Commercial editing

People kid me for not having a DVR.  I can’t tell you why I don’t TiVo, maybe because I’m in no hurry to skip commercials. 

I appreciate TV commercials as an art form, though I admit, as with works of art in general, some ads aren’t worth viewing.  Maybe it’s a matter of personal taste, but the intentionally obnoxious spot where the three dudes go on a pilgrimage to the Raisin Bran Crunch factory is enough to turn me off commercials altogether.  But, thanks to the mute button, problem solved.

Earlier this month I was pleased to see the production company MJZ win the top award for Advertising Excellence/Single Commercial at the Association of Independent Commercial Producers’ Art and Technique of the American Commercial awards, with the commercial it developed for Old Spice.  You’ve seen it—provided you don’t have TiVo—“The man your man could smell like.”  It’s clever and memorable and very well produced.

When I see a commercial of such high quality, it makes me wonder why other ads, likely costing equally large sums to produce, seem so unpolished.

I am no advertising expert.  I’m just a grammar geek, so my attention is drawn to sentence structure.  I find myself wondering, is there no copywriting editor or producer whose job it is to flag glaring grammatical goofs?  Or is a hypothesis I’ve made before proving true—that people just don’t care anymore?  That it just doesn’t matter?

Honey Bunches of Oats is one of my favorite cereals, but I cannot buy another box as long as their commercials claim “nobody does it quite like us.”

Moreover, I like Sally Field as well as anyone.  Heaven forbid my bones become brittle, but they’ll splinter before I’d take Boniva, as long as they keep letting Sally say, “If you have osteoporosis like me…”

I don’t know which agencies produce the ads for Boniva or Honey Bunches but it makes me want to find out if they have any openings for a word nymph.

Actually, shouldn’t it be “the man like whom your man could smell?”