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Most companies have a habit of using extreme hyperbole to sell a product. One common way of doing this is Cereal Induced Superpowers, and the other is this: Hyping up the perceived desirability of the product to comically absurd levels.
In the context of a commercial, Serious Business can make people in the ads Too Dumb to Live. They will ignore their families, forgo basic necessities, and go to extreme lengths of self-abuse all for a hamburger, a bottle of beer, and other such things. They'll barge into a hospital and try giving a person brain surgery because a new tax office made figuring out their income tax so easy, they decided that everything must be that easy. In short, people in commercials will often act at least twice as stupid as Network executives think their audience is. Sometimes "justified" because the products really do have Magic Powers. Which is just as telling to the audience.
Well, not always. Sometimes, you can tell that they're basically spoofing the concept, by having the commercial portray such behavior being as extreme as it really is. The message here is that their product is so good, you'll want to do this crazy stuff, but we know you're too smart for that, right?
[Not to be confused with Sean Cullen's claim that the greatest things in the universe are wood, cheese, and children.]
Compare The Power of Love, The Power of Friendship, and The Power of Rock, each of which can overlap with this trope, depending on the product. See also Men Buy from Mars, Women Buy from Venus to get a more gender-oriented look at stupidity in advertising.
For a trope actually about cheese, see Blessed Are the Cheesemakers.
Examples:
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Cars
- Volkswagen's ad campaign for their new car, the Routan, is just...baffling. Apparently, according to Brooke Shields, women everywhere are having babies—sometimes with men they barely even know—just to get the new Volkswagen Routan, and any of them that say otherwise ("No I'm not! And this is my husband!") are merely in denial. This fake public service announcement would be funny if it weren't so mind-bogglingly stupid. And LONG!
- A disturbing variation has people doing awful things to each other for the sake of the product, such as a car owner sticking pins into a voodoo doll representing the neighbor who spilled coffee in the car.
- Yet a third variation (from...Toyota? I forget) features people describing the crazy-ass rules they've made for keeping their new car nice. One of them is a woman who has decided not to let her kids get a dog based solely on the fact that she has this car now; and this manages to not be the craziest thing someone says in this commercial (it's up there, but it's not the crowner).
- One car ad featured every man in an entire city ripping off their clothes and dancing erotically because they just really like this one car driving by.
Drink
- An ad campaign for Korbel champagne, where any other brand was horrible, to the point where people stopped a new year's countdown because of it, and prompted Don Ho to start singing about "huge, disgusting bubbles" in the wine.
- There was an ad for Dr. Pepper which showed a really whipped guy doing embarrassing things for his girlfriend—buying tampons, taking yoga with her, holding her purse while she tries on clothes—then she takes a sip of his Dr. Pepper and he gets pissed and storms out (actually, more like he flees in terror). All the while, "I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)" plays in the background.
- Perhaps he's a germaphobe?
- An ad for Tetley had a cartoon character crawling through the desert desperately crying out for water. Then he came across a jug of water, picked it up, and resumed crawling, this time desperately crying out for Tetley.
- There used to be a series of British beer commercials in which a guy became a superhero after drinking a pint, probably inspired by Popeye's spinach powers. "Oh, it's Tankard that helps me excel! After one I do anything well!" They were banned on the grounds of false advertising, of course.
- A PSA ad parodied this, having the 'hero' return to a normal man halfway through his feat of heroism and fall off some scaffolding to his death (or at least serious injury). It then went on to warn you about the risks of drink making you feel like a super hero.
- Tim Hortons' initial commercial advertising their new 'steeped' tea went beyond Commercial Idiocy: The apparently young, hip and trendy son (note: foot-and-a-half-high
mofaux hawk, band t-shirt and baggy jeans with more chains than a dungeon. egad. he must be hip!) brings home two cups of tea for his forty-something mother. When she remarks that the tea is good, he says 'yeah, it's steeped'. Somehow, despite the fact that the word 'steeped' has been a part of the English language since tea was a part of English, the mother comes to the logical conclusion that her emo-gothwannabe punk of a son has just uttered some hip new trendy word. And so she goes on to use steeped throughout the rest of the commercial. Her young, daughter models a mini-skirt, and all her mother says is 'steeped outfit honey', instead of 'take that off now!'. Later, when admiring her elderly neighbour's garden, the mother adopts a hip-hip pose and tells Mrs. Chen that her 'garden's looking steeped!'. Clearly, Tim Horton's advertising department is made up of idiots.
- Tim Hortons in Canada had a series of ads where one person would be talking about something important, and the other person doesn't hear a word because they were on the way to get an iced cappuccino and can't concentrate on anything else.
- There's a Coca-Cola commercial that states that the formula for Coca-Cola is broken into two part, each known by one man. The commercial goes on to claim that if either of these men were to die society would cease to exist and a hole would tear right through the center of the universe...all because of the lack of Coca-Cola.
- Hilariously subverted in a late-90s Australian commercial for the soft drink Sprite: In the Australian 'bush', a man lies groaning and clutching his leg. Cue rugged bush ranger type (imagine Crocodile Dundee), who starts talking about how to help snakebites.
If you were to pour Sprite on the wound... This would do absolutely nothing, because all Sprite does is quench your thirst. [Takes a big drink, as the guy with the snakebite finally stops moving]
- Bud Light commercials are infamous for this:
- The "You Got A Raw Deal" segment, where a madman trades away warm clothing in an arctic blizzard for a bottle of beer - and claims the now-warm guy got a raw deal.
- Two college buddies are down to their last few dollars, and have to choose between a six-pack of Bud Light and a roll of toilet paper. They choose the beer. (Which prompts them to answer the checker's "paper or plastic?" question with an emphatic "Paper!".)
- Another ad features a bunch of people stranded on an island after a plane crash. One of the crash victims walks up to the rest of the group and announces that she has found the plane's radio equipment and believes they'll be able to be rescued, only for the group to ignore her in favor of the man who has found the plane's beverage cart, full of Bud Light. Apparently calling for help and then partying is not an option.
- A beer commercial started with having outlandish claims for their beer (for example, that drinking beers will cause you to understand animals), only to hastily retract said claim when the powers that the beer grant turn out to be less than satisfactory (it turns out the family dog can only say "SAUSAGES!" over and over again)
- The California Milk Processor Board once ran fairy-tale like ads, one of which Sarah Haskins hilariously summed up as:
"Milk will bring sunshine to a land devastated by your period tears."
- Another milk ad: A mother is urging her two kids to drink their milk so they can grow up strong. The children scoff — "Mr. Johnson next door doesn't drink milk, and he's fine," they say. And coincidentally Mr. Johnson is next door in his yard, doing some yardwork — he waves hello to the kids, and they wave back. Then Mr. Johnson leans over to pick up the handles of his wheelbarrow — but when he straightens back up, his arms rip off at the shoulders. "Oh, dear, that's not good," he says, as the kids and mother all scream in terror, and grab their glasses and start power-chugging milk.
Food
Furniture
- A recent mattress commercial features a woman worrying about her diet until a mattress salesman informs her that her weight problem is due to not getting a good night's sleep. Apparently, a bad mattress is what's making her fat, not the extra calories and lack of exercise.
- Oddly enough, recent studies have shown that not getting enough sleep can contribute to weight problems. So they may actually have Shown Their Work. Or they got lucky.
Grooming Products
- The AXE and TAG ads, which claim they are more attractive to women than they could possibly be. With a couple of exceptions most modern Sex for Product ads take Refuge in Audacity with this trope. The advertiser gets to associate his product with scantily clad beautiful women, and no one can yell at him because he's obviously kidding.
- AXE is Lynx in the UK. The ads are even better.
- One of Lynx's ad campaigns in the UK a few years back had the slogan "spray more, get more". Of course, the audience most likely to interpret this in an irony-free manner- horny 13-year-old boys- are already notorious for using ridiculous amounts of Lynx in place of a shower, without any encouragement.
- Everyone in Germany who has seen any TV during the 90s will remember this one ad. Revitalizing indeed.
- Inverted by Old Spice, which will not turn your man into the dashing suave gentleman in the ad, but will at least allow him to smell like him. I'm on a horse.
- Schick meanwhile claims that their Quattro Titanium razors will gives you a shave that is so smooth and close, it will cause women at the gym to become distracted and fall off of their treadmills.
Hotels
- Holiday Inn Express has a series of TV ads where someone attempts some highly skilled job (taking over flying a plane when the pilot is unable to, major surgery, a freestyle rap battle, etc...) When someone asks them if they are qualified, they reply, "No, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night".
Household Products
- How about those disturbing, harrowing commercials in which an ostensibly perfect mom hides a secret: she has become dependent on chemicals. The pleasure she derives from them goes hand-in-hand with the shame that she feels for enjoying the cheap thrills they provide. She goes to great lengths to hide them from her friends and family, constantly lying, clearly terrified of the prospect that she might be found out. Most recently, she has even begun to have hallucinations in which inanimate objects threaten to expose her secret to the world. Glade addiction: the new menace tearing apart suburban families.
Insurance
- Survival Auto Insurance had (has? I dunno) a series of commercials based on the idea that cars not insured by Survival are not worth getting into even if not doing so means you'll probably die. Made famous by the first commercial, which featured a guy walking in the desert, apparently malnourished and dehydrated, when an attractive woman in a convertible arrives and says "Need a lift?" The dialogue then goes like this: "Are you insured?" "Yes." "By Survival?" "No." "I can't take that ride." Seen here
- Another featured a back-room poker game where one player raises the stakes by betting his car with the exchange ending with "I can't take that bet." Seen here
Technology
- The camera megastore B&H imply that disasters would happen if a B&H camera wasn't used at the event. The strangest: someone objecting at a wedding because the camera being used to record it wasn't bought from B&H.
In-Universe Examples
- Lord Dunsany's ultrashort story What We Have Come To, in its entirety:
When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked at them and wept.
"If only," he said, "this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it in your soup, ladies like it."
- His The Reward, a considerably longer piece, further elaborates on the same subject:
I looked at the legend on the walls of the hell that the angel was building, the words were written in flame, every fifteen seconds they changed their color, "Yeasto, the great new yeast, it builds up body and brain, and something more."
"They shall look at it for ever," the angel said.
- Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator. Without a doubt a parody, but by far a hilarious usage of this trope.
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