Written on February 9th, 2010 by Brendan

The Most Bizarre Commercials I’ve Ever Seen

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Advertising enthralls me. But, what fascinates me the most is not the advertisers’ skills of emotional manipulation. It’s not their eerie ability to utilize tools as trivial as jokes, animals and babies to subtly shape our collective opinion on important subjects like gender, money and happiness. It’s not even the simple fact that, after years of habituation to their ways, they can still convince us in less than a minute that we must have something we could just as easily forget completely in the next minute. What piques my interest the most are the incredibly obvious things that we don’t notice. The dynamic that fascinates me is that there is often something completely ridiculous going on behind the curtain and we rarely think to look behind it. In my casual investigation, the most incredibly obvious, yet almost universally overlooked absurdity of modern advertising is the battle for local news weather supremacy.

This realization came to me during a commercial touting the excellent educational background of an unnamed Philadelphia meteorologist whose trademark glasses and bowtie has become the weapon of choice for his network. When the commercial closed with the line, “trust the bowtie”, I laughed. I laughed because the premise was comical, but also because his bowtie was actually emphasized more than the years this man had spent studying meteorology. Then, I realized that the notion of trusting a man’s skills of prediction because of his neckwear was actually the least ridiculous part of what I had just watched.

The more I thought about it, the more I was astounded that a significant amount of time and money was being spent by local affiliates in towns and cities across the country to argue a point that is as close to being completely and utterly inconsequential as you can get. If you’re not following me, consider first how rarely the weather significantly impacts your life outside of vacations, wedding days and World Series. Maybe you forget your umbrella once in a while, but, for the most part, if a hurricane is coming you’re already aware of it. Then consider the fact that modern radar and satellite technology is so advanced that pretty much every meteorologist is getting the same exact picture to work with anyways. Then consider the fact that, being weather, it’s nearly impossible to nail down the specifics any closer than an hour or a five degree swing of temperature.

Probing deeper, I realized that it’s almost a law of nature that weather forecasts have to be the same. What would be the reason for one predicting snow when the other predicts sun? How could one come to a conclusion so radically different than the other that you would ever be forced into choosing a station based on merit alone? It’s impossible for them to be different because they’re too good at what they do to be different. They both know what the weather will be and the only way one could possibly set themselves apart in practice would actually be to bet the house on a completely unforeseen occurrence most of the time, which I would guess is meteorological suicide.

Despite all of this, local news stations, like 18th century British soldiers, have mutually chosen meteorology as the battleground from which they stand still and lob attacks at each other. They rarely openly attack another station’s credibility (because they can’t, their forecasts are exactly the same), but they do insinuate that their satellites and software can gather better data and their graphics teams can display their models in such a compelling way that you would be downright foolish to consider getting your weather anywhere else.

This may all seem like a rambling thought, and it mostly is, but I think in some way it’s indicative of the way life is today. There are so many things being thrown at us every second that it would just be too difficult to actually think very hard about everything we see. For a world in which we have little choice over what and how much we receive, it can unfortunately be a useful coping mechanism to be intellectually passive. I do know it’s useful to wonder if there is something strange behind the curtain every once in a while, though, even if it’s just for a laugh.