Badvertising: Optimum Triple Play

Its a little known fact that Cable Companies need to suck the sanity out of their customers in order to survive. They're like "sanity vampires", if you will. Each has their own method for sucking the life-force out of your brain so that they can feast on it like the sick twisted demons from hell that they are.

For example, Time Warner likes to feud with the NFL so we can't get NFL network. This means that we can't watch a bunch of games which were stupidly moved to Thursday nights for the very purpose of allowing us to watch them.

Comcast likes to... well maybe it would be faster to state the ways that Comcast doesn't try to drive the sanity from their customers. For example: as far as I know, Comcast has never egged a customer's house. And I'm not too sure about that. That's the only thing I can think of that they don't do in their quest to suck out people's sanity.

Here in New York there is a cable company called Cablevision, which packages its products as "Optimum", and calls its main service package "The Optimum Triple Play". Its your standard Phone, Internet and Cable package like you could get from any other company. But how does Optimum set itself apart? What method does it use to drive people insane in order to harvest their sanity?

Commercials.

Really annoying, crazy ass, shitty, catchy commercials.

Played EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

"What's so bad about that?" you ask. "Commercials get repeated all the time". Shut up. You don't know.

First, lets enjoy a classic Optimum spot that ran every single day for about 6 months this year:


Those women's voices are like a drill in my brain. "8-7-7! 3-9-3! 4! 4! 4! Eiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii"

Its loud, its annoying, and what the hell is up with that rapping guy dressed in the sea serpent costume? Seriously, who thought that would make people want to buy cable?

After months of this torture, Optimum finally stopped playing this add. Apparently that well of insanity was tapped dry. Lucky for them, they found a new one:



AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Every single day. Always right during my episode of The Simpsons. Its become a reflex now that whenever I see the opening for this spot I rush to turn off the volume and then flee the room for a good 3 minutes, just to be sure. Its like a reverse Pavlovian experiment.

And another thing: WHY DOES THE PHONE NUMBER CHANGE? In the first its 393-4448. In the second its 333-4001. This is the same company advertising the same product. Did they deliberately change their phone number to one more suited to the melody of the new song?

One thing I love is the puppet in the second part of the add, the "adult" with long hair and goatee who still lives with his parents. Its really funny to have him as the one saying how great and fast the Internet downloads are, when you know he's using it to download Muppet snuff films at 100 MPS.

There's probably some really offensive racist aspect to both of these ads, what with the stereotyping of Latinos and all, but I'm a white guy and therefore wholly unqualified to bitch about that.

Ironically, I don't even think you can get Cablevision in my neighborhood, though the only reason I'd want to buy from them is if they promised to never show these ads on my TV again.