass buddy keeps a pack of Sinutab in his pocket and saves the day. But even after he’s cured, the headache cop still can’t stop making weird faces and sounds. I think this may be the first time I became very worried about the effectiveness of our police force.

A few weeks back we came down hard on Microsoft for its misguided Vista-Mojave ad in which it attacked its own customers for not liking its buggy operating system. 

In my “theme songs that explain the premise” post a few days ago, I forgot to mention that the theme song of The Beverly Hillbillies not only explained the premise (and, as a commenter pointed out, still leaves enough room for a brilliant instrumental by Flatt & Scruggs) but plugged the sponsor’s product too. In the early seasons, the theme song was followed by an additional verse that served as a commercial for the main sponsor of the show, sometimes Kellogg’s cereal and sometimes this: