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Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Cavemen, Barbarians and Baseball

This morning, I caught a flash of one of the Geico cavemen commercials and thought, man, I'm getting so tired of them. Then, I read one of my boards and someone posts that they're going to do a TV series with them, but that she'd rather see the Capital One barbarians in a show. I have to agree with her. I like the barbarians much better than the cavemen. I always think the Geico ads are almost there, but not quite. But then I'm pretty picky on commercials and I have been since junior high when we saw reels of Clio Award winners every year. I saw what was possible and then I saw what most companies were doing.

The Minnesota Twins have a couple of cute commercials playing right now. One features Jason Bartlett and Nick Punto (our shortstop and third baseman who were called Piranha by White Sox coach Ozzie Guillen. Because they're not homerun hitters, but they just nibble you to death.) Anyway, it shows a girl and her father going through Undersea World or whatever the heck the aquarium is called at Mall of America and the girl is asking her father what everything is. Then they reach the tank with the piranha and it's the two Twins players under water in full uniform. It ends with the handler dumping a bucket of baseballs in the water and the two swimming to the surface to get them.

This might be one of those ads where if it has to be explained (and if you're not a Twins fan or don't live in Minnesota it has to be), it loses some of it's humor.

The Twins have a second commercial with Johann Santana, our Cy Young Award-winning pitcher and Joe Nathan, the pitcher who closes our games. I've only seen this one once, but Santana is driving like he pitches--constantly changing speeds--and Nathan's getting motion sickness. It was cute too, but I want to see it a few more times because I missed some stuff the first time around.

You know, it's tough in a way to have a major in advertising and then watch ads. I can sit there and label the tactics the commercial is using, and depending on the skill in which it's deployed, it might annoy me. If it's done well, I don't think about it, but if it's blatant, I definitely don't like it.