Dancing for Food... GrubHub Style

Being in a pandemic, food delivery has become a bigger deal. DoorDash and several other sites have become prominent. We all have those days where we want something quick. Not wanting to make food or want any left over food. GrubHub has been one of the big names. Heavily advertised. Back in November, they put one up. It's an animated ad of adults and kids getting excited for food. Dancing to a beat as they take bites of their meals. It's been panned for the most part and I don't blame the people for hating it.

For one thing, the animation does look second rate. Like a worse version of Dreamworks and Illumination combined. I'm no expert on cartoon animation, but still. The character modeling looks awful and ugly. I know it's trying to make a point with delivery and getting food, but this route was poorly executed. The camera angles to get the dance parts in are very hipster like. Music videos are cool when done right, but this is not what you need for a commercial.

I personally think there is much worse for commercials. This is still pretty bad in itself, but if I had to pick the worst, I'd have plenty of options. It's up there with the East Hills Mall commercial in terms of cringe. It's up there with car insurance ads in terms of being shoved so much down people's throats. This has become many memes. Even GrubHub has done a few memes on this. I wouldn't get mad about it and be like some people and not use a service if I wanted to. So childish to refuse to use the service.

Commercials now these days involve a lot of songs. Overproduced ads that have nothing to do with the ads themselves. Cringe ones that I'm surprised make airwaves considering the strictness of the FCC. While I don't think the GrubHub commercial should be banned, I would reconsider how to do other ads in the future. Just do live action ones. If they do go the animation route, look for something better or better storyboards. Awful execution and as I said, panned and with good reason.

Annoying Commercials

For as much as I want to rip on New York City based newspapers and their armchair sports reporters, there are many things I can't say. Instead, I'll go a different approach and talk annoying commercials. It seems like most now these days aren't clever or even well made. Some might be ones I mentioned in other blogs. Others may be new. So without further ado, lets begin.

Truth: This is an anti-smoking ad that usually airs on something like MTV. Typically, they use cheap ways to say things about how bad smoking is. It wouldn't be annoying if they just backed what they say up. They don't put up anything that they reference. I'm not against smoking even though I don't smoke, but the effort is not there. It's a cheap gimmick, much like the Ad Council. People are still going to smoke and these commercials are a huge waste of time.

Little Caesars Pizza: I love a good pizza. Local or franchise based, a good slice is excellent. Little Caesars likes to promote how much more cheese and pepperoni they have on their pies. Do I have a problem with that? No. What I do have a problem with is how they act like it's a bad thing such as the one ad with the dad not getting a Little Caesars Pizza. It comes off rather obnoxious. A pizza is a pizza, no matter what. Honorable mention is the Di'Gornio commercials berating anyone who orders pizza instead of their overpriced ones.

Geico/Progressive: I'm lumping these two in since these are truly wastes of ad space. Geico's not even about car insurance anymore. It's a waste of resources and money to do set pieces such as the music ad with the triangle guy acting like Marty McFly from Back to the Future. It's a shame. One bright spot is that it doesn't have the abysmal mascot idea like Progressive. The less said about Flo, the better. One thing I forgot to mention in a previous blog is that talking insurance box. I don't think they even try with this ad. It feels forced and out of place. Yet, they have turned it into mascot type of campaign. Overall, it's a shame that they don't get the point across 95 percent of the time.

DirecTV: Most of the time, I don't have a huge problem with DirecTV commercials. Usually, they are funny. With the recent ones, however, I don't get it. In a nutshell, they are saying people that stick to cable are stupid, hence the bad things they show people doing. (spoiled milk, sleeping in poison ivy) There is trying to do things better than the competition, but this isn't even something I would put on the air. It's similar to ads they did five to six years ago, but today trying to act like cable people have a low I.Q. I'd rather see the "don't crash into a dinner party" ad again.

I suppose I'll end here and give the wrap up. These are the ones I find annoying. There are many more I wish I could write, but that will take forever. Why can't these commercial writers be smarter with how they come up with ads? We'll never know.

Using Adblock

Probably the last five years, I have used Adblock. It's one of those internet tools that is used to block ads that appear on websites and videos all over the web. But do companies understand why people do this? Do they get the complete picture?

When YouTube got big around 2007 and into 08, companies wanted in on the pie. As a result, ads for various products, films, etc. became the norm. That being said, it would usually be the same commercials. For example, it seemed like all I got was the T-Mobile ads with the one girl in the pink polka dot dress. Whatever flavor of the month film was coming out seemed to get a lot of internet air time. Typically it was horror films.

Using your own computer or laptop, you can pretty much get away with not seeing ads. However, colleges and schools don't use adblock, so you'll see commercials. The last ones I saw on a college computer was the same repeated Burger King ad for french fries that were healthier (Satisfries I think was the name of the product) As time has gone on, companies and sites have gotten wiser on what people have done and counteracted with stuff that forces you to see sponsored ads. In regards to that, it's really shitty.

Look, I get sites need money from advertisements. We are in an era where DVR and streaming is big and people can skip through commercials. The way they do it, however, needs to be changed. Sites need ads that aren't going to clog computers with viruses or malware. They also need to stop shoving the same things down everyone's throats. It's annoying when one sees the same Progressive image of that idiot Flo constantly. I remember one site constantly showing a Netflix advertisement image of Shutter Island from 2010. People understand that a business needs to thrive. They would rather not see a site get clogged and slowed down because they need to promote something that will be replaced with something else in a month's span.

Luckily, Adblock can still be used on YouTube via computers. When it's all said and done, sites and advertisers  have to think smarter and cater to what people want. Otherwise, more and more ways of blocking ads will still be a huge problem, (which I will still block ads) with no way to stop it.

Too Many Commercials

As television has grown to where there are lots of cable networks competing, there is always a constant. That is the constant feed of commercials. In a time of watching stuff on AMC and Spike, you will always find five minutes of commercials before going back to the show or film before getting another five minutes. With that in mind, here is one that will creep up and anger people more. It is seven minutes of commercials per break.

Last year, I watched a few movies on cable. Early in the year, I watched an airing of Jackass: The Movie on MTV. It's not lengthy, but there was a point in the middle of the film where it was bombarded with two straight breaks of seven to eight minutes. A few months later, I watched the 60s version of The Jungle Book on Freeform. That film was not lengthy, either, but it was reaching points where it had some of the commercial lengths as Jackass did and had a two hour fifteen minute air time on the channel. As I look at some of these channels, it's been very evident for years that they are desperate for money and a few extra commercials is their way of getting more revenue in a time where people are going to Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and other sites to get their TV or movie fix. The thought of every channel going seven minutes is a scary one.

As of now, the biggest offender is Viacom. Most of their channels employ tactics to get extra commercials. The air times on stuff like Comedy Central, MTV, and BET is beyond absurd and stupid. Looking at what is on for films for the rest of the week, two films had three and a half hour air times. These weren't dramas or even mob films. They were comedies that aren't that long. One clocked at below an hour fifty and the other was a few minutes past two hours. The tactic might work for Viacom in the short term, but long term is going to be a rough road if it backfires.

Syndication cuts are pretty obvious when it boils down to TV shows, but that's for another topic if it gets made. The tactic is time compression, which is speeding up shows to fit in the half hour time span of the syndicated version of the show to get more commercial time. Some movies do that, but they go more for cutting stuff for both time and content. This was a big deal a few years ago when sites and a few entertainment shows talked about a video one did on YouTube in 2013 on Seinfeld reruns ten years earlier at the time. He did a test in 2015 to see how much of a difference it was and it was sped up a little more.

It's not just TBS. It's pretty much the case with any network that has shows up until the 90s to early 2000s. Even some of the early SpongeBob SquarePants episodes suffer because of the era it was in. Yeah, original content like The Walking Dead may get millions of viewers, but for anyone wanting reruns of shows, the choice is obvious now these days. Networks are still going to wonder why they keep losing viewership. Netflix, Hulu, and other sites have access to all episodes of a show and barring certain things like Saturday Night Live and South Park, should be uncut and unaltered. You can watch as many times as you want before deals expire on shows.

Movies, on the other hand, is tougher. It's hard to know when a deal can be made on some films, popular or unpopular. Networks envy the most recent ones and try to get them on HBO or Showtime before going to a cable network like FX or AMC. Companies are making deals to stream exclusively on one platform, though, making them adjust pretty well to the modern era of watching things. Unfortunately, not every film will make it to an online site and unless you're not able to find on DVD or Blu-ray, you might be stuck with the cable version.

Could we see a time where there is ten minutes of commercials in one break? I hope not. With losing viewership from a number of networks (some of which cannot be blamed on commercials) and rising costs per household, it could be a reality that will be dreaded, even if you are dedicated to something like a 15-hour South Park marathon. Only time will tell, and it may look no good.