The Alternative Worlds of Advertising

If there's one thing I hate in advertising, it's artifice.

It's hard not to turn on the TV these days and see it manifested in so many condescending, offensive, lazy, insipid and hackneyed ways. I'm sure if I turned to my online thesaurus I could run up the score on the previous sentence.

There's so much artifice in advertising it has literally become the baseline. We may not even notice or recognize it. But being of an overly cranky nature, I have.

Let's start where all logical discussions of TV advertising artifice start -- Pizza Hut.

They were not only the first people to stuff their crusts with cheese, shrimp, and garlic-like substance, (idea for Pizza Hut, stuff the crust of your pizza with more pizza.) These culinary genii seemed to invented the very notion of the Bite & Smile.

In fact, and I know this from working on the account at several different shops, on page 38 of the Pizza Hut How to Make a TV Commercial Manual it clearly states,

"...following the excessive cheese pull, the actor or actress, preferably a member of an ethnic group to demonstrate our appreciation for diversity, must eat the pizza and flash a grin exposing at least 22 pearly white teeth."

But they are hardly alone.

Who sprays a bathroom with Febreeze and lights up as if they had won the Powerball Lottery?

Who Swiffers a room and acts like they've discovered the mysterious secrets of tantric sex?

Who jerks their head around in whiplash fashion just to get a look at the sexy new Jaguar/Toyota/Nissan/Audi/Acura/Mercedes Benz?

Who throws their wallet in the Hudson River to make some incomprehensible point about insurance premiums?

Who reaches for their Tresiba/Crestor/Lyrica/Rexulti/or Viberzi to treat their Irritable Bowel Syndrome and then breaks into a Busby Berkeley-worthy song and dance?

OK, maybe that last example of artifice was not the best as I fully empathize with the notion of instant colonic relief.

Nevertheless, it's all so overdone and overwrought. It's as if they set out to discover human Untruths.

It's the kind of crap we see 364 days a year. The day we don't see it is the day of the Super Bowl. That's when America is treated to commercials they actually like. You'd think all these Harvard MBA's and C-Suite execs would do the math on that, but they're too busy pimping digital advertising and reconfiguring open office plans.

There's one more advertiser who deserves to be called out by name.

Perhaps you've seen the oddly excited people who populate the Wayfair commercials. I don't know what it's like at your household but furniture shopping is never the joyous, orgasmic experience as portrayed in these cloying spots.

If anything, it's 180 degrees from that. And the simplest addition to our rag tag collection of furniture exacerbates any aesthetic differences my wife and I might harbor. We once got into a fight about where to place a new ottoman and didn't speak or eat together for a week.

Also, if I ever find myself going through their website on an iPad, see they don't charge any sales tax and then reflexively do a fist pump while blurting, "GAMECHANGER!", I will call it quits and would urge any of my friends or readers of Roundseventeen to put me out of my misery.