Enotes

They were television advertising icons who resided on the banks of our cultural consciousness. Mr. Whipple (Charmin bathroom tissue). Madge the manicurist (Palmolive dish detergent). The Maytag Repair Man. Even the Qantas koala bear. Those were just a few commercial characters who invaded our living rooms in the 1970s and '80s. Their ads---usually 60 seconds in length or even longer---were rarely the same. The format might have been nearly identical, and of course the tag lines were ("DON'T squeeze the Charmin!"), but each appearance by Mr. Whipple or Madge usually had them interacting with different customers. The actors behind the characters were often nameless, as it should have been, but I'm sure their paychecks weren't nameless---or paltry. The pitchman on TV these days is usually a local litigator or a voice-over hawking prescription meds. There isn't really any character that is iconic---no one who, when they appear on the screen, instantl...

Before the commercial airwaves on television were taken over by ads for prescription drugs, lawyers and car insurance companies, there was the wild and crazy pitchman. Every city had them. The products being pumped were usually electronics, appliances and used cars. The ads were low on productions costs---usually all we saw was the pitchman screaming into the camera with an occasional glimpse at what he was hawking. The emphasis was on the supposed insanity of the pitchman, because the deals were so good, you see. New York had Crazy Eddie, who pitched electronic gizmos while shrieking maniacally at the viewer. And Detroit had Ollie Fretter. Fretter, who passed away Sunday at age 91, blanketed the TV and radio ad space with commercials for his appliance store, starting in the 1960s and continuing for about 30 years. He promised five pounds of free coffee if he couldn't beat your best deal. The appliance wars in Detroit were hot in the 1970s and '80s. Fretter went...

McDonald's has been covering its, ahem, bases for years. The fast food chain's second most famous signature sandwich (after the Big Mac), the Quarter Pounder, has been tightly covered with a disclaimer ever since it hit the market. The beef patty, McDonald's has long put into tiny print, weighs the requisite four ounces "before cooking." After it hits the grill, it's anyone's guess. But a Quarter Pounder can be called a quarter pound, using the "before cooking" caveat. I wonder how Subway is going to put the toothpaste back into the tube. The sandwich chain has been called out, big time. Already they're calling it a "scamwich." A photo hit the Internet the other day, visual evidence that a Subway Foot Long sub comes up a tad short. A full inch, in fact. The poster of the pic, a customer from Australia of all places, captioned the photo of the Foot Long with a tape measure on top of it, with "Subway pls respond....

Just take a pill! Just drink a shot! If you watch TV advertising these days, it seems as if the country needs help going to sleep and waking up, and with plenty of things in between. Like my lovely wife so astutely pointed out, "It's like this country has turned into one big Elvis Presley." Yeah---or Michael Jackson. Meaning, TV advertisers look at us like the late rock-and-roll and pop stars, who infamously would take gobs of pills and other meds to sleep, and gobs more to get themselves back up, and gobs more just to get through the day. I'm uneasy as to where we're headed. Last night it struck me. I've never professed to be a fast learner. It was a commercial for a sleep aid that set me off. I started to think of the fancy-shmancy "sleep number" beds and other sleep aids I see advertised, which led me to think of the 5 Hour Energy spots and others similar. The 5 Hour Energy commercials stick in my craw. They dismiss coffee as eithe...

The question goes like this: "What would YOU do for a Klondike bar?" I'm not sure what I would do, exactly, but I'd do some things. I'd do some things, because there is something wonderfully simple yet with largesse about a Klondike bar. You know what a Klondike bar is, right? It's that block of vanilla ice cream generously covered in chocolate, wrapped by hand, it seems, in foil. When eaten immediately out of the freezer, before it gets a chance to get remotely soft, is the best way to eat a Klondike. They have different flavors, but I think I like the old fashioned vanilla the best. They come in packages of six and I start to get sad as early as when the third one gets lifted from the freezer, for that means it won't be long before we're out of Klondikes. Mrs. Eno doesn't buy Klondikes every week, and that's a good thing, because absence makes the stomach grow fonder. Klondikes wouldn't make me nearly as happy if they were...

Whatever happened to Mr. Belvedere? Or Marilyn Turner, hawking Carpet Center? How about Bob Allison for Bobson Construction? Remember Mel Farr and his cape, "flying" through the skies over Metro Detroit, promising a "Farr better deal" on Ford cars? Or the Metro Detroit Ford Dealers commercials, which always featured sports celebrities, including all the Detroit sports team coaches at one time or another? I'm still wondering if anyone got five pounds of free coffee from Ollie Fretter for finding a deal that he couldn't beat. I can still see the homely face of Irving Nussbaum of New York Carpet World, with his tag line, "The BETTER carpet people!" The company pitchman, in Detroit, has often been more well-known than the product being sold. I should know; I work for one. Brian Elias, my boss at 1-800-HANSONS , is one of the last of a dying breed, along with Gordie over at ABC Warehouse. Elias and Gordie are among the last of the combination company ow...

I've been stuck in a time warp, yet again. Those who've dared to view this space to see what I'm blathering about now, know that I tend to enjoy living in the past. Well, is the present so nifty? My latest jag is to point my browser to YouTube and start searching for old commercials---beer, food, even cigarettes. I'm talking REALLY old commercials, circa the 1950s and '60s, mostly in black-and-white. The commercials of those days were typically no less than 60 seconds, and sometimes longer. They weren't filled with eye-popping special effects or talking babies or scores of beautiful young people breaking into an impromptu party just because one of them popped open a cooler of light beer. The commercials that I've been fixed on show a simpler time, when a cold beer was something enjoyed by well-dressed couples inside a spiffy tavern, served by well-dressed waiters and drawn by well-dressed bartenders. It was a time when little kids ran home to partake in Bee...

Those advertisers sure know a captive audience when it sees one. I'm talking about the newest way they're getting you to watch their ads---by boldly placing them in front of various videos you click to watch on the Internet. And they're getting worse. It used to be that the advertiser spots you'd be forced to view would last 10 seconds. No biggie; 10 seconds isn't too long to settle in and watch what you hope will be a compelling, funny, interesting, cute video. Then the spots grew to 15 seconds in length. OK, what's 15 seconds, right? That doesn't seem too long. Now they're a full 30 seconds in length, and they're showing up in more and more videos, annoyingly so. Now we have a problem. First, 30 seconds is a long time. It may not seem like it, but grab a watch with a second hand, close your eyes, and count out what YOU believe are 30 seconds. Almost guaranteed, the watch will tell you that you're shy. Besides that, having to sit through a 30-se...

What's the fascination in TV advertising with those who sport a British or Australian accent? This isn't an anti-UK post, bloke, but I must protest. Seems there must have been some market research done, that says us Yankees are more inclined to yank out our credit card or rush to the nearest big box store if we hear said items being hawked by those who hail from across the pond or Down Under. How else to explain the influx of voices I am hearing lately on the telly? Before, the tack du jour was to yell. That's all. Just simply shout EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO SAY IN HOPES THAT VOLUME WOULD TRUMP COMMON SENSE. The late Billy Mays yelled at us, as he sold us on those great TV offers. He was hardly the first TV pitchman to literally "give a shout out." Now it's not so much shouting as it is the apparent allure of the British or Australian accent. You may not be aware of what I'm talking about, but give the TV commercials these days a listen. There's the GEI...

Tell me, what would be your annoyance factor if, while trying to watch television in your living room, someone occasionally steps in front of the screen, making hand gestures and other things to call attention to themselves? Pretty flipping annoying, right? Then why do some television networks insist on pumping their programs in the CGI version of what I just described? You've been there---watching whatever on wherever, and you get momentarily startled by a moving image that is doing something in the lower right corner of the screen. Your eyes can't help but go over there, and it's a graphic or an image of a person (or people) dancing or moving or waving their arms, calling attention to their show, which is sometimes several days away. Some networks, in addition to the moving images, simply leave the programming information for what they're promoting on the screen for the entire duration of what you're currently watching. Though that's easier to ignore because i...

I won't be running out to buy a Chrysler 200. I won't be moving into the city of Detroit. But I'm proud as hell of the spot that Chrysler heaped on us during the third quarter of Super Bowl XLV. About 160 million people watched the game on TV, by the way, so it wasn't like the 2:00 ad was played to a private audience of Detroit backers. Some of those non-Detroiters are beside themselves. They just can't stand anything portraying Detroit in anything close to a positive light. That's OK; I suspect that there were far more who were bedazzled with the spot than who are hating on it today. I had the unusual experience of both watching the spot AND later strictly listening to it, minus the visual images. I heard the audio played on the radio, and still it was riveting, even without the gritty, architectural images of Detroit. That's because the script was dynamic---perfectly acknowledging Detroit's foibles along with pointing out that it's those very foibl...

I guess PETA doesn't think it needs donations from the plus-size community. Because it sure ain't gonna be gettin' any NOW. PETA, which rhymes with the bread but actually stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has proven that they need to work on the ethical treatment of humans. Billboards have gone up in Jacksonville, FL trumpeting the benefits of going vegetarian as a way to slim down. So far, so good. But the image PETA chose to use is that of an obese woman (the back of her, anyway) spilling out of a bikini, on a beach. The words that accompany the image are, "Save the Whales. Lose the blubber. Go vegetarian." There are no whales on the billboard, even though "Whales", by far, is the biggest and most prominent word displayed. Get it? Ha ha---boy, that's so funny, my sides are splitting! Not. The billboard in question How could PETA possibly think that making fun of overweight women---especially when the female gender is far more ...