Fixing Bad Commercials: Singing (featuring NAPA Know-How)

Singing in commercials can be a fun, lighthearted way to communicate a message. The more clever the lyrics and the more catchy the song, the more an audience is going to respond to it. Unfortunately, most people leave out the first part (I'm struggling to think of a good example of it) and instead just focus on the second part.

You've probably seen a lot of local commercials that make this mistake (perhaps they even drop some phresh beats and lay down a rap!) but national commercials are also guilty of this. Companies, here's the thing. Just because your song is catchy doesn't mean that it's likeable.

The people who made the NAPA Know-How commercial don't understand this.

Okay, so, to start with, we've got this:

When the very first words of your commercial are the protagonist talking about how he doesn't care about other human beings (evidenced by his careless disposal of the very organ he is lacking), you should know that your character is going to come across as broken at best and insane at worst. We'll see which it turns out to be.

Space Age Drink Machine

I'll confess that I'm a little late on this one. I could have written about this at the beginning of summer, but I was really friggin' busy and never had time to stop and assemble the material. Hopefully, though, this will still be new to some of you. Also know that this would have been a scoop. I want you all to still give me credit for that.

In fact, at the restaurant where I encountered this machine, the workers proudly told me that it was the first one in the state. Badass.

In short, those old-school drink machines you may know and love--the ones with nozzles for each drink, like so:

may become as much a part of our past as the Stone Age.


That's right, say hello to the new kid in town:

THE SPACE AGE DRINK MACHINE.

Now, I know it doesn't look like much, but that's just 'cause I didn't get a very good picture of it. So I'll have to paint a picture... with words.

(I could just find a picture of it from the internet, but to do so would be to acknowledge that there are other sites out there carrying this story, and I'm just not ready to do that.)

Imagine one of those self-serve ice-cream machines. Now imagine only one dispenser thing.

Or, imagine one of those Coinstar machines:

Or one of those stand-alone ATM Machines:

Except they look like this:

I hope that's clear enough.

Find out more about the machine that will change the entire world after you click read more:

I Haven't Forgotten About This Blog

I'm writing a new post as we speak. It's going to be about something awesome.