I have heard from a former advertiser that good advertising is intended to create a need in the person targeted, and offer a product which would fulfill that need. The creators of some of my "favorites" appear to believe that while that is great and all, just making people remember their name is plenty. This may or may not be true, so in exchange for spreading their brand ever so slightly more, I will say that a purchase from one of these companies is just a little bit more money towards some terrible, lazy, and (to me) irritating advertisers.
The first add I am complaining about here is a Verizon wireless advertisement attempting to sell some phone and dataplan or whatnot. It is mostly made up of a brief dialogue between a man and a woman apparently watching a baseball game. At one point, the man rebukes the woman for playing with her cell phone during the game, and she replies by saying she is "looking at the closer's ERA vs right handed batters". Oops.
In case the reader is unaware, split ERA vs left or right handed batters simply does not exist. The formula for ERA is (earned runs/innings pitched)*9. To get that split ERA, you would have to take just runs driven in by left/right handed batters and divide by outs made by left/right handed battes divided by three before multiplying the whole thing by nine. Relative to calculating split batting average or OPS or other "batter" statistics, that is a horribly complicated method which leaves out far too much information (any play which did not directly result in an out or an earned run) for it to be at all useful. In other words, this attempt to connect with the sort of person who would want to look up stats on their smartphone during a game is something of a flop. A quick note for whoever makes commercials at Verizon: do some bloody research.
Another add which irritates me is a Autotrader.com comercial. The reason is similar to the previous add (poor understanding of baseball), although this one is centered more around the importance of context in decision making. The add lays out a scenario in which the team you the listener are supposedly managing is down in the 9th inning, facing a right-handed closer with your right handed number six hitter batting. Apparently, you need to either go with your "head" and pinch hit a lefty batter, or your "heart" and leave your #6 hitter in. It then concludes things by saying how great it is not to be forced to make such decisions and tells you that buying an expensive car on their site is totally a great idea.
Now, this is honestly a fairly solid add given that it is targeting the sort of person who would call in to WEEI complaining about a bunt or non-bunt yesterday, for example, or (in 2008) that the Sox should trade JD Drew for "that guy in Seattle" (presumably, Ichiro Suzuki). However, the scenario it proposes irritates me because of, among other things, the total lack of context. Not all #6 hitters are the same, and they are in fact very, very different. in 2012, #6 batters have hit .258/.323/.422 (AVE/OBP/SLG), while the league as a whole has hit .255/.319/.407. That does include pitchers batting, so the league average for players expected to actually hit well is somewhat higher, but the #6 slot on a typical team is generally an above average batter, and the guy coming off your bench is almost certainly below average (If he were good, he would be starting). Even if you did have a left hander of comparable offensive ability to your #6 hitter (lets give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you have a good reason for leaving your 6th or 7th best hitter on the bench), you still would not necessarily want to pinch hit. Pinch hitting would grant you the platoon advantage (typically a 20 point swing in wOBA), but batters who come in off the bench to pinch hit (for whatever reason) hit worse than they normally do, by just about, oh, 20 points of wOBA. back to square one. Given that this pinch hitter is likely worse than the original batter to start out with, your "head" does not seem to have thought this one out all that well. But what do I know? I made a bunch of guesses based off of a typical team, because that is all this silly comercial gave me.
I find it fascinating that the actual advertisement part of this add shares exactly the same sort of problem. It claims that your "heart" wants a brand new expensive car of some sort or other, while your "head" want's "the best deal in town." Since this website has "the best deal in town," you can totally buy your nice new car without worrying about the price tag.
In the same sense that the baseball scenario left out all of the useful context which would actually give it a correct answer, this car part leaves out quite a bit of context which you should (hopefully) be able to figure out yourself. For one, your "head" does not want "the best deal in town," it wants the car for a reasonable price. If the best deal in town requires making some bad loans or sending one fewer kid to college, you obviously would not want to take the car, in the same way that you will want to stick with the better hitter (whichever one that happens to be) in the baseball scenario.
Unquestionably the worst advertisements, however, are for Papa Gino's pizza, to which (according to them) "Nothing compares". The TV adds for Papa Gino's are very simple, and relatively effective: they show glamoured up shots of what at least appears to be fresh-baked pizza, with some lettering thrown in on the side advertising their new promotion. Formerly, radio adds were nothing particularly good or bad, just regular old "get this many pizzas for this much provided you do, in fact, buy this many!!!" slogans. Perhaps in an effort to translate their television adds into radio, they have taken a huge turn for the worse.
The first of the new adds was some older guy talking slowly, in a way which was probably supposed to imply that the pizza was just incredible but implied to me that he had been smoking something, about how the "vine ripened tomatoes" and "special three cheese blend" were so good that "nothing compared" to them, except being carried around by the Patriots following a Superbowl. Irritating, especially given that Papa Gino's pizza is rather mediocre, but not terribly so.
Unfortunately, this was merely a first step. The most recent Papa Gino's commercials include stupid sounding young men making flat-out disturbing comparisons between Papa Gino's pizza and their sleeping children or their significant other's face. I do not find such commercials make me at all interested in eating a Papa Gino's pizza, I actually feel, and continue to feel, exactly the opposite: Listening to some creep comparing his child (unfavorably) to a very mediocre pizza makes me simply uninterested in getting one of those pizzas. In my experience, small business pizzerias make much better pizza in the first place, and they certainly do not claim to flatter their girlfriends by comparing her face to one of their products.
An I overreacting here? Yes. Well, maybe. Writing a blog post 3-4 people will read is hardly an overreaction. I am not exactly boycotting any of these products (I never wanted them in the first place, and if I did not have batter options these adds would not chase me away), but I have no interest in supporting the people who drive me especially insane between innings. That seems quite fair to me.
Now, this is honestly a fairly solid add given that it is targeting the sort of person who would call in to WEEI complaining about a bunt or non-bunt yesterday, for example, or (in 2008) that the Sox should trade JD Drew for "that guy in Seattle" (presumably, Ichiro Suzuki). However, the scenario it proposes irritates me because of, among other things, the total lack of context. Not all #6 hitters are the same, and they are in fact very, very different. in 2012, #6 batters have hit .258/.323/.422 (AVE/OBP/SLG), while the league as a whole has hit .255/.319/.407. That does include pitchers batting, so the league average for players expected to actually hit well is somewhat higher, but the #6 slot on a typical team is generally an above average batter, and the guy coming off your bench is almost certainly below average (If he were good, he would be starting). Even if you did have a left hander of comparable offensive ability to your #6 hitter (lets give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you have a good reason for leaving your 6th or 7th best hitter on the bench), you still would not necessarily want to pinch hit. Pinch hitting would grant you the platoon advantage (typically a 20 point swing in wOBA), but batters who come in off the bench to pinch hit (for whatever reason) hit worse than they normally do, by just about, oh, 20 points of wOBA. back to square one. Given that this pinch hitter is likely worse than the original batter to start out with, your "head" does not seem to have thought this one out all that well. But what do I know? I made a bunch of guesses based off of a typical team, because that is all this silly comercial gave me.
I find it fascinating that the actual advertisement part of this add shares exactly the same sort of problem. It claims that your "heart" wants a brand new expensive car of some sort or other, while your "head" want's "the best deal in town." Since this website has "the best deal in town," you can totally buy your nice new car without worrying about the price tag.
In the same sense that the baseball scenario left out all of the useful context which would actually give it a correct answer, this car part leaves out quite a bit of context which you should (hopefully) be able to figure out yourself. For one, your "head" does not want "the best deal in town," it wants the car for a reasonable price. If the best deal in town requires making some bad loans or sending one fewer kid to college, you obviously would not want to take the car, in the same way that you will want to stick with the better hitter (whichever one that happens to be) in the baseball scenario.
Unquestionably the worst advertisements, however, are for Papa Gino's pizza, to which (according to them) "Nothing compares". The TV adds for Papa Gino's are very simple, and relatively effective: they show glamoured up shots of what at least appears to be fresh-baked pizza, with some lettering thrown in on the side advertising their new promotion. Formerly, radio adds were nothing particularly good or bad, just regular old "get this many pizzas for this much provided you do, in fact, buy this many!!!" slogans. Perhaps in an effort to translate their television adds into radio, they have taken a huge turn for the worse.
The first of the new adds was some older guy talking slowly, in a way which was probably supposed to imply that the pizza was just incredible but implied to me that he had been smoking something, about how the "vine ripened tomatoes" and "special three cheese blend" were so good that "nothing compared" to them, except being carried around by the Patriots following a Superbowl. Irritating, especially given that Papa Gino's pizza is rather mediocre, but not terribly so.
Unfortunately, this was merely a first step. The most recent Papa Gino's commercials include stupid sounding young men making flat-out disturbing comparisons between Papa Gino's pizza and their sleeping children or their significant other's face. I do not find such commercials make me at all interested in eating a Papa Gino's pizza, I actually feel, and continue to feel, exactly the opposite: Listening to some creep comparing his child (unfavorably) to a very mediocre pizza makes me simply uninterested in getting one of those pizzas. In my experience, small business pizzerias make much better pizza in the first place, and they certainly do not claim to flatter their girlfriends by comparing her face to one of their products.
An I overreacting here? Yes. Well, maybe. Writing a blog post 3-4 people will read is hardly an overreaction. I am not exactly boycotting any of these products (I never wanted them in the first place, and if I did not have batter options these adds would not chase me away), but I have no interest in supporting the people who drive me especially insane between innings. That seems quite fair to me.
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