Commercial break

Well, I ordered my two textbooks, and they arrived today, so I'm going to go pick them up tomorrow. I'm kinda excited - I like getting my desk copies of books, and checking out all the free extra stuff that comes with them. With this being a media class, I expect the extra stuff to be pretty interesting.

But today I just realized a bit of irony in this whole situation: the person teaching these kids about media this winter will be someone who has spent more time in the past year reading dusty 15th century Latin Bibles than watching television. And the television I did watch was British television, which is a whole different ballgame from American television.

This (along with Terminaldegree's posts about playing music clips in class) got me thinking about what kinds of media examples I'll show them this winter. I want to start collecting them now so I can have a decent-sized arsenal come January. So tonight, I started looking for some of my favorite commercials.

That's one of the things I love about teaching and researching Communication - it's fun for me to talk about TV shows and pop music and movies from a scholarly perspective. Since I focused on advertising for both of my Communication degrees, I am particularly interested in commercials. My former Spanish prof noticed that when I watch TV, I pay as much attention to the commercials as I do to the actual show! Maybe that's a result of having researched them so much, or maybe it's because I like them so much that I ended up researching them. I'm not sure which came first.

Anyway, I wanted to share a few of my favorite commercials, which I hope to work into the class in some way*:

Nike - "I Feel Pretty" (Wieden + Kennedy, 2006)

This came out fairly recently, and it makes me giggle. At the same time, though, it makes me think about the role of women in sports - it practically doesn't matter how well you do, just as long as you look good doing it. What's also interesting is that this ad isn't just for Nike. If you watch, you'll notice that the logos for Prince tennis equipment, the Waldorf Astoria, Heineken, Lexus, Continental Airlines, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Olympus, and the US Open. Oh, and it's an ad promoting Maria Sharapova's image as well. All that in one minute and five seconds!

Amazon.com - "Sweatermen" (FCB San Francisco, 1999)

I liked this whole campaign when it came out, but this was the only clip I could find online. This was just around the time when e-shopping was starting to get big, so online retailers had to pitch it as an alternative to regular Christmas shopping. I like this campaign because it places a modern concept in a traditional/familiar setting, which I think is meant to both reassure the viewer (I need a better explanation than that, but that's just what came off the top of my head right now) and give an idea of the intended target market. When this ad came out, I just knew it was supposed to be "vintage," but my parents were more familiar with the '60s Christmas shows it was trying to parody.

Toys 'R' Us - "Peter Cottontail" (Leo Burnett/Chicago, 2003)

What makes this ad work (and what makes me giggle) are the shrill, annoying voices of the bunnies. People whined about how they couldn't get this ad out of their heads, but they remembered it, didn't they? So, sometimes annoying is a good thing.

Grey Poupon - "It even has wine" (Lowe Marschalk, 1981)

For some mysterious reason, I loved loved loved this ad when I was little. I walked around saying, "Pardon me, but do you have any Grey Poupon?" all the time, and even carried around an empty mustard bottle that I said was Grey Poupon. (It wasn't. It was French's.) What impresses me about this campaign now is that Grey Poupon became wildly popular all of a sudden in the early eighties, and the rate by which people switched from French's to Grey Poupon was phenomenal. People associated this brand with style, luxury and class, mostly from the perception that this product came from France. (Coincidentally, it was bottled in Hartford, Connecticut.)

There are a few more ads that I love and for which I am trying to find clips - a Sunbeam bread commercial from a few years ago ("Put a little Sunbeam in your life") and an Hampton Inn commercial with a kid who says, "If you have breakfast, then you can frolic."

Now, if only I knew how I was going to incorporate these clips into my class...

*Sorry for not linking to product or agency websites. It took me enough time to embed and format the videos. If you're interested in the products or the agencies who advertised them, you can look 'em up on Google.