I don’t know if it’s an inevitability in the process of growing older, or simply an increase in overall self-awareness, but I’ve begun to slowly realize that I’m a Hater. From mild pet peeves to global political trends, for every order of magnitude of things I can observe in life, I’m probably dissatisfied with some aspect of it. I don’t think this is abnormal, exactly. Everyone dislikes things, and while I’ve become more open about saying how I feel about the ones I’m not okay with, especially on a local scale — under the philosophy that if I say nothing, nothing will change, and small-scale change often has a relatively accessible barrier to entry — I also have to check myself on this process, especially for things that are less likely to be actionable; too much salt is bad for the diet, and such.
To reiterate, I really do believe that this is normal behavior. This is mild, perhaps undeserved, self-reassurance, to be sure, but it’s also not like I’m only a Hater; I’m also a Liker. I have interests! I like things, too, in coexistence with others that I don’t. If you know me, or you’ve read this blog, you know that one of the these things is sports. I like playing them, and I like watching them; these activities consume a significant portion of my waking hours. This information is all quite fascinating, I’m sure — thank you for reading my third grade essay describing how I enjoy some things, but not others — but I promise that I’m building to something, here.
Continuing with this rhetoric device, where I make a simplistic, broad statement slowly progressing toward an actual point: sometimes, to have things that you like, you have to deal with other things that you dislike. (Wow; so profound.) Part of the traditional tax for being someone who enjoys watching sports has been watching commercials alongside the content that you actually care about. If you think about it, this is a rather weird dichotomy. Normally, if you dislike a thing, you are allowed to stop engaging with that thing directly. If you don’t like a product, you can not buy the product; if you don’t like a person, you can avoid their company; the list goes on, and obviously there are other exceptions (we’ll ignore the global-scale ones that might be problematic for the human race, as above, in service of making a point), but you get it. With commercials, however, you’re absolutely a captive audience. You recognize the necessity — that in part, these are economically subsidizing the viewing of the thing that you like — but you have relatively limited freedom to negotiate this part of the experience. Want to watch your favorite team play? You’re routinely beholden to interruptions from several minutes of content in which you have absolutely no interest; have fun¹.
“Being unwanted content” is not, however, the only problem plaguing most ads. Conventional wisdom in advertising dictates that impressions are key; any tactic that can get viewers to remember your product name and increase brand recognition is worthwhile. An effective way to accomplish this is to make a clever ad, but this is hard, because creativity is difficult; a far easier way to accomplish this is by being annoying. This leads to a rather unholy mixture, where viewers are made to watch undesired material that is made with an incentive structure that partially promotes it being as grating as possible. Naturally, this has also led to the time-honored — and justified — Hater tradition of complaining about bad ads.
But you knew all this already! You live in a society — you’re well aware of the macroscopic trends and implicit reasons why things are bad, and you’ve almost certainly listened to someone talking about how much they dislike a particular commercial; maybe you’ve even participated in this type of catharsis yourself, in an attempt to nurture social bonds with your fellow monkey — the capstone of years of civilization and linguistic development globalizing shared experiences so that we can collectively fling poo at the thing that sucks. You don’t need this introductory backdrop, but I do. I have led with the fact that I’m prone to disliking things, and followed it up by revealing that I’m aware of the broader trend that ads are a commonly disliked thing — along with the reasons why this is so — to let you know that I am self-aware enough to realize that I am yelling at a cloud, but that I am also informed as to the reasons why this particular cloud exists. I have additionally contextualized this by noting that I am less likely to complain about things that I can’t effectively change, implicitly guiding you towards the following (correct) conclusion: I do not actually complain about ads very often. This is all in service of lending gravitas to the following statement, the thesis for this particular literary exercise:
Holy hell, those Kate McKinnon Verizon ads are AWFUL.
I’m going to back up a second, and talk about some trends here leading to why exactly I find these particular ads to be so odious. For one, “television watching” is not actually the same activity it used to be, especially in the context of advertising. The bargain you used to enter was that there was television, and it was broadcast over the airwaves; you would watch the singular source of the thing you were interested in, and the Devil would play some siren songs on his fiddle in the intermissions, telling you to go buy Alka-Seltzer or whatever. Nowadays, streaming services are proprietary and fragmented; the Devil cannot book himself in a million small venues, nor is it practical for him to do so. Ads are targeted and niche — the Devil can fiddle specifically for you! — but may be only bought by a few providers on a given stream. Due to the Byzantine nature of digital rights management, if you subscribe to a cord-cutting service that restreams cable programming, this is also how the ads on its programming work; the regular broadcast is spliced over by stream-specific ads at every intermission, so you only see ads from the companies that happen to have bought digital-only airtime.
This brave new world has developed an interesting quirk: even on prominently rebroadcasted pieces of media, such as sporting events, the number of slots for commercial airtime vastly outstrips the number of companies that have actually paid for advertising space. What this means is that you see the same ads, sometimes in ridiculous proportions — especially if you happen to be watching content with a limited surface area. My favorite stupid example of this is a brief period from a month or two ago when Crunchyroll, which normally is strapped enough to fill commercial space that they resort to running proprietary ads for their own shows during breaks, was lucky enough to have Amazon pay to run ads instead. On the one hand: good for them, they got the bag! On the other hand: Amazon was clearly the only company that had actually bought ad airtime, and furthermore, had only given Crunchyroll two or so variants of ad to run.
This ultimately led to the following viewing experience, which oscillated between being abrasive and completely hilarious: An ad break in a Crunchyroll show would consist of four 15-second slots. All of these slots had been bought by Amazon, but they had only provided 2 different 15-second ads to run (or occasionally, seemingly only one). Therefore, the entire 60-second ad break would consist of multiple copies of the same two ads — or, even better, running the same exact ad four times in a row, approximating “ad infinitum” in a much more literal sense than the original intent of the expression. The net effect was an empirical study in finding out exactly how long it takes to drill completely meaningless information into one’s head; spoiler: it does not take very long. I memorized the ad copy; “Maureen is saving big holiday shopping on Amazon, so now she’s free to become Maureen the Merrier. Food is her love language…”. I was slightly annoyed at myself for forgetting, sometimes, if she merely “loves her grandson, like, really loves” or “really loves her grandson, like, really loves.” I wondered if there was a Maureen Expanded Universe. I envisioned a Maureen entry on the Holiday Shopping fandom Wikia; “Trivia: Food is her love language. Blood type: unknown.” I idly questioned my life choices. I recalled that captive prisoners had also been subjected to repetitive audiovisual content by certain nation-states; I wondered if Crunchyroll was aware that they had inspired this particular comparison.
Watching less niche content doesn’t reach quite these heights of ridiculousness, but the number of advertisers is still limited (comparatively to the traditional broadcast space), and the increased frequency of the particular ads that run on your content of choice still magnifies the examination of their shortcomings. Most of them suffer sins that are explainable and/or forgivable; for example, there is the “car commercial” sect of bad ad, which is the least-bad kind, really, in that it’s inoffensive and forgettable. These typically consist of a few lines about how a car is cool, juxtaposed with footage of driving it through some exotic location (or mundane location made to look exotic), followed by some mumbo jumbo about interest rates and zero percent APR or whatever. This ad is not unique or creative, and maybe it entrenches the make and model of this car somewhere in my lizard brain, but I doubt it; its defining characteristic is that it will have left my working memory within 30 seconds.
Another significant genus with a justifiable shortcoming is the “annoying jingle” ad, which quadruples down on trying to worm its way into my subconscious; I’d rather the information not end up there, but I respect the creative feat of making it happen. It’s a little bit questionable if this actually works for brand recognition — I remember the stupid lyric of “I’ll grab a ta-co be-cause it’s late” rather than whatever car was in that ad — but, sure. This is usually a subset of the “trying too hard” ad, which is an attempt at creativity that falls flat. The aforementioned Amazon ads with the various Christmas shoppers, aside from being the temporary bane of my sanity, are a great example of this; wow, they’re playing Take on Me with handbells, so quirky, cool, I guess you have enough money to license popular songs for an ad that isn’t actually funny, but you do you. There are many other subcategories of bad ads, but generally one of the following things are true: either there is some attempt at creativity, or they are self-aware enough to stay out of their own way.
And now we have come full circle, to the line of Verizon ads starring Kate McKinnon, which have been playing in outsize proportions during sporting events during the last several months, especially on streaming services. Their creativity is negligible; their self-awareness is non-existent. The Verizon marketing department has hired a known comedic actor to read marketing copy, verbatim, and pantomime things that resemble comedy, if you were not actually familiar with the essence of what might cause a person to laugh at something. There is an attempt at a unique aesthetic; the ads are on a white background that appears to be a soundstage, with overhead lights, and extras, who are meant to be Verizon customers(?) standing around in various configurations. These surroundings serve no purpose. Kate McKinnon gesticulates wildly — usually at nonsensical intervals — walks awkwardly, and occasionally says rhyming words. I assume she got paid handsomely.
In practice, I’m aware of the realistic reasons why ads like this can come into being. Committee writing and creativity-by-consensus hamstrings things incredibly; I have sat in a writers’ room, with a bunch of people I know to be inventive and funny in everyday life, and produced tepid, lukewarm, blandly comedic output. I have mentioned above that I am aware of the overarching imperative to create memorable advertising at all costs; perhaps the Verizon marketing department has navigated the 5D chess board brilliantly, by spurring me to write this blog post about how much I hate them, ignoring that I am now extremely unlikely to become a Verizon customer unless I become a captive audience, forced into such a situation by my lack of agency within the pseudo-monopoly of telecommunications services.
I know these things! And yet I still legitimately wonder how this series of ads exists, because they are so creatively bankrupt that I refuse to believe any actual human — nor group — could sign off on this, and be proud of their work and comfortable with putting this content out into the world. At some level, I suspect that these ads are made by lizard people; put yourself in the shoes of a body-snatching alien desperately trying not to blow your cover amongst the Earthlings, and it actually makes sense. You would mimic the behaviors of your surroundings, blindly regurgitating behavior without fully comprehending the underlying content — the humans find humor when the lady makes wide eyes and waves her hands; if she points at the sky for us, they will laugh and buy our phones. It is not altogether surprising that the Verizon marketing department appears to employ a critical mass of individuals with this complete lack of human ingenuity and inherent spark; you will meet this personality type often, unfortunately, as you hitchhike through Corporate America, in greater concentrations the further you infiltrate the droll bureaucracy. If you find yourself surrounded, it is well past time to extricate yourself, lest ye be assimilated.
It’s not as if I’m off in the woods here, either. This particular ad campaign has proven irritating enough to spawn near universal revulsion — the outlets for this are admittedly self-selecting, but it says something that these commercials seem to have a bigger target on their back than anything else currently airing. YouTube reposts of these ads contain nearly unanimously negative comment sections; Googling “Kate McKinnon Verizon ads” immediately turns up multiple blog posts and tweets complaining about them. /r/CommercialsIHate, a support group for fellow cloud-yellers, has had reposts of this ad campaign cycle to the top of the subreddit for several months running. There are unfortunately a number of sketchy and bad takes within this otherwise justified hate — mostly weird and rather untoward comments about McKinnon herself, which I won’t repost. This makes me slightly hesitant to throw my hat into the ring alongside this messenger-shooting (and often offensive) discourse — is it too much to ask that you hate things for the right reasons? Thanks; signed, your fellow Hater — but I came to the conclusion that these ads suck independently, stumbling upon these groups after several months’ worth of growing resentment spurred me to search for the Internet’s reaction to this campaign, in an attempt to find mutual dislike (and therefore validation of my opinion, via tribal consensus). My hat, and my Hate, are my own.
It is reassuring that the prevailing sentiment concerning these ads is disgust (ignoring the finer points of the more misguided variants of this aversion). You could argue — and you wouldn’t be wrong, necessarily — that it is somewhat dystopian that these ads exist in the first place. A company can be large, entrenched, and unassailable enough that it can burn money, time, and presumably significant effort creating a thing that inspires unanimous loathing, with essentially no practical consequences; we may yell at the clouds, but the corporation sits in the tower atop them, unassailable. But it would truly be scary if the emotional reaction also disappeared — if we collectively became inoculated to, or unable to express our dissatisfaction with, this type of blandly soulless assault on our senses masquerading as relatable content. (This sentiment is admittedly melodramatic, although maybe less so than you think, given recent product decisions in the technological sector.) If my efforts to find like-minded (dislike-minded? hate-minded?) Haters had instead solely uncovered a group of smiling folks trying to convince me that these ads were fine — “why are you so worried? Sure, the script might be a little bland, but you’re not the target market!,” they say, as the target market removes its human mask and lazily flicks its tongue to catch a fly on the patio in the background — I would worry; it is nice to be reassured that you are not, in fact, Principal Skinner.
There is a moment in a rap battle — Tsu Surf vs. Calicoe — where one of the rappers, Calicoe, projects his performance directly at a member of his opponent’s entourage, who immediately claps back at him in completely unfiltered defiance — “that shit ASS, PUSSY.” I think about this moment a lot; it is somewhat of a seminal work in my personal studies of the Hater genre. There are things in life, including these ads, that I feel this way towards — where I believe the thing I have been presented with has no merit, deserves none of my regard, and furthermore, should be summarily dismissed by any reasonable human being — yet I doubt that I will ever be able to express my sentiments as concisely as this random hypeman. I wish that I could scream this in the face of the Verizon marketing executives who have propagated this campaign. I wish that the broader consensus about these ads (which is basically also this, in multifarious forms) would be respected, and that having the audacity to broadly distribute annoying, intellectually stagnant commercials that waste untold hours of human attention would be punished appropriately. I wish that these things would happen, as a form of catharsis, so that I would feel “better? Better!” — parroting the marketing copy now permanently ingrained in my head, as I pull my sleeve down to cover the scales forming on my wrist.
[1] Sports suffer uniquely awfully for this in the modern era. Other content can be recorded and watched on-demand, but a large part of the appeal for sporting events is watching them live, meaning that you have to sit through the ads.
