More Annoying Commercials

 

Curmie has written a couple times in the past year or so about television commercials that annoy him—a pair of ads for the well-known board game Monopoly and one particular spot for Red Baron pizza.  Now it’s time for another round.

We start with the trio of ads that came out this fall for the Hello Apple Intelligence campaign, featuring actress Bella Ramsey.  Curmie never watched “Games of Thrones” and can’t remember her from “Resistance,” the only one of her credits he’s actually seen, so he doesn’t know whether or not she’s truly as horrible an actress as she appears to be in these commercials… but this post isn’t about her histrionic abilities. 

One of the ads, “Custom Memory Movies” (which Curmie never saw on TV, only online in doing some quick research for this piece), in which she comes to the rescue of a father trying to deliver a eulogy for his daughter’s beloved goldfish, is moderately cute and actually pretty inoffensive, if not exactly plausible. 

The other two, though, present some ethical issues.  AI has its uses, but, as Curmie mentioned last time, more than a few of those uses are to make deception easier, whether we’re talking about plagiarism or a different kind of misrepresentation.

In one spot, “More Personal Siri,” Ramsey uses her spiffy new iPhone to remember the name of someone she met “a couple of months ago at Café Grenel.”  At one level, this would appear to be a pretty innocuous use of the technology.  But whereas she could have responded to the man’s surprise that she remembers him with a platitude about seeing him again, she launches into a lie, “as soon as I saw you I’m like, it’s Zac.”  (Curmie is particularly amused by the error in the subtitles: how better to show off how great your product is, right?)  True, there are worse things, but this isn’t exactly a white lie, either… call it pearl grey.

The remaining ad, “Email Summary,” is more troubling.  Here, Ramsey, presumably as herself, uses her phone to pretend to have read an email pitch from the woman (producer? agent?) she’s apparently lunching with.  Not least of the problems here is that she may have just expressed interest in a project that if she’d actually read the email she’d dismiss out of hand.  Of course, the other woman would have to be pretty much of an imbecile not to notice the evasion, so how does that sell the product?  “If all you need to do is fool an idiot, we can help”?  But even if the subterfuge were a little more elegant, it’s difficult to see how “we make it easier to lie to your colleagues” scores very high on the Our-Product-Makes-the-World-a-Better-Place scale.

But Curmie hasn’t seen those Apple ads in several weeks.  What he has seen, often several times in an evening if he and Beloved Spouse happen to be watching old TV shows on Hulu, is a commercial for Kesimpta, a medication for those suffering from multiple sclerosis.  The spot features actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler, best known for “The Sopranos” (another show Curmie didn’t watch), who actually has relapsing MS and, one presumes, actually uses Kesimpta to control her symptoms.  I truly hope the product does work; I wouldn’t wish MS on anyone.

Curmie has two problems with the ad, however, one general and one specific.  The general one has bothered Curmie for decades: what is to be gained by advertising a prescription medication to the public?  Are we really ready to believe that the cost of advertising is offset by patients walking into their doctors’ offices and saying, in effect, “Look, I know you’ve got a medical degree and all, and I flunked high school biology, but I saw this ad on TV the other night, and I think you ought to prescribe this stuff for me.”  Any doctor who’d pay any attention to that argument deserves to lose their license.

But, Gentle Reader, what really drives Curmie crazy about this ad in particular is something else.  The spot proceeds predictably.  We see Sigler now able to lead a pretty much normal life: she takes a walk with a friend, does an interview, plays cornhole, and plays catch with a boy we presume to be her son.  It’s this last thing that I want to talk about.

As the photo above shows, she’s about to catch a baseball that’s coming in about sternum high.  But her glove is facing up, not out, and she pretty much catches the ball with her bare hand: not the best way to protect her hand in general or those nicely manicured fingernails in particular.  Or to demonstrate proper technique to her young companion, for that matter.  Yes, the ball was lobbed, but come on…

It’s also telling that Sigler’s father-in-law is Lenny “Nails” Dystra, a good-fielding centerfielder for several major league seasons.  In 1986, he was one of the stars of the last New York Mets team (Curmie’s team since their inception) to win the World Series.  It would be unkind and no doubt erroneous to attribute Nails’s stroke earlier this year to seeing that ad, but it is certainly embarrassing.  Sigler should know better.  The director should know better.  The corporation marketing exec who signed off on the commercial should know better.  Hell, the kid should know better.

The Apple ads seem intended to encourage deceit, but the Kesimpta ad actually annoys Curmie more.  It demonstrates that ineptitude is its own special variety of unethical behavior.