The Conical Glass: It's an ad, ad, ad, ad world

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

It's an ad, ad, ad, ad world

So everyone in my book club really liked this week's selection, Donna Andrews' You've Got Murder, except for one person who was pretty lukewarm about it but certainly not vehemently opposed to it. I was thinking that it might be nice to get some new blood into the group; I've been in it for about eight years, and only one person joined after I did. A few people have come a handful of times, but on the whole, there has been an extremely low rate of turnover. Several of the members have been in the group since the 80s. At this point, we're like a family -- a highly literate, somewhat dysfunctional family.

Remember my post from December about our media unit that arrived with a broken door? It took another month for us to get the door fixed. The first time the repair guy came out, he did not bring the door. Replacing the door was the whole purpose of his house call, and he arrived without it. I couldn't even wrap my mind around how stupid that was. He returned the next morning with the door. So our media unit, ordered in September, was finally complete on Jan. 26. Here's the punch line: today, I got a postcard in the mail stating that the furniture store where we had purchased the item was going out of business. Take that, Evolution Furniture! The name of the store, by the way, had become the target of Joe's and my barbs -- De-Evolution Furniture, Unintelligent Design Furniture, etc.

Even though I don't do a blogroll, I wanted to give a plug to my friend Steve's new blog. He's primarily blogging about music and sports, and I've really been enjoying it. (Unlike me, he's making a concerted effort to post once a day.) I couldn't agree more with his comments about the Super Bowl: "Even the commercials were boring. I watched the game time-shifted on my DVR, but kept watching the ads anyway hoping for someone to make good use of their $3M worth of ad time. I liked the K-Fed Nationwide ad, and a few others, but when the best Super Bowl commercials are the Letterman and Craig Ferguson, it's a bad year for advertisers too." The Letterman-Oprah spot (along with Prince's halftime show) was the highlight of the telecast. It surprised and delighted me -- something the best ads do, but those qualities were in mighty short supply during this year's game.

TiVo is going to start monitoring its users' commercial-watching habits. I'm guessing that most TiVo users are like Joe & me -- we fast-forward through most of them, but we stop and watch the good ones. We both love the Mac campaign with John Hodgman playing the PC (we like him better than the Mac dude, but even so, we're diehard Mac fans). We always watch the Jack in the Box commercials, which are funny and clever. Make your ads entertaining, and we'll stop skipping them.

posted by 125records @ 10:42 PM

1 Comments:

At 5:24 PM, yellojkt said…

The Mac ads are hilarious. We go to the Apple Store and watch them on the giant MacBookPros.