No Roast for the Weary

It's kind of bizarre that the Planters marketing team came up with the idea to kill Mr. Peanut before the idea that they could build an ad around the word "roasted" having a second definition.

Alternately, maybe they just dodged this idea for as long as they could, because it never had any real hope of being funny.

There's an episode of The Office where Michael organizes a roast of himself, thinking it's going to be extremely low-impact if not wholly flattering, and instead his employees take the opportunity to actually roast the shit out of him; the segment ends with Michael choking up and storming off. That's illustrative of the general problem with roasts, or perhaps more specifically with the modern "roast industry" that has emerged over the past couple decades: everyone wants the cachet of "getting roasted," but a roast only truly works when the subject has sufficiently thick skin and a sense of humor about themselves such that nothing is really off-limits. This is why by far the best roasts are those of comedians, who get it. By comparison, remember when Comedy Central decided to do a roast of Donald Trump and he vetoed any jokes about how he wasn't actually that rich? (He didn't have any problem with the jokes about him wanting to fuck his own daughter, which... anyway.) You can't roast someone with veto power over the content - and that's exactly what you get when the "person" being "roasted" is an animated spokescharacter for a billion-dollar corporate brand, in a commercial that brand paid for.

For that matter, how were you ever going to roast a fictional peanut? He doesn't have life history to make fun of, he doesn't really have a personality... in this teaser, the jokes we see are mostly about peanuts in general, plus two jokes about his appearance. Here's the entire, ahem, "set list":

"I'll make this quick, Mr. Peanut, I know you've got some brownies to ruin"

"Mr. Peanut, why are you dressed like it's five recessions ago?"

"Mr. Peanut, what do you eat at parties? People?"

"I'm a big fan, I love your work in Thai food"

"We can all agree: there's rich, and then there's 'haven't worn pants in 100 years' rich"

Don't forget, the roastee is allowed to get in on the act himself!

"Wow, that was brutal. Wish Planters would just kill me off again!"

Well, he's not wrong: that WAS brutal. We might disagree on the exact definition of that word though.

Woof. While his look may be the easiest target, the best roast of Mr. Peanut's design was already done by Cohen Edenfield on Twitter an entire decade ago:

is there anything more capitalist than a peanut with a top hat, cane, and monocle selling you other peanuts to eat

— Cohen is a ghost (@skullmandible) August 29, 2013

Not only is that funnier than either of the jokes about Mr. Peanut's look that we get here, but it actually gets under the skin a bit by making a capitalist critique, whereas the jokes here double (in frankly Trumpian fashion) as sly compliments about the subject's wealth. (Or anyway they would if Mr. Peanut were remotely a real person.)

Maybe there are some better jokes in the full roast, but there's no reason to believe that when this is what they ran with to whet our appetites. I'm not nearly enough of a masochist to sit through over ELEVEN MINUTES of this shit when the teaser is so dire. The single best joke here is Jeff Ross's about ruining brownies, and that's obviously pretty tame. (Side note: since when does Ross look like he got stopped halfway through morphing into Ving Rhames? If he didn't have the same voice as ever I wouldn't even have known it was him.) His other joke, the one about Thai food, isn't even a joke. (To be fair, it was clipped from a longer bit; to be less fair, I did watch enough of Ross's intro to the full roast to see what it was clipped from and it's not any funnier.) Ross is obviously more than capable of being funny at these things so I doubt any of this is really his fault other than accepting the gig at all, but then that's kind of my point; this entire concept was DOA no matter the caliber of comedian you involved.

I certainly don't subscribe to the older and/or right-wing comedian whining that "you can't say anything anymore!" Usually people who say that are griping that they'll get canceled if they keep doing their 1980s set featuring a ten-minute block about how much they hate Asian drivers or something similarly racist. But when it comes to a roast, you do need to be able to say virtually anything about your subject or there's just no point. And when there are corporate reins on your roast, that's never going to be possible.

All this wouldn't matter so much if the ad itself were a true one-off. "Roasting Mr. Peanut" is a passably amusing gag to build a single 30-second spot around, at least in theory, and in that scenario it wouldn't even really matter if the jokes were bad. But this wasn't just a punny gag. They were dead serious about doing this shit for real. In addition to shooting a full roast sequence lasting more than ten minutes and putting that online, they clipped multiple jokes (plus Mr. Peanut's animated laughter in response) and made those their own short videos on the Planters YouTube channel. They thought people were gonna find these jokes hilarious and want to share them with their friends. They thought they could go viral just by wanting it enough! It really is legitimately embarrassing.

Maybe Planters needs a marketing rethink. Between dramatically "killing off" their spokescharacter and now this, they seem to be trying rather desperately to find a gimmick that will attract online engagement. But I don't feel like it's been going very well, and besides, not every product should or needs to try for that. This is roasted nuts, not Mountain Dew or Taco Bell or whatever. Relax a little bit, will you?

Striking while the iron is oxidized

I really just have one question about this GEICO ad.

 

Angry Birds.  ANGRY BIRDS!  In 2021!  To be fair, this is the same company that dragged out Ickey Woods some 25 years after his brief relevance and then built an entire ad campaign around his famous love of cold cuts, something that was, to be clear, 100% not actually famous.  Even in the past year or so, GEICO ads have been centered around such famous people as Tag Team (peak fame: 1993) and Billy Blanks (peak fame: 1999).  By that standard, this ad seems entirely reasonable - you can still download Angry Birds games, and there was an Angry Birds movie (the second one they made!) in theaters as recently as 2019.

But even with that in mind, this shit just drives me up the wall.  It's not just that Angry Birds is roughly a decade past peak relevance, although that is certainly a component.  But the GEICO ads in this vein are just so ungodly lazy.  The gecko has been a spokescharacter since 1999, if you can believe that (hang on, gotta pop my hip back in), and those ads remain far fresher.  Why?  Because he's just a character, and then you actually have to figure out something to do with him!  Meanwhile, ads like this, or the "It's what you do" series, tend to rely on that most eyeroll-inducing of ad tropes, "Hey!  That's a thing I've seen before!"

Now, this certainly isn't new.  I was just reading Gastro Obscura, the new food-themed book from the Atlas Obscura people*, and there are multiple references to circa-1900 ads that used, of all people, Pope Leo XIII as a spokesman.  But this isn't "famous celebrity uses our product."  It's not even "famous fictional character uses our product!"  It's literally "fictional character that has been famous, sufficiently so that you'd recognize them but long enough ago that they probably came fairly cheap, is onscreen while our product is being mentioned."  This isn't an especially new tactic either, especially not from GEICO, but it still sucks.

And GEICO barely even tries to integrate the Angry Birds with the actual pitch.  Sure, they're seen knocking over a few planters, but is that the sort of thing people are usually calling their insurance company over?  This could have been done more smoothly, perhaps by showing an agent visiting to assess the bird damage, but I guess that wouldn't leave time for the neighbor character to show up to deliver the hilarious line, "Why are these birds so angry?", thus implying that GEICO does not trust the audience to actually recognize, without assistance, the ostensibly well-known characters around which it has constructed an entire ad.

Which leads to my final complaint, something I could probably keep in standing type for this blog: this is an ad that is written as though it is supposed to be funny but contains no actual jokes.  The closest thing is "Why are these birds so angry?"  That's not a fucking joke.  The "punchline" of the ad is... the husband running outside to grab a flowerpot.  My sides!  GEICO isn't entirely incapable of making ads with okay punchlines, so what happens with something like this?  Am I to believe they weren't actually trying?  Maybe just take the one person at your agency who knows how to write a joke (perhaps the person responsible for this ad, a substantially better take on the same basic concept for about eight different reasons) and have them do a punch-up pass on all of them.

*This wasn't a plug, by the way. I was gifted the book recently and literally was reading it last night, which caused the Pope Leo ads to pop to mind when I was thinking about past celebrity endorsements. But it's a fun book if you like that sort of thing.

More like "blow-cus group"

If there's one thing we know about the people who make ads, it's that they think nothing is more interesting than the process of making ads.  You know how Hollywood loves to give Oscars to movies about Hollywood?  It's like that, but much dumber.

 

Virtually everything that annoys me about this now-ubiquitous ad format is here.

Ad: "The Snapshot app from Progressive rewards you for driving safe and driving less."

Flo: "Okay, what message did you hear this time?"

[No one says anything.  Beth shrugs.]

Flo: "Safe drivers can save using Snapshot?"

At least they make sure to get the message out up front.  Minor points there.  Too many ads these days hide what they're for behind 20 seconds of annoyance, such that by the time they arrive at the pitch, anyone sane has already changed the channel or walked away.  This is the last compliment I'm going to give this ad.

Kirk: "What's Snapshot?"

Flo: "...what the commercial was about."

Rashad: "I tune commercials out."

Beth: "Me too.  They're always like 'blah, blah, blah.'"

You can pretty much see the room where the ad creatives came up with this.  "Oh man, we are gonna make people THINK with this one."  Guys, if you don't pay attention to our brilliant Progressive ads, how will you ever learn about our Snapshot app, which big-brothers your driving for a modest discount and unless you are especially careful can actually cause your rates to increase?  (Also, who are these obnoxious people who signed up for a focus group and then refused to pay attention to a 30-second ad that they're being paid to pay attention to?)

So: editorializing.  That's one thing I hate.  We're not done though.

Meredith: "Tell me about it.  I'm going to a silent retreat next weekend."

What are you talking about?

Guy Whose Name Card is Not Visible: "My niece got kicked out of one of those."

Meredith: "For talking?"

GWNCINV: "Grand larceny."

[long, *hilarious* pause]

Oh, we needed Meredith to change the subject entirely so we could set up this hysterically funny joke.  Do you think the pause was there to give the audience enough time to pick themselves up off the floor?  Personally, I think it needed to be a good 30 seconds longer so I would have time to wipe the 7-Up off my TV screen after I heard the funniest thing in the world and did an enormous spit take.

That's the second thing I hate: bad jokes, and in particular bad jokes that put a gap in like "Whoa, can you believe someone just said this crazy thing???"  It's a fake crazy thing.  That didn't really happen, you just had a guy say that.  If it were real, maybe it would be a little funny.  As a written joke it sucks shit.  Sorry.

I know - believe me, I know - that the people who write ads are not professional comedy writers.  But why even bother trying to put in jokes when the attempts are this feeble?  If you're incapable of making a normal commercial, you need to at least go a lot crazier in an attempt to be memorable. I can't imagine anyone finding this post because they Googled "hilarious Progressive grand larceny ad."

(On the other hand, I just scrolled through the first dozen comments on that YouTube video and... yikes.  There really is no accounting for taste.)

Flo: "How about we get back to the savings?"

[Overlapping dialogue of everyone agreeing]

Okay, so do they care or do they not care?  If you're telling me that people care about the savings they can get with Progressive, but absolutely zone out whenever a Progressive ad comes on TV, you're writing an ad that argues against the existence of your own job.  Brilliant?

Just to annoy me further, in the YouTube version of this ad, Flo appears at the end and thanks you for "sticking around" to see more "great content," which turns out to be an additional nine seconds of very much not funny outtakes.  Oh yeah, if you thought the stuff they were willing to put on TV was mediocre, wait until you see what they WEREN'T.

Get the Zelle out of here

There are a lot of advertising tropes that I really cannot stand (obviously).  But then there are the ones that just baffle me.

 

Yes. Like that.

Dad: "Let's finish that smile.  There we go.  That's perfect!"

Neighbor [walking up]: "Wow!  That's incredible!"

Mom: "Incredible?  Yeah.  Using Zelle to send money to friends and family right from your banking app is incredible."

Neighbor: "Oh.  No, I was talking about the snowmen."

Dad: "I know, right?  This one's saying that with Zelle, he can send money to other snowmen pretty much wherever they bank."

[Neighbor stares blankly, then walks away]

Dad: "I like that guy."

That's the whole ad.  I know that 30 seconds isn't a lot of time in which to do, really, anything, and I guess you are getting across the basic message here - Zelle is some sort of money-sending program that works from the banking app you were already using.  But one thing I will never understand is making ads in which your protagonists, the ones who are clearly using your product and are tasked with evangelizing on its behalf, are not just weird obsessives BUT ARE CLEARLY ACKNOWLEDGED IN THE WORLD OF THE AD TO BE WEIRD OBSESSIVES.  I always found stuff like "the bar that only serves DiSaronno" to be amusing for its patently absurd unreality, but wouldn't it be an even stranger sell if the commercial featured someone walking into the bar, ordering a gin and tonic, and then doing a Jim Halpert take to the camera when told that his order is required to contain a specific brand of amaretto?

Now, using weirdos who no one else in the world of the ad likes to sell your product is nothing new -

- but it remains baffling.  And usually the ads that do this are at least going for a laugh, which I suppose is an excuse for the tactic, albeit not a very good one.  But is this ad even trying to be funny?  The "I like that guy" line is framed like a punchline, but well, you could have fooled me.

This isn't the only ad in this series featuring this family, and you'd better believe it doesn't improve.

 

Same couple, same reactions from everyone else - in fact even worse, because here you get blank stares from some of their friends and visible embarrassment from the children.  "God, it was bad enough when he started working Zelle into our bedtime stories. I just can't deal with this anymore!"

(By the way: bargain-basement Will Ferrell knockoff.  Tell me I'm wrong.)

And this second ad does the same nonsense at the end, where it feels like it's trying to go out on a joke but just does not know what jokes are.  "Brussels sprouts came out perfect?"  Oh man, my sides!  It is really hilarious just to name a vegetable, right, guys?  I don't claim to be the world's funniest person or some grand high arbiter of what's funny, but I defy you to make a case for this being in any way amusing.

There are several more of these, but I won't torture you.  Okay, one more.

 

(By the way, the gaps they need to leave in the dialogue of these ads to get them to 30 seconds, you could drive a fucking truck through.)

This one, I think, makes it pretty clear that they are trying to go out on jokes.  It's almost funny, so some points there, but this is also by far the most obnoxious that these parents have been.  "What's that?  Sorry I wasn't listening to the start or end of what you were saying.  My brain can store exactly one fact at a time and right now it's this Zelle thing!  Check back in six months, maybe I'll have room to learn about mighty gonorrhea or whatever."  And again, having the daughter be so annoyed (justifiably!) by hearing a pitch for this product... in an ad that is a pitch for the product... whose side am I supposed to be on?  The way it's filmed, I don't see how I'm supposed to be on the side of the couple.  So you are telling me, in an ad for Zelle, that people who use Zelle and love it are annoying and hated by everyone they know.  Nailed it!  How can I possibly resist a sales pitch like that, fellas?