Awesome Advertising Adventures? (?????)

Still working on the name, but nonetheless the bit continues.

Today we will not be starting on a positive note (gotta ration out the positivity, since there is so little in the world) and instead I'm gonna dive right in and talk about that stupid Nutrigrain commercial with the mom where the narrator says "you take a meeting" and shows her like talking to her kids "you take a run" and she's running to catch the school bus "you take it up the butt" ...no wait, then she wouldn't have kids and also this commercial would be less annoying. This commercial is the advertising equivalent to nails on a chalkboard for me. I physically wince whenever I hear it.

There are two main factors that make this commercial maddeningly irritating. First, it does that stupid thing where it analogizes parenthood to business. I hate this shit. Your kitchen table is not a boardroom, your kids are not employees, and your home is not traded on the New York Stock Exchange. It's the same as when over-entitled douchebags say that their companies are their "babies" and taxing them is the same as murdering their children. Directly likening facets of the home with facets of business is a lazy metaphor only used by people trying to sell you something you probably don't need. The commercial is saying, "Being a parent is hard! This is a super secret that we know you live with and we can relate. Only us at Nutrigrain understand how hard you work and that you should be a million bajillionaire for loving your kids so since we're in this together you should buy our product" even though Nutrigrain is an actual company and really does make a million bajillion dollars (based on SEC filings) and wants to make sure companies keep making the money and families keep spending it.

The second reason this commercial is so deserving of public ridicule and ire is by far the more egregious. This line actually happens,

"Take a nap? L-O-L."

No, the narrator didn't laugh out loud, she actually said "LOL." The first time I heard this I literally could not believe it. I thought maybe it was a joke, like "PSYCHE! That's not a real commercial. Real people don't get paid real money for writing commercials that lazy and insulting to the intelligence of it's audience. Also, Nutrigrain doesn't really want to destroy the English language. This was all some big joke because Kids in the Hall is coming back to TV or something." Yes, it was so bad that I had to believe the best of all things, a Kids in the Hall reunion, was actually happening and not the terrible thing that was really happening.

This one line encompasses so much suck, I can barely mock it properly. There's the obvious, "They actually said L-O-L?! On like television? And it wasn't an interview with a 15 year old? Fuck the world." Every time I hear "L-O-L!" spouting out of the TV in that condescending "fuck you for living" voice I want to punch the TV, fully knowing that it's a TV and not the woman talking. I want to feel glass break under my knuckles and the weight of the plastic body topple behind the force of my fist. In short, it fills me with a desire for destruction. I have to consciously remind myself that at some point the commercial will end and I'll be really pissed if I don't have a TV anymore. I need something to watch my Gilmore Girls DVDs on (no commercials FTW!) Side note: I actually suggested to my SO the other day that I should just DVR all the channels at all the times so that I can watch everything without commercials. They seemed to support the idea but I don't think the technology does. I should just wait for everything to be on DVD and guess at what I'll like. It'd be better than putting up with these brain-dead marketers who have the intelligence of krill and seem to think everyone else is even stupider./ End side note.

The other thing that pisses me off about this one fucking line is that it capitalizes on that stupid, played out cliche of "OMG being a mom is so hard right?! I mean it's like totes hard and we never get to sleep which is hilarious HAHAHA! My nipples are chapped and I can't remember what sex feels like HAHAHA! Am I laughing or crying HAHAHAHA? Laughing? Good." This has always been a stupid thing that lazy marketers do but it's so overused that I was hoping they'd find something new to play out. Of course that would take imagination, which no one with the words "marketing" or "media" in their job titles has to even the smallest degree. As someone without kids (and who thanks to modern medicine never will STERILIZATION FTW!) this is just such a weird concept to me. It's basically saying that having kids is nothing but heartache and sorrow and that your life is about as easy as a shit after eating four dozen eggs but isn't it great and funny at totally worth it? "I got pregnant and ruined my life AIN'T IT GREAT?!"

It's like if someone had a really crappy job that they complain about all the time, but it pays pretty well so they think everyone in the world should have the same job. And I don't know who they're trying to convince because pretty much everyone does have kids. Are they trying to convince themselves they didn't make a mistake? Because they did. Unequivocal, intractable mistake. Maybe they're just trying to make the best out of their mistake? Through laughter?

And yes, I know that I just analogized a job to parenthood but what I did was a brief metaphor that got my point across without being too specific. What this commercial, and others like it, do is just beat a dead horse:

"And and ummmm the infant is like the receptionist because he's really bad at taking messages and, yeah, and ummmm your spouse is the secretary? No wait, Vice President and ummmm, no now hold on, "metaphor" totally means take all things from the first concept and correspond to something in the second. I learned that in business school."

Anyway, I grade this commercial so bad I refuse to buy Nutrigrain bars. I wasn't their most loyal consumer before, admittedly, though I did buy them occasionally (especially for road trips or to placate my sister the monkey) but now every time I even pass them in the grocery store I recoil as to that of something damned; something Godless, and think "YOU! You defile the language I love so much and so must be shunned. Death is too good for you, instead you should be forced outside of society, to live a hard and uncomfortable life and eventually die alone and broken. Sort of like what I hear it's like to have kids."