Effective advertising through annoyance

Old Navy ranks highest on my personal scale for having an advertising department led by monkeyfuckers who give good money to talentless, washed-up TV stars.

I don't know the name of that woman from the Old Navy commercials with the big glasses (I saw her on VH1 talking about Studio 54), but I DO know that I am considering a dog-a-cide against Magic and Morgan Fairchild.

I sincerely wish for the God that I do not believe in to suddenly become real and punish Old Navy. For their commercials which rot my brain and force my teeth to clench -- Veangeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.

Since I have become so desensitized to violence in TV, I do not think it would be above myself to perform a Riverdance on my coffee table upon hearing Stone Phillips inform America that all of the Old Navy advertising executives, VPs, VIPs and trough of bad actors were suddenly killed by a mountain of shit that was apparently predicated by the appearance of a giant ass in the clouds . . .delivering divine retribution, just for me.

That's nothing. Those Gap commercials only got annoying after repeat viewing. Some of them were actually good, and they did a great job of establishing a visual identity.

No, the 2000 gold medal for advertising annoyance goes to "Superclub Vidéotron", a chain of video stores in Québec. Their commercial had a couple of store clerks talking about how they had tons of copies of each movie, and how that annoyed the competition. That statement got repeated about six times by means of a video tape loop. Yes, they just repeated the same piece of video six times in a row. Pure annoyance on first viewing.

They took the insult further by later airing another commercial that seemed at first to acknowledge how annoying the first one was, only to use the same video loop technique again.

Everybody noticed those commercials and everybody hated them, as far as I know.

I hate to break the news to you guys, but I'm afraid this is an accepted advertising strategy. Though I've seen irritating commercials for every kind of business out there, the worst offenders have seemed to be furniture stores.

'Round here, there's a furniture store that employs an actor to do their TV ads. He's short, bald, fat, and has a thick hillbilly accent. That's not so bad. But when he does his ads, he bugs his eyes out, jerks around in a robot-like manner, and spins his arms around in circles. I've even seen him on ads in other cities, which means he's not just some idiot boss making his own commercials -- he's actually employed to make people hate his employer. And people do hate him, make no mistake. They run the ads often enough to make you wanna throttle him and firebomb the store everytime he goes into his arm-spinning routine.

And during my radio days, the furniture stores employed the Man with the Irritating Voice for all their ads. He had a stentorian, sing-song delivery with lots of odd pauses and rapid switches from loud to soft, slow to fast, and irritating to more irritating. It's difficult to convey how stupid this sounded in a non-audio medium, but it would look a little something like this:

"COMMUNITY FURNITURE IS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS FOREVER

sothestoreis
CLOSED TODAY
whileemployees
MARK DOWN
pricesonHUNDREDSofitems
all
over
the
store
SO WHEN THE DOORS OPEN AGAIN
_at7a.m.SHARPmondaymorning

youwillsavelikeNEVER BEFORE
onfamousbrandnameslikeThomasonBroyhillLa-Z-Boy
AND MANY MANY MORE!

LADIES AND
GENTLEMEN

YOU
CAN
NOT
MISS
THIS
SALE!
Community Furniture, 718 West Main BETHERE!"

Irritating? Oh, god, yes. Some of the DJs at the station called the furniture store to ask why they used the guy, but the manager wouldn't talk to us. But the answer is obvious. They knew that the commercials would irritate everyone who heard them but felt that the need to make sure everyone remembered the sale outweighed the need to make sure everyone thought positive things about the company.

Is it a smart advertising strategy? Perhaps so. As this and other writeups and nodes show, we always tend to remember tooth-gratingly irritating commercials. Perhaps business comes pouring in when irritating ads are used.

But I go shopping at their competitors.