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What Were They Selling Again?
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There are many ways in which a commercial can fail to get its message across. Some ads are uninteresting; others are so bad that they turn more viewers against the product than they attract. But some commercials fail because they're too good. A commercial that's too clever, or features too memorable a gimmick, runs the risk of being remembered only for the gimmick and not its association with the product. The commercial has performed the important task of holding the audience's attention, but it hasn't spread the word about the product it's trying to promote. While in the era of the Internet, it can be argued that any commercial that makes people want to run a Google search for the company or product's name is a successful one, this trope already existed long before anybody had even conceived of search engines. German media experts call this the "Vampire Effect"; this was also named on The Gruen Transfer as "Vamping". May happen in a Design Student's Orgasm or Dada Ad. May also happen if overdone sex appeal distracts the viewer from the message. See also Breakaway Advertisement, Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer, Made of Shiny, Commercial Switcheroo. Contrast The Power of Cheese, which is when the ad gives way too much credit to the product. Compare Our Slogan Is Terrible. Perfume related products have their own trope, Perfume Commercial. So do medications: Side Effects Include.... For non-indicative movie advertisements, see Never Trust a Trailer. |
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| What Were They Selling Again? / int_14a06b19 | type |
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Danny Gonzalez invoked this by doing an experiment to see if vague mobile game ads actually attract viewers, making one ad that explained his channel well and two other ads that were really confusing and irrelevant, based off specific weird mobile game ads Danny had previously reviewed. One of the weird ads depicted him as undergoing Evolutionary Levels and becoming a wizard with a fat ass, with the vague tagline "I do everything on my channel" and an audio track berating the viewer, while the other had Danny spank himself with the tagline "IF YOU SUBSCRIBE TO THE GOOD BOY YOU ARE LEGALLY PENCIL SHARPENER," though at least that one showed clips of Danny's channel. Surprisingly, the ad that received the least engagement was the straightforward ad, and the ad that received most engagement was the wizard ad, which was the least related to the channel's content. | |
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The trailer for Rivals of Aether's Milestone System in Rivals Direct 2 is incredibly vague, with the hosts just mentioning that "it's free" and a "system", but not how it works. | |
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The Simpsons: In "Mr. Plow", Homer commissions an ad agency for a new commercial for his snowplow business, hoping to get an edge over Barney Gumble's "Plow King". The commercial in question is an artsy Dada Ad that has almost nothing to do with Homer's business. It opens on a black and white scene of a woman gazing into a snowglobe while giving a One-Woman Wail, then cuts to timelapse footage of the NYC skyline. Then a shirtless man strides into the room, lifts the snowglobe, and throws it, causing it to shatter. The dust clears where it landed, revealing a sign reading "MR. PLOW." | |
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Ozzy Osbourne's commercial. That's all anyone knows about it. They know it involves cellphones. And Ozzy Osbourne. But they don't know what it's about anymore. (It's touting AT&T's Samsung Jack.) | |
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Rick and Morty uses and parodies this in "Rixty Minutes". Watching inter-dimensional TV, one of the ads is for "Turbulent Juice", which is (seemingly) a cleaning product that overdoes the sex appeal, leaving Morty bewildered when it overlaps with Dada Ad. | |
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The ad for Golden Sun featured creatures coming to life in a theater — in particular, the chandelier turned into a dragon — and being fought off by the orchestra, which has little to do with Golden Sun beyond using general fantasy elements. (The ad was ultimately for the Game Boy Advance hardware itself, with the point of "take your games anywhere; such as to a classical concert!") The funny thing is, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn later went out of its way to recreate this scene, including granting the party the chandelier dragon as a summon. | |
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DuckTales (1987): Fenton, trying to prove that he can be more than an accountant, does up a series of mock advertisements for a fake product called "Pep." It's literally just a stand-in name, because his intention is just to show the commercials to Scrooge so he can get a chance to make a real commercial for a real product. Unfortunately, there's a mixup at the marketing department, so Fenton's fake commercials end up airing, and Duckberg goes wild for Pep. No one knows what it is, but everyone wants it. When Fenton comes clean to Scrooge, they decide that the best course of action is to come up with some kind of product that they can sell, and the plot sort of takes off from there. | |
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State Farm's hands aren't completely clean here — to go by their 2010-2011 ad campaign, saying their slogan out loud will cause sensitive, rebellious, lantern-jawed guys to appear and sit on your car. There may be something in there about coverage or some shit, but who needs that when you can spawn chunkheads (and Bob Barker!) from thin air? Also, apparently, saying their slogan summons a State Farm agent from thin air so you can get anything you want — that has nothing to do with insurance coverage. This ad from State Farm has a robot man click on a "I'm not a robot" button before being denied access, making him shriek. This ad makes no sense unless you've seen their earlier ads, which had the robot man working for a Shoddy Knockoff Product of State Farm, who uses real human agents instead. |
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One ad showed a car zooming along a cliffside road while music reminiscent of a James Bond movie soundtrack plays. No commentary at all. The car pulls into the driveway of a mansion; Patrick Macnee gets out, smiles directly into the camera, and asks "You were expecting someone else?" (The ad was for "Sterling", a short-lived attempt at importing the cars sold by the British brand Rover to the US; it didn't work out, chiefly because they were essentially luxurious versions of Honda models, and Honda had already launched their own luxury marque, Acura, by this point.) | |
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A recurring theme in the British version of The Apprentice — one team will be led by someone with an "artistic vision", the other team will make something "tacky" that shouts the product name and concept at you, and the shouty team will win because Lord Sugar can't stand "artsy fartsy stuff". Given that irrelevant adverts were one of the things Lord Sugar nominated when he was the guest on Room 101, you'd think they'd catch on to this. |
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Mountain Dew's live-action versions of the MAD "Spy vs. Spy" comics were technically superb, keeping to the spirit and fun of the source material — and generally failed to make the connection to their product, other than having the victorious spy enjoy a Dew in the final seconds. On the subject of Mountain Dew, there's also the infamous "Puppymonkeybaby"! The Super Bowl spot at least managed to show a can of the beverage, but it was completely overshadowed by the sheer bizarreness of the mascot with the head of a Pug, body and tail of a lemur, and feet of a baby dancing jerkily, chanting its name, shaking a rattle, and licking one of the human characters on the face. After that performance, people can be forgiven for not recalling that the ad was in fact for a drink called Mountain Dew Kickstart. (The intended message was that the beverage is "three awesome things combined: Dew, juice, caffeine", but even this fails to connect to the product since regular Dew is caffeinated already.) |
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On Channel Awesome, the Game Heroes put out an advert for t-shirts. Problem? With all the fanservice like The Nostalgia Critic as a manhandled hostage, Gun Porn and Brad Jones' lampshaded-sexy voice, nobody noticed the actual product. | |
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Given that irrelevant adverts were one of the things Lord Sugar nominated when he was the guest on Room 101, you'd think they'd catch on to this. | |
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One Whirlpool ad from the 70's, seen on the most popular recording for The Star Wars Holiday Special features nothing but an eagle flying around for a solid minute while a voiceover talks about how American standards are being threatened. The voiceover promises that Whirlpool appliances are held to these high standards, but there's so much emphasis on Patriotic Fervor that they never show the product at all; they seem to be riding on "Buy our product or you hate America!" | |
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On Seinfeld, Jerry's Girl of the Week at one point was a model who showed him a magazine ad she appeared in, which consisted entirely of a picture of her getting out of the shower covered only by a washcloth. Jerry asks what the hell it's supposed to be selling, and she points to a pair of jeans draped over a chair way in the background and so out of focus that Jerry has to squint to see them. | |
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Once Upon a Honeymoon. The short film showed off Ma Bells brand-new colored phones, which previously came in one color: black. The lead wishes for different looks for her home — and they appear. The point was "you can now color coordinate your phones with whatever your living space was", but even for the 50's, the point was subtle. Now, to modern eyes, it's just baffling. | |
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Other Japanese loan sharks are no better. One, the company Lake, used The Flintstones in their advertising, while another, Aiful, used an adorable Chihuahua in theirs. | |
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In The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time, one of three 24th-century commercials Gage Blackwood can watch is an infocommercial for an unusually powerful spray cheese product called "Cheese Girl". It consists of a giant can of the stuff falling on a man, who then unwillingly pukes it out of his mouth while a high-pitched voice shouts "CHEESE GIRL! CHE-CHE-CHEESE GIRL! HA-HA-HAVIN' FUN WITH CHEESE GIRL!". Conveniently, this item actually proves useful in reaching a damaged space station in one of the time zones. | |
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In 1989, Midland Bank, one of the UK's "big four" banks, created First Direct, a new brand that would offer an over-the-phone banking service, something unique at the time. To hype up it's launch, during an ad break of a TV airing of Romancing the Stone, what seemed like a normal Audi commercial was interrupted by "a message from the future" (Audi had agreed with Midland Bank with the usage of an Audi ad for it). Midland also ran similar adverts concurrently on ITV and Channel 4, one offering a negative view showing the aspects of normal banking and the other a positive view of First Direct, with the two crossing over at a key point. However, it was the "message from the future" ad that proved to be the most memorable, as some commenters online in later yars who were looking for it were probably too bewildered by what they saw to remember it was an ad for First Direct. | |
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Mixels: An animated short series airing on Cartoon Network that gives no indication that is a product from LEGO, goes with this trope heavily. This is mostly due to the fact that the series is made using 2D animation, when most LEGO shows and advertisements are made out of LEGO. | |
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Game Grumps parodied this with the video titled "Our House". It consists of the chorus for "Our House" looped and altered to say "in the middle of our house" for nine minutes with images of houses inside houses inside Houses. At the end, it is revealed to be a commercial Arin was watching for a pillow brand called "Fosterman's Sleep-Tite Pillows." The only indication was the house at the 3:46 mark having the words "Sleep Tite" written on the garage door and the line "That was where we used to sleep" at the end. | |
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The Apple 1984 ad was parodied in Futurama with the new Planet Express ad (which was designed by a Gordon Gecko expy from the 80s): | |
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During the height of Max Headroom's popularity, the titular (fake-)CGI head was used in a Coca-Cola TV commercial in which Max angrily interrogates a can of Pepsi about its inferiority. Essentially, this was a Coca-Cola advertisement in which a can of Pepsi was given a lot of screen time. Naturally, lots of people watching the commercial thought it was for Pepsi, and lots of others thought it was promoting the Max Headroom TV show, far more than the people who correctly identified it as a Coca-Cola commercial. | |
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Saturday Night Live once ran an ad for a company called West Link that sells an inspirational message of "greatness," "ingenuity," "our children's dreams" and "mak[ing] the extraordinary commonplace," never hinting at any particular product or service before triumphantly concluding, "West Link: Even we don't know what we do." | |
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One ad had a very hyper middle-aged man on his way to work, to the tune of "Good Morning" from Singin' in the Rain. He bounces down the footpath, past the white picket fence, past the postie and neighbours, hops down the hop skip and jump game, slam dunks a basketball, dances past Mario’s barber’s shop, bounds up the stairs from the train, chases the pigeons, leap frogs the Journal newspaper, and cartwheels up to the front door of his office. At no time during this is any category of product mentioned (hint: they're selling medication). Only at the end is there a freeze-frame of the word Viagra. You can probably guess the use for the product now, but this ad aired long before Google was a thing. Cialis also had an infamous ad campaign from about 2009-2011 which had a couple holding hands while in separate bathtubs without ever directly saying what Cialis does. |
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In Britain, everyone remembers Nick (Wallace & Gromit) Park's Creature Comforts being used for a series of well-regarded British Gas adverts in the 1990s. Except the adverts were for the Electricity Board, and emphasised how much better electric heating was than gas. | |
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Be Funny Now! developer Jack Douglass put out a billboard to promote the game, which simply read "Your joke here," referencing the "answer the prompt in a funny way" angle of the game while being vague enough to pique interest. The problem was that the billboard only had the game's promotional website in tiny text in the corner, which was unreadable at a distance, especially when covered by a building. Even if the website's URL had been readable, nothing made it clear that Be Funny Now! is a mobile game. Jack noticed in retrospect and regretted this, challenging his fans to design a clearer billboard. | |
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There's another 2020 ad that shows a woman waking up in bed as upbeat music plays, and then she rolls out of bed, taking the bedding with her and proceeds to roll out of her house and down the street in an ever-increasing ball of stuff that she picks up as she rolls. The ad is for home insurance, but it looks more like some sort of ad for Katamari Damacy. | |
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Geico rolled out a line with the catch phrase "It's what you do," which also generally has no connection whatsoever to their insurance. One of these is a Call-Back to the camels on the Hump Day commercial they did, which is unfortunately represented simply with a group of people harassing camels in a zoo by shouting the lines from that commercial at them. | |
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Evony. Oh dear God, Evony. Evony is a clone of the old computer game Civilization, which is a classic 4X-style strategy game. It's run, in at best a legally grey manner, out of China. A few of their ads actually show what the gameplay looks like, but at least as many of them show pictures of hot models in their underwear (that the Evony people don't hold the copyrights for) and say things like "play discreetly in your browser". There are some in-between ones where the girls are at least dressed in medieval-type outfits (though that's only one of the many time periods covered), which tend to say things like "rescue the princess" (an element that doesn't exist in the actual game). There's literally an ad that's just a picture of a woman's breasts◊, with the name of the game in small plain text in the corner. As stated in Evony's page, the sad part is that a lot of similar browser-based games are now employing the same tactics. Some of them aren't even trying to be subtle about it. A similar game, Caesary, had a CG-rendered woman in skimpy clothing with the tagline "One click for a ROMAN ORGY!", before changing it to the tamer "One click for a ROMAN EMPIRE!" some weeks later. |
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In one episode of Codename: Kids Next Door, various sectors are having a science fair to demonstrate the latest in 2x4 technology. The judges approach the booth for France's sector, Sector F. The operatives there display a video in black and white, bizarre imagery and dialogue, and the two operatives reciting Frère Jacques. The lead judge needs to call out to them to even figure out what the hell they're demonstrating. It turns out to be a spray operatives can use before taking a bath so they will not get clean. It ends up winning the fair. | |
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One episode of Happy Endings: Dave shoots a commercial for his sandwich truck, Steak Me Home Tonight, but spends the time talking about nostalgic things from his childhood like playing chess in the park, and talking with his dad over hotdogs. He forgets to mention the name of his truck. He later runs into a man, who reconnected with his father because of the ad, as they go to get hotdogs. | |
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Homestar Runner: "Senorial Day" features parodies of Kitschy Local Commercials for Memorial Day car dealership sales, with Senor Cardgage's "Senorial Day Tent Event Suprasale" and Bubs' "Bubsotathon". However, at no point does either commercial explicitly state what they're offering "vera low prices" and "huge savings" on. | |
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The commercial in the Dragon's Lair review (a Sequel Episode to the 2015 commercial special) for the Dragon's Lair 2 kickstarter throws in Randy Savage and Segata Sanshiro (both of their ads were featured in that commercial special), but they quickly lose track of the product in favor of being extreme. | |
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Family Guy: The family mostly reacts in confusion to a Mentos parody commercial, while Peter says: "Must. Kill. Lincoln." | |
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Some viewers get so caught up in the Double Entendre of the "You and Your Johnson" video, they overlook the fact it actually advertises outboard motors for boats. | |
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Nicely subverted in a Hyundai advert for Spain. The ad opens with a series of shots of landscapes that wouldn't have been out of place in The Lord of the Rings films, then it cuts to a fairy who looks at the camera and complains that there are too many bells and whistles just to sell a car. The ad focuses completely on the car from then on. | |
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One infamous ad for Nuveen Investments (a company The Other Wiki describes as "a global provider of investment services to institutions and high-net-worth investors in the asset management industry", which probably means either a stockbroker or a hedge fund) that aired during the Super Bowl XXXIV took place 20 Minutes into the Future, where man had cured AIDS, cancer, and spinal cord injuries, then showed Christopher Reeve, aided by CGI, getting out of his wheelchair and walking. There were massive protests from those who didn't pay attention to the premise of the commercial and felt lied to afterward. | |
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