Advertising madness.

It’s been a while since I’ve railed at TV commercials, so I guess I can have at it again. Today’s theme will be: cell phone providers.

One of the ads has been on the air for a couple of weeks, for n-Telos, a local phone and cell-phone company. Pretty generic ad: it starts off with an animated blue bird swooping and soaring around on a downtown street, past a building with a lot of columns, gliding around the clock on the corner of the building, down to a burgundy canopy over an entrance to the building, and up, up and away! into the blue sky, only to come back down in a meadow out in the country, surrounded by singing children. Stock footage, I’m sure, and not especially remarkable. Except: the downtown building that is swooped around is the building I work in, and I even go into the building through the door under the burgundy canopy. The clock on the corner of the building? Doesn’t work, and hasn’t for at least six months.

And the other thing I find fascinating about the ad is the choice of background music: “Volunteers” by Jefferson Airplane. Lifted straight off one of the Airplane’s albums, I believe, and apparently not done by a sound-alike studio group with rewritten words. Nice music, and I’m always happy to hear it, but a pretty inappropriate choice for the ad. When I think of Revolution Against The Man, I don’t think about cell phone providers, and vice versa. n-Telos is consistent though: they use the same music in their ad where the animated blue bird swoops around the inside of a shopping mall decorated for Christmas.

The other ad played heavily over the Thanksgiving weekend, and was (I think) for Verizon. Set at a big football game, it looks to be either just before the game or during the half-time entertainment, as the marching band is on the field, the cheerleaders are doing something appropriate, and the stands are filled with fans, dressed in team colors (and occasionally bare-chested and covered with paint, and thus presumably liquored-up). The stadium’s public address announcer comes on to tell about the great deal that Verizon has on camera phones – and that the sale ends on November 28th (Sunday). So everyone – fans, cheerleaders, band, and players – bolts from the field, heading off to get themselves camera phones before the fantastic sale ends.

Fine. No better or worse than most other cell phone ads, I’d say, and certainly better than the plethora of “Can you hear me now?” ads. So what earns it a place in this ranting? The time that I saw the ad: Sunday night. I saw it twice between 8 and 9 p.m. on the History Channel (a show about possible conspiracies surrounding the Lincoln assassination), and again around 9:40 p.m., during Desperate Housewives.

What in the world was the purpose of showing the ads that late on Sunday night? Surely the Verizon shops had closed by 6 in the evening, and even if they were 24-hour stores, who could they possibly expect to jump in their cars after 10 p.m. on Sunday night to go buy a new cell phone before midnight? Lunacy. Given that the ad was showing on two different networks at that hour, I won’t blame the advertising scheduler at the network for putting the ad on after the promotion was effectively over. Instead, I’d blame either the ad agency placing the ads or the manager at Verizon who approved the ad placement and the entire promotion, either (or both) of whom probably specified that the ad should run “throughout the Thanksgiving weekend” without realizing that Sunday ads would be wasted, so the commercial should have run only Thursday through Saturday. But I’d have also expected that it would part of their jobs to ensure that commercials pushing a promotion don’t air after the promotion has finished.