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A while ago I shared a great video from local commercial kings Rhett & Link, and now Oddee has even more hilarious local commercials, some made by professionals, like this one which was created by the delightful comedy group Big Dog Eat Child, and some are more authentically terrible.
If you guys have IFC, I highly recommend checking out one of their newest shows, Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings. Essentially, the show follows around these two video-makers who create hilarious local commercials that are pretty much all destined to become viral successes. The one above is my favorite so far.
Have you guys checked it out? If so, do you like it?
Did you know David Lynch made a series of Japanese coffee commercials based on Twin Peaks? They’re very weird, funny and all interconnected. If you’re a fan of the show, be sure to click on the link to watch all of the ads.
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If you’re eager to see the upcoming season of East Bound & Down, then let this video satiate your excitement in the meanwhile. If you aren’t familiar with the show, let me introduce you to Mr. Kenny Powers.
Via Buzz Feed
I remember many of these ads, but of course, at the time nobody knew the actors in them were going to be famous someday! Unknown actors take work where they can, and that’s often commercial ads, which lead to experience, which can lead to starring roles later. Unreality magazine has a collection of ads featuring stars you know, yet you might not recognize at a much younger age.
This list includes everyone from A-listers to TV stars, and products ranging from Pringles to Mylanta. It took me a while to track these down, but if you know of any more I’m missing, I’d be happy to amend the list with your finds. I’m sure there are a ton more out there, it can just be tough to know where to looks.
Enjoy the ones I’ve found so far, and keep in mind when watching commercials today, that someday that annoying kid from the Toyota commercials might be our next big movie star.
Go see them and find out who is in the picture here. Link
The Pocket Fisherman Makes it Big
The history of pitching unusual gadgets on television begins with S.J. Popeil. Born into a family of roadside salesmen, S.J. had the vision to break into a much larger audience via TV. The first gizmo he hawked on the small screen was the Pocket Fisherman -a fishing rod small enough to fit in your glove compartment or briefcase. While veteran anglers debated the utility of the flimsy rod, Popeil maintained, “It’s not for using. It’s for giving.” He had a point. Forty years after the first commercial aired, The Pocket Fisherman continues to sell millions of units worldwide every year.
The Genius that Bred the Chia Pet
In the early 1970s, entrepreneur Joseph Pedott heard about a failing Chicago company that was selling seeds from the chia plant, a member of the mint family. He bought the company and sold the seeds along with a terra cotta figurine that could sprout vegetation. The result was the Chia Pet -one of the most successful infomercial products in history. But Pedott is hardly a one-trick pony, He’s also the genius behind another TV favorite, The Clapper. He took an existing sound-activated device called The Great American Turn-On, tweaked it, and renamed it. The rest is “clap on, clap off” history.
The Lesson Behind “I’ve Fallen, and I Can’t Get Up”
LifeCall, a medical alert system, launched one of the most popular catchphrases of the 1980s, when it aired the “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up” commercial. Radio DJs and stand-up comics endlessly made fun of Mrs. Fletcher, the elderly woman sprawled on the floor. The character was played by Edith Fore, a 70-something widow who’d actually been saved by LifeCall after a tumble down her stairs in 1989. Fore was paid a one-time fee for her performance and never received any royalties. Although her phrase was printed on T-shirts and parodied in songs for years, LifeCall never saw an increase in sales and eventually filed for bankruptcy. The problem was that the public remembered the slogan but couldn’t recall the name of the product.
The Knives That Served Up Catchphrases
Despite the Japanese name, Ginsu knives were originally manufactured in Fremont, Ohio. The company, formerly known as Quikut, hired an advertising copywriter named Arthur Schiff to spice up its sales pitch. Schiff not only came up with the name Ginsu, he also coined several phrases that are still infomercial staples today, such as, “Now, how much would you pay?” and “Act now, and you’ll receive…” But his pièce de résistance was “But wait! There’s more!”
All These Hits on One Giant LP
Long before there was Now That’s What I Call Music, there was K-Tel, the affordable pipeline to the hits of the 1970s and 1980s. Salesman Philip Kives had the idea to cram 20 to 25 songs onto one LP and pitch them on rapid-fire TV commercials. The ads were ahead of their time, because serious musical artists of that era didn’t advertise on television, and young music buyers were mesmerized when they heard a succession of 5-second snippets of their favorite tunes on TV. Kives was able to sell his LPs for less than half the normal cost by using cheap, ultra-thin vinyl. He also mastered the records at a lower volume, which produced thin grooves, allowing for more songs on each side.
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Great Moments in Infomercial History was written by Kara Kovalchik. It is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the May/June 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
This CLIO award winning commercial shows an interesting and hilarious perspective on sibling rivalry.
– via clioawards
From the Upcoming 
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Viral marketing has become so commonplace that it is now a household term even in the least media-savvy households. Even so, many marketing agencies have managed to fool the world into thinking that certain outrageous stories are genuine articles and not simply a clever ruse to bring nationwide attention to a product or event.
These viral marketing campaigns have managed to trick their way into the public eye and managed to fool us all into believing their ads were real.
One of the first and most famous viral marketing campaigns was the one involving the promotion of The Blair Witch Project. Those of you who remember when this film hit the theaters likely remember at least one person you knew thought this was a real documentary and that a group of student film makers was really killed while getting the footage. Some people were so terrified of this mediocre fear-fest that they actually lost sleep after seeing it.
It was so successful that the maker of the movie, Eduardo Sanchez claimed, “One of the guys from Artisan told me the other day, ‘Everything that could possibly go right on the film has gone right on this film, and you’re never going to experience that again in your career and I’m never going to experience it again in my career.’”
Sources CNN, Viral Blog
More recently, you probably remember the video featuring the hipster who was apparently stupid enough to get Buddy Holly sunglasses tattooed on his face. This one spread throughout the web before anyone started realizing that maybe, just maybe, he was actually working with RayBan. Humorously, even after everyone discovered he was working with the company, no one has yet proven if the tattoo is real or not.
This wasn’t the first time RayBan managed to fool the masses though, remember the two guys who managed to keep catching RayBans on their faces?
Source: Mashable
Levis had a similar success story as RayBan when blogs across the net picked up on this clever video showing a guy jumping into his pants. The commercial isn’t branded, but people started being tipped off when they heard the comment on the tape that mentions “at least there’s no zipper” and then noticed the video was put on YouTube by “unbuttonedfilms.” Levis is the only jeans company that markets their button-up flies, which really helped limit down the choices when it came time to figure out who made the promotion.
A while later the company tried to pull a similar stunt with their helium-inflated pants video, but no one really picked it up because it was a) obviously impossible (there’s no where near enough helium in his pants to lift him off the ground) and b) an obvious advertisement. Instead the company decided to just use the ad as a television commercial.
Sources: Trend Hunter, Gawker, Adrants
What happens when you combine illegal activities, extreme sports and poor video quality? You get a surefire viral video hit that’s sure to spawn some idiotic imitations. That’s how Quicksilver landed a major success with this questionable video showing someone surfing in an English river thanks to a hefty load of dynamite.
Source: Daily Mail
This video was obviously branded for Guitar Hero, but it originally seemed to be a fan project. It also made its rounds on the blogosphere before someone discovered it was created by an advertising agency and not “Kevin in Indiana” like the YouTube profile page indicated.
Source: Multi-Player Blog
Do you remember when everyone thought for a split second that cell phones popping popcorn with radiation could be the new Mentos and Coke? That is until people actually tried it and realized it was a complete hoax.
Then the news quickly arose that the video was actually created by a Bluetooth headset company called Cardo. Lets just hope people were smart enough to test this bunk science before running out and buying a headset.
Sources: Boing Boing Gadgets
Now it’s your turn readers. There’s been thousands of these promotions in the last ten years, most of which were unsuccessful. But I’m sure many of you have fallen for these tricks at least once? What was the most convincing viral ad you’ve seen?
Put that shotgun away. This Australian beer commercial proposes a new sport: skeet shooting with a tank.
Previously on Neatorama: skeet fishing.
via Wandering Goblin
AdFreak has a list of the thirty strangest commercials of 2009. The above video is a Swedish commercial for McDonald’s featuring children who express their impatience with a long car trip in a particularly creepy way.
This spellbinding 1-minute animated video is a commercial for Central China Television. It shows drops of ink in water morphing into fish, dancers, airplanes, and other shapes. The video was created by the Paris-based graphics studio Troublemakers.tv and directed by Niko Tziopanos.
Via Gizmodo | Director’s Website | Troublemakers.tv
This one-minute stop motion video appears to be a Portuguese-language commercial for a fruit juice brand available in Brazil (Google Translator version). It’s a trippy depiction of moving wafer cookies that form a piano.
Via The Presurfer, who celebrated his ninth blogiversary last week.
In the early 90s, Old Milwaukee decided to compete with the imports by inventing the Old Milwaukee Swedish Bikini Team. The ad features a bunch of guys out fishing and being manly men and they think that it just can’t get any better. And then, of course, the Swedish Bikini Team shows up wearing spandex, cans and six-packs of Old Milwaukee parachute in, and the camera pans in on lots of jiggling boobs.
The ad triggered a sexual harassment suit by five members of the Stroh Brewery who said that the ads perpetuated an environment of verbal and physical abuse that had been going on since the mid 80s anyway. You can tell it really scared the company – shortly thereafter, the “bikini team” was featured in Playboy For your viewing pleasure…
In 1989, Miller ruffled more than a few feathers with a 16-page pamphlet distributed in 55 college newspapers across the country. Called “Beachin’ Times,” it instructed college students on how to get drunk and pick up babes. One such gem includes a piece on “Lite Beer Pro Beach Volleyball” which asked readers to “Name something you can dink, bump, and poke. Hint – it’s not a babe.” You can tell it was 1989 because the pamphlet is liberally peppered with “babe” references – another section was called “Four Sure-Fire Ways to Scam Babes.” I don’t know about you guys, but I’m totally hearing Jeff Spicoli in my head. Even college students were offended – groups of students at two universities organized protests and threatened to boycott Miller, which was enough to scare the company into an apology. They sent letters with the headline “We Blew It” to all 55 student newspapers the pamphlet had appeared in. It didn’t impress some people, though – the University of Iowa’s Daily Iowan ran an opinion column that compared the apology to after-the-fact birth control – “It might make you feel better, but it doesn’t do a damn bit of good.”
Looks pretty tame, right? But when this ad was first published, complaints rolled in by the barrel-ful. The look on the girl in the barley’s face was apparently much too suggestive for the liking of the general public, because the Minneapolis Brewing Company received so many letters that they recalled the posters as so not to offend any more potential customers. Photo from Land of Amber Waters by Doug Hoverson.
This is actually not a controversial ad, but Rolling Rock wanted you to think it was. I watched the You Tube video and wondered what people found so offensive about it – girls in bikinis? Because there’s much more scantily-clad women on Rock of Love every week (trust me, as an avid viewer, I know). But that was all just part of the scam. A little more digging revealed that Rolling Rock actually released “Beer Ape” as a viral Internet campaign. They put up billboards and other ads, apologizing to anyone who was “offended” by the campaign… the campaign that never actually aired anywhere except YouTube. Of course, this resulted in people flocking to YouTube to see what this offensive commercial was all about. Kind of genius… kind of underhanded and sneaky. Check it out for yourself:
Photo from World News’ 25 Most Controversial Ads
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember Miller Lite’s “Catfight” ad. It ran in 2002 and showed two women getting in an out-and-out down-and-dirty catfight over whether Miller Lite tasted great or was less filling… you know the schtick. They end up tearing off each other’s clothes, wrestling into a public fountain and eventually tear it up in a pool of cement. At the end of the ad, we see that the whole thing was really just the fantasy of two guys sitting at a bar.
Miller contends that they were mocking the stereotypical male mentality, but that didn’t really hold water with the hundreds of people who called or wrote to complain. Miller made it a point of pointing out that the majority of people who complained were women over the age of 40 who had children… I find the fact that they pointed this out more offensive than the actual commercial, personally. Here it is in all its racy glory:
Before the newest Super Bowl ads roll out today, refresh yourself with some of the biggest ads from Super Bowls past. I totally remember the Michael Jordan/Larry Bird commercial, and I’m amused by the Michael J. Fox ad for Diet Pepsi. It’s so ’80s! Warning: there are current ads sprinkled here and there as well.
