With the advent of TiVo, marketeers are forced to expand their lexicon to get people to see their ads. This week, watching “Life” on NBC, we were annoyingly bombarded with product placement advertisements that ate up a good 5 to 6 minutes of the show.
Some people see commercials as a necessary evil on television. Other’s see them as a horrible waste of time, which thankfully DVR’s have eliminated. I see them as a sort of micro-story and, if done with skill and panache, can be worth watching for their own sake, despite whatever they are selling. How many people do you know who only watch the Superbowl for the commercials? Are commercials just chewing gum on our feet, or are they a slick expression of our modern artisitic desires?
I was thinking recently about a Nike advertisement that had an unfortunate debut during a girls gymnastic competition. It was pulled from the air almost immediately afterward. It remains one of the more amusing and clever commercials I’ve seen in recent years. Check it out on Youtube and tell me what you think.
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