Weekend Diversion: Current favourite commercials

I love advertising, TV commercials in particular. That’s obvious—and why I have a tag called “Advertising” so that other fans can find those posts. At any given moment there are ads that are may favourites for any number of reasons: Because they work, because they’re well made, because they break new ground—the list is endless. These are my current favourite TV ads.

The ad up top is from Vodafone, which is running a series of ads promoting “the future according to…”. The reason I like that ad so much is that I also absolutely loathe corporate speak and its related jargon. When I first saw the ad, I thought it was as it seemed, then the joke is revealed at the end. Anything that takes the piss out of insufferably pompous corporate jargon warms the cockles of my heart.

The other newest ad in the series is cute, as the previous ones are, too:



An ad for Australian underwear sold in New Zealand was revived because it’s timely (and I first saw it recently):



This ad is one of a series for Tradie Underwear (which is apparently a good product, though I don’t know). They all have similar humour, but this one has a scene at the end in which Nick “Honey Badger” Cummins, a former Australian rugby player who is now a media personality, holds a big trophy. This is funny because it looks an awful lot like the Bledisloe Cup, a rugby trophy awarded to the winner of a rugby test series between New Zealand and Australia that’s been held every year since 1932. New Zealand has won it a bit more often than Australia has, and has held the cup since 2003, and won it again yesterday night. That’s fifteen long years that Australia hasn’t seen the trophy in its hands, hence the joke.

This ad from last year was meant to be faux arty, but it also has the same sort of humour that the other ads in the series have had for years:



How about American ads? Even on the other side of the world I see American TV ads, and my current favourite is a series of ads for some company called “esurance” that feature Dennis Quaid. This was the first one I saw:


What I like about the ad is its easy-going humour, its self-mockery in particular. It makes fun of the fact that nearly all ads use actors by using bland names for some of the people in the ad, and calls out the clichés also used in ads. And, Dennis Quaid really is likable.

Here’s the long version, which is slightly different:



And that's this week's distraction from things that matter. And, I should add, I have not been paid anything by anyone to share these commercials. Of course.