HBO's got some new ads out touting its HBO Go service, and the one above in particular seems to feature a familiar conceit. That's because it's nearly identical to BriTANick's Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer, which was nominated for a Comedy Award and has been viewed 6-7 million times. Check out their original video below to see the similarities for yourself.
So you know those god-awful Groupon commercials that made light of the suffering in Tibet? That whole campaign was directed by…Christopher Guest. Buh?
The Simpsons have been around for a very long time, but it can be sometimes hard to place those early episodes in their time periods. Sure, there are references to politicians, celebrities and events from the early 90's that date it a bit, but on the whole, it's aged incredibly well. So much so that watching this compilation of every commercial that ran alongside the premiere of the show is almost shocking. I mean, look at how old this stuff is! It's amazing to see how dated the rest of American culture looks to us now when compared to how relevant those Simpsons episodes continue to be. That's one [...]
New from Therefore Productions is The Multiproduct Commercial, an ad in which penny-pinching companies join forces to cram as many logos and products into one commercial as possible.
Comedians in commercials are definitely a thing. I’m no good at trivia, but I can always impress my (non-comedy nerd) friends and family members by knowing the names of actors in commercials because so many of them are stand up and improv comics. From a 2009 episode of The Comedy Nerds Podcast called Comedians in Commercials comes this: “It’s a great way to make money and also to get seen. For many comedians, they’re good actors, and have good comedic timing and good comedic abilities and it’s hard to get someone to actually pay for that in the stand up comedy world. The path of least resistance is [...]
Ugh, Super Bowl commercials. These ads, which have become events worth paying attention to by virtue of their pricetags, pretty much provide a master class in what not to do as a comedy writer. They're full of lazy, sometimes-offensive punchlines, and they all follow unsurprising formulas that we've seen a million times before. If people tried to write crap like this into sitcoms, they'd never get work. Or maybe they'd get work on the most popular comedies on TV on CBS? I don't know, guys. Let's just look at some examples.
The last few years, Doritos has offered up their Super Bowl ads to whoever produces the funniest spots as voted on by the internet, The contest has become a yearly excuse for sketch comedy groups to write videos that are based around the cheesy chips, and it's all pretty brilliant, really. Sure, a couple of the homemade ads will make it on the air, but they also get hundreds of free ads that are sent around the internet for months before the Super Bowl itself. And we've hit that time of year again.
One of the best entries up so far is from Splitsider-favorite sketch group Serious Lunch. [...]
Community's Ken Jeong got tapped to star in this two-minute-long Adidas ad with NBA star Dwight Howard in which Dwight sings an off-key song and Ken…dances? Poses? Acts like a crazy person? I don't know how many shoes this will sell, but you can't argue with Ken Jeong.
Bill Hader did a series of web spots for Volkswagen, each of which essentially bounces back and forth between someone describing the features of a Volkswagen and Hader being funny. They're good! Granted, they'd be better sans the features-of-a-Volkswagen thing, but you know how it is. [via]
Alec Baldwin is rich and famous and has absolutely no need to do crappy, low-budget local commercials. But his mom loves upstate NY supermarket Wegmans! So of course, he did a couple of weirdly lousy ads for them. It's like they're a joke! But they aren't, as there are no punchlines. The first one is above, and here's the second:
Here's the first print ad for Conan, featuring Conan and an owl. I think we can read a lot into this about what the show is going to be like!!!
