These "It's not Delivery, It's DiGiorno" ads have been around for a long, long time- over a decade, in fact- and they've always struck me as being a really pathetic attempt at brainwashing through repetition. As in, "if we tell people that this frozen pizza tastes like delivery pizza often enough, the stupid viewing public will actually start to buy it."
The commercials themselves have always veered from mildly stupid to just plain asinine. Some years back, we were "treated" to the sight of a half-naked loser singing the praises of his straight-from-the-freezer stuffed-crust pizza, only to be interrupted by his rightfully mortified wife- "the delivery guy didn't see you like that, did he?" More recently, we've seen a commercial featuring a guy and his friends watching a football game in the back yard. The guy calls inside the house and talks to his wife as if she's the local pizza place- she ultimately responds by turning the sprinklers on the jerkwad. Disfunctional families are ALWAYS funny, aren't they?
This most recent one might just represent the low point for the good people at DiGiorno, however. At a dinner party in what looks like a very upscale penthouse apartment, the host inexplicably prepares to present his guests with a pizza which, we are shown, is so heavy with toppings that when it's placed on the coffee table, the floor under the table collapses, dropping floor, table and pizza directly into the apartment below. The whole destructive mess lands neatly in front of two guys doing what two guys are always doing in apartments- sitting on a couch, staring straight ahead.
Please, save your questions until after class.
Totally nonplussed, the two guys instantly pick up slices of the pizza which has magically appeared before them, ignoring the pleadings of the pizza's owner, who is far more concerned about gettting his eight-dollar hors'deurves back than he is about the lease-smashing structural damage he's just inflicted on two apartments. Nor is the former owner of the pizza at all concerned that anyone has been hurt. Nor is he concerned that his guests have apparently only narrowly avoided death by either A) not happening to stand at the place where years of mold rot have given the floor the strength of a soggy graham cracker or B) collectively weighing less than a DiGiorno's pizza. Nope, he just wants his damned pizza back.
Ok, I get it. This is supposed to be a fun, exaggerated illustration of how superawesomely massive DiGiorno's pizza is. It doesn't work because the situtation is just TOO bizarre. the claim is just TOO overblown and, most of all, because I've eaten DiGiornio pizza and know that while as frozen pizzas go it's not half bad, if you can be tricked into thinking it's Delivery, you really need to stop ordering from Domino's.
The two guys sitting on a couch staring straight ahead theme really bugs me.
ReplyDeleteThere's an ad campaign for car oil that doesn't create sludge in your car's engine. Or maybe it reduces the sludge that's already there -- you get the idea.
In the ads, some unsuspecting motorist who doesn't know the dangers of sludge always gets hundreds of gallons of it dumped on his head or car rooftop.
In one of these ads, the two guys sitting on a couch staring straight ahead are laughing at the commercials that show all those poor schmos getting covered in sludge. "WHOA -- that guy got NAILED!"
Of course, the two fools sitting on the couch staring straight ahead then get sludge dumped on THEIR heads. While they're sitting on a couch. Staring straight ahead.
I ask you -- how does that even make sense? They forgot to change the oil in their living room after they'd driven it 5,000 miles?
The concept makes no sense. Just like every other ad that features two guys sitting on a couch staring straight ahead.
I would be more concerned about the floor of my apartment/conmdo collapsing than about some stupid frozen pizza. I'm strange that way.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny you should mention guys sitting on a couch staring straight ahead and collapsing floors; there's an ad for Terry's Chocolate Oranges that runs every Christmas. What happens is that the Dolt-on-the-couch smacks the thing on his coffee table to loosen the sections of the candy from the center whereupon the girl in the upstairs apartment comes crashing through the ceiling while she's taking a bath. I would be more concerned about the damage to my apartment's ceiling and the young lady's floor than I would the overpriced candy treat. I too am weird like that.
ReplyDelete