Journal of a Lazy Perfectionist

As someone who rarely watches TV anymore, I feel I don't have the television "culture" in my head (anymore) to use as a baseline for what "works" as an advertising message in the popular sense. For example, I saw an which could be summarized as follows:

Scrabble tiles land on a sterile white surface in front of the viewer and jiggle around to form misspelled phrases. I was so distracted by the misspellings I didn't catch the wording but it had something to do with putting a dollar sign after the word "million" to specify it refers to cash. I think it was a rhetorical question. The tiles vanish and a 3-D cartoon monkey comes out in a giant robotic suit and screams "there's millions to win!" or something of the sort. Dolly out to an oversized drink cup branded with the Subway logo, surrounded by hundreds of metallic CGI dollar signs, once again on a sterile white surface.

WTF?

So, I don't get the significance of the monkey in a mech, and I don't understand why "word" appeared as "wrod" or why "read" was "raed". Can someone fill me in?

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( 12 comments — Leave a comment )

_nayo_

2009-05-05 02:57 (UTC)

i saw that to and i couldn't keep up with the msg cause of the misspellings!

I think its in a mech cause for some reason subways monkeys turned into scientists... :\

devvyn

2009-05-15 15:25 (UTC)

Wait, Subway has monkeys?

2009-05-15 15:29 (UTC)

Apparently, they do now XD

klitaka

2009-05-05 05:51 (UTC)

TV is trying to use marketing and think tanks and "random" to try to catch the same king of mindshare that viral youtubes like the turtleboy, Rick Astley, piano cat, and the host of other 30-seconds-of-fame vids.

They're competing directly against youtube. You pit a company with millions of dollars for marketing against an infinite* number of people armed with handycams, flips, digicams, and cell phones and a budget of zero and see who comes up with more content that captures a mindshare.

Welcome to the internet culture and 30 seconds of fame**.

(I too am completely baffled by the television these days. I watch most of my TV on DVDs or on Hulu, so I see little in the way of commercials. I also generally listen to either music I download, podcasts, or NPR, so I have absolutely no clue what is popular any more.)

--
*actually finite, but the statistical significance here is such that the limit of x as x increases approaches one over infinity; in this case, the number could be 100 000 or 100 000 000 just as easily as it could be infinity.

**At least it's not 30 seconds of frain.

I think I'm comfortable with being "out of the loop" in advertising culture. It's the people I interact with in the real world that I'm concerned about. If this keeps up I'm going to be thought of as the crazy eccentric for not "getting it".

Is 30 seconds of frain related in some way to 30 seconds of Flain?

2009-05-15 15:32 (UTC)

That's exactly what it is. It's the annoying voice he uses for that annoying segment.

2009-05-15 15:38 (UTC)

LOL, I'm pretty sure it's his own voice with a pitch bend and chorus effect. It makes me think of old cartoons. Not necessarily in a good way.

coniferous_you

2009-05-05 14:31 (UTC)

The theory among linguists is that the human brain notices misspellings, but can still read the word if the first and last letters are the same as normal.

The rest...I don't know. But it sounds fairly surreal.