There are quite a few television advertisements that grab my attention in the most negative way.

One of them begins with a woman asking, “How do you tell your husband I have cancer?” Every time I hear that, I want to scream at her with “Why would I want to tell my husband that you have cancer? Why would he or I care? And when the heck did I even get married?!” I’m not stupid enough to actually believe that she meant it that way, but the copywriting on that commercial is so bad, I just can’t help but shout at it every time.

“How do you tell your husband I have cancer?” Come on! Don’t mix your pronouns that way!

Another one that bugs me is the one that ends with, “You’re in good hands with Allstate. Mine.” I keep wanting to correct their syntax to make it have some real sense. “With Allstate, you’re in good hands… mine.” But nooo… every time they have that commercial, they say it the way they always do, with the “mine” right after “Allstate,” instead of right after “hands.” I know that they want to build on their old logo line — “You’re in good hands with Allstate” — and simply add “mine” to personalize it, but the syntax just sucks, sucks, sucks!

Allstate is mine! The hands aren’t important!

Then, there’s the commercial for the product or company called something like HealthQuest or LifeQuest. “Do you and your loved one suffer from schizophrenia?” the announcer asks in his radio broadcast voice.

Here, I always find myself saying, “No, I don’t.” Then I dramatically turn to my right and ask, “Do you?” And I turn to my left and say, “Nope. Me neither.” Naturally, I’m the only one in the room when I’m doing this and amuse myself to no end. The commercial copywriters just leave themselves open to my special brand of ridicule when they ask questions like that.

“I’m sorry, but Me, Myself, and I just don’t suffer from schizophrenia. Do we, girls? No, we don’t.”

Gah — but I have to laugh sometimes. You would think these companies would know better than to allow their copyediting to slide before letting one of their ads go national. If I were the VP of Marketing, I’d take a look at it and say, “This sounds funny to me. Does this sound funny to you?” And I wouldn’t let it go public until it absolutely sounded good.

There’s an amazing number of typos and grammatical errors on ads these days. Every now and then I’ll see “its” for “it’s” and — god forbid — “their” for “they’re.” It’s not such a big deal on small or local ads, but to see it on national television ads, on one of the big three networks, really and truly bugs me. These are supposed to be big organizations or publicly traded companies, and here they have a little problem with copyediting.

Pshaw. Can’t they afford to employ enough good people in their advertising department?

::Sigh::

There are other commercials that bother me, but I can’t for the life of me remember half of them — at least, not at the top of my head. There’s one really disturbing one where all you hear is the squeak of a swing as you see kids running around at a playground. Some announcer’s voice is talking about the future — perhaps about retirement or life insurance — and the camera follows a little girl running to an old man sitting at one of the playground swings. Again, all you hear is that godawful squeak of a swing, and now all you see is the old man looking directly at the camera as he embraces the girl. For some reason, that image just looks so subtly evil, as though the old man is having dirty thoughts and is communicating them in an “aside” by looking directly at the camera.

If I were in charge of making that commercial, I’d make the crew shoot that again and tell the old man, “Quit looking at the camera like that! You look like you have evil inentions for that little girl!”

Okay, okay.

I know I’m twisted.

There are commercials and campaigns I like. I absolutely love the tagline “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.” I also love the Nick Park Chevron commercials. And the second that a particular commercial comes on, I start to recite the following: “Rain, stop. Traffic, yield. CD, play. Climate control, on. Lights, green.” Because I just can’t help it. Those ads are good.

Still,…

I know that the main purpose behind a commercial is to get the product or service noticed, but if I notice it in a negative way, I think they’ve failed miserably.

“Do you and your loved one suffer from schizophrenia?”

Gosh, no. We’re normal, aren’t we? Yes, yes. I’m sure we are.

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