Why Are TV Adverts Getting So Stupid?

Post Reply New Topic

We just watched one trying to sell a modern style reading lamp and on it someone said "I can see so much more when I turned it on!"
Where do they get these people? Why are they so stupid? Of course one will see so much more in a darkened enviroment. Its a lamp! Its what it is for!

Who exactly are they trying to sell these lamps to? The prices of thsse lamps are just shy of £150. Thats £100 more than one could buy such a lamp elsewhere! What medication are they taking? What sheltered enviroment did they actually grow up in?

Is like an advert selling a certain brand of a product (Read on...) that said in the advert "Do you hurt your feet on stones when you walk outside? You need..." (And then it showed the shoes they made). They really are getting this stupid, and the rediculous thing is that brainwashed people are buying their products!

But seriously!

Remember that sad death in the USA where a young manager working in an office would run at the window to demonstrate to new recruits how strong and safe the windows were and sadly one day the window gave out and he fell to his death below, and a statement given by his company said "....He was one of the brightest staff we had..." (If he was one of the brightest, the mind boggles what the other staff in the company were like! We know it was not intended to be read that way, but it amused us when we read it).

I do think that if they are trying to capture the attention of the average person, they need to address the average person at their level in the advert, so they can sell their product or products. Who is going to buy a product that was advertized at a level aimed at those who didn't know a door or the wheel had been invented? It is irresponsible to aim at those who are vunerable when ones products price is at a stupidly high level! That is like taking advantage of elderly who do not know how to use the internet so one can steal their money! This is what some of these companies are doing and we sit back and let them do it like that!

I’m assuming a commercial like that is trying to be funny

I thought so at first with the shoe advert I saw nearly a year ago, but with this desk light advert they are actually serious. Makes one wonder whl checked the advert from their company before it came out.

I once was asked to assess an advert before it came out and most people they brough in from the street to fill their forms on what they thought skimped through the forms and said they liked it, just to do it fast. I told the truth and spent over half an hour answering every question which obvilusly was ignored as the advert then came on TV, and it was a bit of a flop as it was stupid with no real humour or point relting to the product to it. They abandoned the advert after that and made a more traditional advert which wasn't stupid at all.
But if they listened, and instead of asking hundreds of leading questions, just asked a few open questions, they will have honest answers.
I know how some questionaires are asking leading questions specifically designed that whatever tack one answered them in, the answers would produce the aswers they wanted rather than honest open answers to open questions. This questionare I had to fill in every month happened to be part of a local athority (Local UK county council in South Wales) questionare for their "Quango" (Which I found myself part of) but it was already designed specifically that one had to give them the answers they wanted! Was a bit of a farce! Why I decided to pull out of it as it was a waste oftime filling them in. They did not actually want the publics oppinion at all. They just wanted to use it as a means to say they had the publics oppinion! They were going to do what they wanted anyway and only did thee questionare to make it "Seem" like it was democratic when it wasn't!)
Now this company that wanted public oppinion on their new yet to be launched advert did just that. They didn't really want the oppinion at all. They just wanted to say that the public had liked the advert... Probably to please their elderly managing director who thought the odd humour that only he and a few people had would attract the younger generations and was actually way off the mark!

This is why companies waste their money. They believe the "Highly qualified" experts who don't live in the real world!

Is why politics have become a world apart from reality of how most people live!

I sometimes think radio adverts are stupider.

Haha. Gave up with radios years ago when black and white TV was invented in the 1980's.

Anything to do with liberty mutual insurance!

Its mostly because advertisers have a very LOW opinion of the people who watch them.

Yes. Which leads to a lack of sales.

I mean listening to the radio in the car. I've encountered a several terrible radio adverts over the years. Some I remember strongly for no reason.

I never use the radio when I am driving as it is like doing two things at a time.

There are only a few radio channels left in the UK. Not sure why.

Some adverts I have heard are silly though, but rarely have the radio on. Maybe two or three times a year while waiting in a car park somewhere?

Internet ads are often even worse. I'm so sick of getting that "I've got home Internet from T-Mobile" ad.

Why on earth don't you use ad-blocking? There's very little reason to subject yourself to ads on the internet at all these days.

I thought ads had always been stupid. Why would anybody in their right mind passively soak up a vendor's brainwashing propaganda and then buy the stuff they're selling?

But ads are aimed at getting through the brain's critical faculty, so they barely work on people like me because I'm very analytical, and I enjoy identifying the dirty tricks and the sheer stupidity of their attempts to persuade people to do anything. Ads are the worst source of information there is about the desirability of products.

The worst of all ads are for any product from Apple.

Didn't they make that iPod thing, the glorified mp3 player? There was a poster ad for that which just showed somebody carrying a white one of those. No information about what it was, what it did, how well it did it or how much it cost, even the user's face was out of shot so you couldn't see whether they were happy with it or not. In truth, they were the only mp3 players at the time that could play consecutive tracks without a gap between them, which is useful if you're playing a continuous album that you've ripped to separate mp3s. But the makers weren't interested in telling me that.

Then there was the time I went to Sainsburys to find my way around the store blocked by a cardboard cutout picture of somebody with an inane expression on his face and a weird bodily posture that made John Cleese's silly walk look sensible. The caption was "Food dancing is living well at Sainsburys." Here's an explanation of why it was a Great Idea that deserved to win awards:

https://www.wk.com/work/sainsburys-food-dancing/

And here are some spot-on remarks by people who aren't complete imbeciles:

https://www.reddit.com/r/britishproblem ... ?rdt=65173

I could go on about Apple ads for a long time. One annoying thing about them is that the people in the ads are shown as hipsters, which I take to mean that they think most people see themselves as hipsters, which is discouraging if true, considering how much product they seem to move with those ads.

As for the food dancing. Apparently for NTs, spontaneous dancing is seen as evidence of almost euphoric happiness. My "favorite" trope is women dancing while sitting in a car at a red light, typically at the thought of going on a shopping spree.