The Ad Pundit: DirecTV - Don't Wake Up in a Roadside Ditch

We have once again almost arrived at the event which many consider to be the Super Bowl of advertising: The Super Bowl!

That means next week will be Super Bowl retro week in which I look back at Super Bowl ads from years past.

Here is a selection from last year's Super Bowl retro week:

Hare Jordan

Fence

Frogs

i-Opener

Just be warned that I will not be reviewing any of the Super Bowl ads that been pre-released on the web, most prominently the Volkswagen Star Wars dogs ad.

I am not a fan of this trend where companies release their Super Bowl ads before the game itself. It's kind of like when a person is so excited about a Christmas gift that they bought someone that they give it to them before Christmas.

When I'm watching ads during the Super Bowl, I want to be surprised and entertained by new ads, not by something I've seen already!

But before we get into the Super Bowl ads, I'm going to review a current commercial that will not be shown during the Super Bowl. It is from DirecTV and attempts to show us the perils of having cable instead of DirecTV.

We start off with a man frustrated by being placed on hold by his cable company's customer service.

Now this is something I can relate to! I know just how hellish an experience it can be trying to deal with a cable company's customer service line. You have to navigate through seemingly hundreds of menu choices only to wait about an hour to speak to a living person, who usually ends up being less than helpful.

Trying to work off his frustration, the man engages in physical exercise - in this case, a game of racquetball. This seems like a healthy way to burn off stress, as I too enjoy a spirited game of racquetball from time to time.

Here's where the problem comes in: The man is both unskilled and unprepared to actually play racquetball.

At almost every racquetball club, there are signs that warn players to use proper eye protection. As an experienced player, I can tell you that the ball moves very quickly, and the threat of eye trauma is very real. By playing without any sort of eye protection, he pretty much invites disaster upon himself.

Aside from his lack of goggles, there is another major problem: Both he and his opponent don't seem to actually know how to play the game.

Racquetball is a game of quickness and agility more so than power. Simply standing there and smacking the ball as hard as you can is not generally an effective technique if you want to win the game.

If he had just moved around the court a little and used finesse instead of pure power, he probably could have avoided his eye injury altogether. He must also have extremely poor reflexes, as he was standing decently far back when the ball struck him. You're telling me he couldn't have dodged that ball?

Next, we see the man being treated by a doctor. Apparently the injury was severe enough that it requires him to wear an eye patch. It didn't look like the ball hit him THAT hard, but maybe it just was perfect placement.

I suppose it is possible that he just had LASIK or some other eye surgery, and his eyes are especially sensitive. But if that was the case, then by not wearing goggles, he really deserved to have his eye injured.

Now he has to ride the bus home wearing an eye patch.

He didn't have anyone who could give him a ride? What happened to his racquetball opponent? You'd think the guy might have at least given him a ride home.

Unfortunately, also riding on this bus is a gang of hoodlums. Based on the look of these guys, I think that it doesn't take much to set them off. They might have used the eye patch as their motivation to go after him, but I have the feeling they were just looking for an excuse to attack someone.

What kind of neighborhood does this guy live in anyway? When they show him running, it looks kind of barren. Maybe instead of spending his money on cable or DirecTV, he should look into moving to a nice neighborhood where he isn't in danger of getting attacked by gangs on the bus.

Finally, he ends up in a roadside ditch. Did the guys who beat him up dump him in the ditch? That seems like a lot of extra effort on their part. They probably would have just left him bleeding on the street.

In the end, he might like to blame the cable company for all of his problems. But by choosing to live in such a bad neighborhood, and by eschewing proper eye protection, it seems that going with cable was just one of several bad decisions he has made.