Your Commercial still Sucks

I have noticed a recent trend in television commercials. For a company, it is hard to make up a creative way to get the message across to the viewer. This is especially true if you have a boring product. So instead, a lot of them are just making commercials with a really boring message on a background of something that they think will capture our attention long enough so that we will listen to the message. For example, Vonage has these commercials where they fake interview a people on the street about their service while something interesting is going on in the background, like a guy dancing or a guy in a costume. Charles Schwab has these commercials where they have some middle aged asshole talking about how he or she is rich but is also really dumb and can't invest in stocks. To make it interesting, they use a new technique in digital animation that overlays the real video to make the person look sorta like a cartoon.

While these tactics may catch your attention for 2.3 seconds, it still isn't enough to cover up the ultra-boring messages they are trying to promote. Why don't you do something memorable instead? Ameritrade and Comcast, two companies with similar products, are able to push their goods in a memorable way without having some fake customer preach at you for 45 seconds. In advertising, BORING is BORING, no matter how you package it.