Sun Jan 11 23:10:43 EST 2004

There is a commercial for Master Card that I do not understand. It usually airs during football games. There’s a guy with hedge clippers trimming a bush into the shape of a football player. The bush is on someone’s front yard. Donovan McNabb (Philadelphia Eagles quarterback) walks out of his house to pick up his morning newspaper. The guy with the hedge clippers sees McNabb and presents him the trimmed bush, evidently in honor of McNabb. McNabb looks at the bush with disdain and says “It’s not my yard.” The guy with the clippers was trying to impress McNabb so as to win tickets to The Big Game. The guy flips a little, realizing he just trimmed the hedges of McNabb’s neighbor. McNabb’s neighbor appears and sees the guy with the clippers slinking away. The neighbor yells “Hey, you!”

That’s the punchline, but what’s missing from this narrative is the background music. The song is “Wishin’ and Hopin'”, sung by Dusty Springfield and covered by many others.

As the commercial fades to exit the Dusty is saying “All you gotta do is hold him and kiss him and squeeze him and love him … ”

So is that what the guy with the hedge clippers has to do to impress Donovan McNabb? If so, what exactly is the guy with the clippers hoping to get from McNabb?

I don’t appreciate the violence in recent commercials. There’s this commercial that shows a trio of corporate types marching to a Big Meeting. The boss asks an underling if he has the information they need for this meeting. The guy says “It’s all up here,” pointing to his head. Then the underling smashes his face into a file cabinet drawer and, for as much as you know so far, drops dead in the hallway.

Cut to the boss, who left his employee dead in the hall. The boss goes to the meeting anyway. (And by the way, that meeting is in a conference room on a high floor of some office building in Manhattan, I’m guessing on or around 57th Street, and the view from the conference room is familiar enough to me I might swear I sat through meetings in that exact room. It could be.)

The boss’ other underling appears, and after apparently getting a death bed brain dump from the first guy, he whispers into the boss’ ear that that other guy told him everything.

Then the violence resumes, as this second underling crashes his face into the conference room table.

It’s unpleasant.

The point of the commercial is that data should be backed up effectively. I don’t know how data backup would have helped the boss in this situation. He was evidently a figurehead with distant flunkies doing work about which he had no concept. This boss prepeared to lead meetings with executive rhetoric and managerial flourishes. The commercial sorta kinda addresses the common issue of basing your business on a single point of failure.

Another commercial shows a guy who bought a digital camera. While showing off his new camera he mumbles the price he paid for it. Someone says she got the same camera online for $50 less than him. The guy, feeling the pain of having wasted money he could have saved shopping online, enters a metaphorical boxing ring. Punches, thuds, black eyes, his body flies about for being punched so hard by some invisible sparring partner. It’s really unpleasant to see. I get the joke, ha ha. But why must the message be so painful?

I wince when these commercials come on. I scramble for the remote. I don’t enjoy them. I don’t like violence. Emotional, physical, political. Anger, to me, is a show of weakness.

So what century did I grow up in? Or as Churchill might have asked: Up in which century did I grow?