Radio commercials
One aspect of my life as a performer and writer is that I get really caught up in the shortcomings of radio and television commercials.
Television commercial shortcomings actually are far fewer and more forgivable than those for radio. It’s rare for a TV commercial to reach the air with some of the demented (to me) amateurism I hear on radio in the few minutes per day that I listen. I think this is because everybody thinks they can go for huge effects in a radio commercial using the people in the office, whereas for TV the pitfalls of this approach quickly become evident. Then they either give up and just do voices over a shot of the product, or go the other way and make it seem like they purposely did a cheesy awful commercial.
But on the radio, you can go and do lots of things right but still come up with a debacle. For instance, there’s a commercial for Autobell auto wash with two utterly disjointed narrative threads — “precociously cliched arguing kids” and “smooth-voiced pitch man.” The commercial actually has decent production values and rns smoothly. the main travesty is in the copy — it never occurred to anyone that the narrator should at least mention how getting your car cleaned by Autobell could make you forget the two bickering brats in the back seat, or something — justify their existence somehow, Autobell! Plus the kids are THE ABSOLUTE WORST of the breed.
