agustina prigoshin

As the economy continues on its unstable course, I wonder what will happen to commercials on TV. I wonder how big companies decide to distribute funding; where to cut, maintain or boost it. I’ve heard that companies will usually cut their marketing departments first in times of economic distress.

At first I thought that companies wouldn’t cut their funding towards advertisement (primarily TV advertisement) because that’s their biggest form of exposure, but by the same token, isn’t it very pricey?

In advertising, I’ve heard that “sex sells;” but when times get tough and advertisers are competing even more, when does sexy advertisement go too far?

Two examples of tasteless commercials:

1. Joe’s Crab Shack: two men and a woman are sitting at a table, the woman gets her food in a covered steamer and one of the men says, “Take your top off.” The woman looks confused and says, “What?” The man repeats, “Take your top off.” You can’t help but find this man to be a pervert until the other man at the table lifts the top off the woman’s steamer to reveal steam-cooked lobster. The first man clearly meant to the take the top off the steamer, not for the woman to take her top off.

I think the commercial could’ve been executed in a more tasteful manner, one that doesn’t imply a man ordering a woman to take off her shirt.

2. Quiznos: this one was actually pretty disturbing. Their latest commercial starts with an oven telling an employee that it wants the young man to tell the audience about their new Torpedo sub. It hints that the oven and the employee have had a previous encounter which they “both enjoyed,” one which the employee doesn’t dispute. The oven tells the employee to tell watchers that the Torpedo is only $4; it tells the employee to repeat it two more times with more and more passion behind his message.

An oven and a human seeming to have had an affair? An oven ordering a man to be sexier? Kind of creepy.

An example of a great, and sexy, commercial that I don’t think I’ll ever forget is Kate Walsh driving a Cadillac CTS. In trying to sell the car to viewers, she describes the cars’ features and then says, “The real question is, when you turn your car on, does it return the favor?” Her words are followed by a shot of her stiletto pressing down on the accelerator.

Now, that commercial is sexy, not raunchy like the others.