Commercials tend to be things most people find annoying and wish to get through as quickly as possible. This has, in turn, created product placement in television shows at an epic level. Every chance a character gets on most shows to name a product very specifically you know that company paid a hefty amount of money to get that product named on that particular show. I was watching a show earlier this year when one of the characters stated he needed to borrow a car and his companion stated, “Well, here, take the keys to my Prius.” Now, why did that person have to mention the specific car? Product placement my friends. All of you with TiVO who think you are out-smarting the advertisers are greatly deluding yourselves.

Anyway, I still sometimes watch commercials. I also listen to a lot of radio and I hear radio commercials. They have satellite radio but they have yet to develop a kind of TiVO for radio when you can fast-forward through the commercials. You have to wonder about the people who create the ads these days. There is a strange mixture of really good commercial concepts out there and some of them are so stunningly bad you have to wonder if the people who created the commercials have been hit in the head too many times.

What I hate, more than anything, is a commercial that jumps right off with incorrect information or a bad concept. Years ago there was a commercial for a fast food chain where the person in the commercial was going out on a date and didn’t think he had enough money to pay for dinner with his date. However, this fast food chain was offering two cheeseburgers for ninety-nine cents. He thought this would be an acceptable solution. My thought was that no self-respecting woman would want to go on a date with a man who was buying her fast food cheeseburgers and he was forgetting that they added tax to those prices so the eventually price of the two cheeseburgers would be over a dollar.

These days there is a radio ad running on a local talk FM station here in Chicago for a strip club. Apparently the strip club is going with some kind of theme that involves the lost city of Atlantis. I am thinking that since this particular ad is for such a local club that the ad was written by the ad people at the radio station. The problem is that the person who wrote the ad obviously knows nothing about the legend of Atlantis. The ad starts out by stating that the legend of Atlantis is that thousands of years ago the city of Atlantis rose from the depths of the ocean. Um, no, sorry guy, the legend is that Atlantis was this great civilization but it SANK to the bottom of the ocean. If you want to continue with this theme for the strip club, you would have to sink it to the bottom of a lake.

There is a commercial running on national television right now for a cell phone company. In this commercial a wife talks to her husband and expresses surprise that they are getting charged for incoming phone calls. Cell phones have been around for a while now. I have had a cell phone for a long time now. From the very first it was made expressly clear that cell phones worked by charging the user for any and all phone calls including those inbound. Is there really anyone out there who does NOT know that cell phone calls that come in to their phone are charged to them?

There are a few commercials out there that I do like. I cannot help it but I love the caveman guy from the Geico car insurance commercials. I think the concept is pretty well thought out. It attacks the myths of the caveman and then imagines how they would react in the present. It also pokes fun at the idea that certain small minorities can create a stir by expressing indignation loudly and publicly. This seems to be more and more relevant these days.

I have also liked the whole Mac and PC commercials. I think part of the reason they work is the actors. The words they are saying are largely crap if you know anything about computers. Sure, Macs have that magnetic plug for their laptops but if you try tugging on those things as lightly as they suggest in the commercial it ain’t going anywhere. It takes as much force to detach that magnetic plug on a Mac as it does to unplug the non-magnetic plug of a PC laptop. Still, the actors make it work and the guy playing PC has expressed some amazement at the fame he has gotten thanks to those commercials.

One thing that never worked and, thankfully, someone finally pulled the plug on the commercials, was that older guy with the accent talking about traveling and travel rewards for some credit card. You couldn’t understand a word he was saying. His little sidekick was not funny. The entire thing was more annoying than memorable.

The Gap recently had a commercial where a man and a woman were dancing. It took me seeing that commercial about five hundred times and then looking it up online to realize that they were celebrities. The guy is someone I have never heard of but apparently was in the movie version of “Phantom of the Opera.” I never saw it so I didn’t recognize him. The woman apparently is the actress Claire Danes. Now, for me, personally, there is nothing sexier than a woman wearing just a man’s button-down shirt. You can keep all of your lingerie ladies, just do that for this guy and I will be driven wild. Anyway, I was so busy looking at her legs and the shots of the actresses face were so brief I couldn’t tell who it was. I still liked the commercial, however, and would like to encourage more advertisers to use women wearing just a man’s button-down shirt, thank you.

I have also greatly enjoyed any of the commercials that star Peyton Manning. Since it isn’t football season right now there probably won’t be many of them for right now. Until the fall comes and football season starts we will probably not be seeing Peyton doing his thing. The guy has a really good sense of timing. He was even funny on SNL. Having him ask for the apron outside of the restaurant and throwing his arms in the air in triumph still makes me laugh. Seeing him talking to the moving guys and saying “Mooooooveerrs” still makes me laugh. Seeing him wearing the fake mustache and wig and talking about himself in such adoring tones still makes me laugh.

There was a commercial that was running for a while that evidently starred some kind of basketball star. He also played multiple characters. For me this was never going to work mostly because I still don’t know who the basketball star was and he was not funny in any of the roles he played on the commercial. It helps to have a celebrity people will know.

I still don’t know what many of those ad people are smoking. I just wish they would sometimes think things through before the agree on a campaign. At the very least, they should look up the actual legend of something like Atlantis if they want to use it as a basis of their ad campaign.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.