What is happening with ads?

There’s a particularly unpleasant image of an Amazon back-to-school commercial that I return to in my mind from time to time. It has this wannabe The Office vibe of a self-aware person in a slightly awkward situation—except it’s a bubbly mom who breaks the fourth wall to announce how much she loves saving money more than her kids. She giddily brags about gluing her children to tablets as a necessary reprieve from parenting. At one point she strolls down a school hallway and describes her children’s outfits as “lit rizzy rizz clothes.” What was supposed to be a humorous play on brainrot came off as company town ghoulishness in the most contemporary of aesthetics: Come home from your Amazon job to eat dinner made from Amazon groceries before playing with your kids with Amazon toys, and if one of them gets hurt, you can patch them up with Amazon care. I didn’t think it was possible to resent Jeff Bezos’s lavishly bald head more than after his chode rocket stunt or after lobbying a municipal government to dismantle a landmark bridge to accomodate his superyacht or after his three-day-long $50 million wedding or after he turned the Washington Post into his personal blog or after saying that taxing him won’t help “the teacher in New York” or after he claimed a $4,000 child tax credit. But this rejected SNL skit-level “comedy” has convinced me that he isn’t really a business genius as much as he’s Amazon Basics grafted onto Dr. Evil.

As someone who has stumbled into advertising creative, I often get asked why every commercial is now some form of embarrassing dogshit gigaslop. Those posing this question likely conceive of my job as a Man Men episode, while the bulk of my working hours are spent trudging through V13 of Figma mockups and educating middle-aged global brand directors on the difference between your and you’re when they email feedback on billboard headlines.

I regret to inform you that ad agencies and clients are taking most of their cues from TikTok. The more deflating reality for all this suckage is that companies are inherently risk-averse, stakeholder alignment/approval is a morass of bloated privatized bureaucracy, VPs are reluctant to put their job on the line by making any decision of consequence, and much of corporate leadership is content with deferring their value judgment to a spreadsheet. Since advertising is a client-service industry and they’re paying us to solve business challenges and not for our unfiltered creative expression, many agencies will kowtow to their insatiable demands for formulaic data-driven nonsense that fulfills their vanity metrics. I advise clients to assume that no one wants to watch their ad, so they should make something entertaining to compete in an attention-economy saturated with content. But a management consultant has already convinced them that a compelling ad is built on rattling off a bullet-point list of product features instead of creating an emotional pull through storytelling.

So we’re left with a glut of sterile, HR-friendly sludge that’ll pair a twee ukulele/glockenspiel/whistles/hand claps instrumental with a Papa John’s calzone made with Cool Ranch Doritos. This would portend that the private sector isn’t this mythical engine of boundless creativity, but that’s for another post. I now understand why the apostle Paul said that Satan rules the world.

It’s hard to complain about my gig too much, since there are plenty more proactively evil or degrading ways to earn six figures than writing 50 variations of a TV spot based on the premise of Stupid white guy contrasted with smart, snarky woman. Although my talents in music curation are severely underutilized now that most brands don’t license music anymore and instead pay studio musicians to make the Muzak version of corn syrup. Or if they do license a song, it’s remixed to fit a specifically nondescript mold, with bland vocals and modern bubblegum production. The most demonic of developments is the use of classical music to sell some bullshit—like “Flight of the Valkyries” to hock soap or macaroni. This should be considered an Eighth Amendment violation, right up there with single-ply toilet paper.

Being an industry insider somehow does not desensitize me from the feeling of nausea when the NFL playoffs are briefly interrupted by a Wingstop spot that features a grown-ass man dousing a sandwich in ranch and saying “mhm lemon peppah” with a mouthful of half-chewed food. From one moment to the next, it is just as brutally and banally embarrassing to see an ad for Cardi B’s favorite McDonald’s entree followed by one for supplemental insurance for geriatrics on Social Security.

If the proliferation of AI and prediction market commercials isn’t a recession indicator, the state of advertising is another unpleasant reminder that we’re trapped in a dull, sexless, and culturally stagnant era. As atonement for how my industry pollutes the airwaves and congests your newsfeeds, here is a list of commercials that bother me.

This type of spot will begin with a generic classical piano melody to give off a mood of deep, profound intellectualism. A beat kicks in as it cuts to B-roll of space shuttles launching into the atmosphere, a child playing catch with their dad, a timelapse of Times Square at night. The voiceover will utter some vague corpospeak as it cuts to a loop of a waterfall.

“The future contains the possible of the unknown. The unknown is just knowledge waiting to be known. It’s yours to know, just predict the unknown. If the future is full of known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns, is there anything that’s unknowable? What if what you know is the answer to life’s most unknowable unknowns? What if what you unknow leads to more unknowns? What if known unknowns becomes unknown known unknowns? If you know an unknown, is it really an unknown? What if your knowns become a prediction? Can a future full of predictions contain possibility? The future relies on taming the chaos of the unknown. Do you know the unknown?”

Is this commerical having a stroke?

Like how most pop songs are produced by the same Swedish team, these must all be ghostwritten by Josh Whedon. They all feel like Marvel cutting room floor jokes condensed into 30 seconds.

It’s that eerily familiar fourth-wall-breaking soy banter. “HAHA, we know we’re in a commercial! Wink wink! Look at us beeing so random and awkward! We still manage to shoehorn our product into a real-life dialogue, and we’re aware of how forced and lame it is! Erm, did we just do an ad?”

This is not convincing anyone to identify with the commercial’s protagonist, unless the target demographic is suburban wine moms who have been lobotomized through second-hand Cocomelon exposure. This schtick has been played out and gauche since 2013, and it likely makes potential consumers resent the product and its marketing team for being irritating and cringe.

No commercial that’s attempting humor will ever be as hilarious as a pharma ad with stock footage of old people dancing in a field while talking about dementia.

As global spending on AI is projected to reach $2.6 billion this year, the hyperscalers aren’t even implying that their technology will usher in a techno-futuristic utopia. These spots are a far cry from Apple’s 1984, as these chatbots are positioned as a more interactive Google for maladroits who are willing to outsource their critical thinking to a glorified autocomplete.

A guy will ask AI to give him a “recipe that says he likes a girl but is low-key about it,” then it cuts to him preparing a bowl of popcorn with a side of pickles and Sour Patch Kids. This guy could’ve saved rural Pennsylvania 20% on their utility bills by looking up “girl dinner” memes.

Insurance is a strange product to market because it’s hard to conceive of it as an impulse-purchase, or one that’s emotionally driven. No one is developing the itch to buy Liberty Mutual because an annoying jingle is rattling around their skulls. No one strongly identifies with insurance, it doesn’t change how someone goes about their lives, or how they view themselves.

I suppose most insurance companies are aware that no one cares about the specific details of their plans, and everyone hates being bombarded with their ads during a sports game. So they compensate with an absurd premise or character. But they’re jumping the shark with more sharks.

When sports announcers aren’t directly broadcasting the odds on the games they’re calling, these commericals will basically say, “Please gamble responsibly… with our app that’s designed like an addictive kid’s game. Here’s a $500 bonus to get you responsibly gambling with us.”

They should be required to show examples of people losing their bets. I want to see a Ravens fan crying because his girlfriend left him after he lost his engagement ring savings on the under for how many times Lamar Jackson would fumble in the AFC Divisional Round.

There will be uplifting music, polished cinematography, slow-motion footage of people, families, faces, homes. But there’s no product. What the fuck are you advertising? Why can’t you get to the point? Why are you filibustering your own product?

How did the tables commerical in Silicon Valley make more sense than the Facebook chairs ad?

These will put the protagonist in a routine scenario that anyone with a room-temperature IQ could navigate, like making a sandwich. Apparently, now people need to ask AI how to stack and assemble various food items and condiments in between two slices of bread.

It’ll be a guy standing in a kitchen leering at a spread of cold cuts and sliced cheese, a grimace of hopeless paralysis. “Hey Gemini, can you tell me how to make a sandwich? How do I know if there’s too much meat? Can you tell me when the bread is too toasty? Do I like it when the cheese is melty? How many times should I chew before swallowing?”

The boosters will ask how anyone could make it through the day without using AI, a technology that has existed for four years…

These make me miss the big pharma commercial era. At least they were selling something.

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