There IS a reason for the aggressive, in-your-face affirmations that launch this ad for a credit card- and they have nothing to do with making us feel better about having to rely on self-imposed debt in order to "build a credit score" (prove worthy of that debt) and buy stuff we need to escape from the otherwise soul-crushing reality of being too poor to appear anything close to successful in modern America.
Rather, it has everything to do with convincing us that we "deserve" nice stuff and if we can get that nice stuff through the use of a piece of plastic connected to a bank, we should do it and stop limiting ourselves to only buying things we can afford. I mean, it's 2023. Nobody does that anymore.
So buy those pizzas, climb into that new car, sign a lease on that new apartment- because you've borrowed and paid back enough to be deemed Worthy of More Debt by the banking industry, and how much more affirmation do you need than that?
There's a whole series of these "Miss More" ads presented by Morgan and Morgan ambulance chasers Personal Injury Attorneys at Law, and they all star the same person, which creates a very awkward situation in which it's hard to imagine anything other than the main character being a total scam artist getting rich filing nuisance lawsuits. I mean, come on. This really isn't the kind of ad campaign you can pull off with one actress. It looks sketchy as hell.
Especially since Miss More never appears to be even the slightest bit injured in any of these ads. She does, however, look almost demented in her happiness as she files yet another personal injury lawsuit. Remind me to never ever drive in the same zip code as this woman. I'd never knock another woman's hustle, but that doesn't mean I want to be part of it.
Man, the messaging in these ads is weird. I might have to do another one somewhere down the road. As I said, there's a whole series of this garbage.
Thankfully, the eagle that seizes this woman's reason for living smartphone flew very slowly, very low, was careful to stay near the road (not that these douchenozzles would have stayed on the highway to avoid killing wildlife if the eagle had swerved away from the pavement) and built it's nest very low to the ground so that this stunningly entitled woman could rescue her soul phone from that nest.
And as a bonus, as near as we can tell the eagle's heart didn't explode from being chased at high speed by a huge, noisy metal behemoth chasing it through the desert. Nor- as near as we can tell- were any of its young injured because Disgusting Horrible Woman simply had to retrieve her drug phone instead of oh, I don't know, just getting another one in a few months which is probably what she had planned anyway.
You suck, KIA. You suck really, really hard. I don't care if this is a CGI eagle or, as suggested in the comments, is the pet of some trainer. The optics are terrible. Do better.
(Full disclosure: I'm a Boomer. But my point is that you don't have to be a Boomer to hate several things about these ads for ridiculously expensive toys or the people who insist on buying them. You just need to have brain cells and a sense of shame.)
1. When they aren't complaining about their student loans or their rent payments or the refusal of their employers to let them work from home, they are standing in line to buy the Very Latest Must Have Electronic Device because it has Titanium (because that sounds cool, not because it actually means anything) or (in the case of this ad) it has a Reality Eraser which you know people like this dumb ugly geek really, really wish they could have in Reality.
2. They spend way, way too much time in their fleeting youth gasping for attention like a fish flopping around at the bottom of the boat. This guy "needs" a $2000 phone because the one he bought six months ago isn't quite good enough to allow him to make a universally famous jackass of himself express himself to the world because, as I mentioned earlier, Reality keeps getting in the way.
3. Total tools with way, way too much time on their hands pollute the comment sections of videos like this to express their admiration for the Shiny New Thing with a Camera (and maybe even Titanium!) that they really really desperately need to guy like yesterday Because Reasons, Reasons including "my life sucks because I don't have this and it will totally not suck the moment I get it."
In conclusion- every time I see one of these commercials, I feel a little less concerned for people from middle-class and upper-class suburban backgrounds struggling in dead-end jobs and burdened with student debt. And I know that there are plenty of people out there half my age who feel the same way because seriously, you are shaming your own generation every time you buy in to this crap. Just look at the comments posted in response to this ad. It would be shameful if shame hadn't died years ago. RIP, shame. We miss you!
Oh my god just check out the elderly woman as she- um, "saunters"- into the enormous kitchen of what is clearly a very substantial house to interrupt a conversation concerning Medicare benefits. And while you're doing that, check out her liberal use of- um, the Queen's English- as she, um, "contributes' to said conversation.
Somehow we are supposed to believe that a woman who looks like she forgot to take the shirt she's wearing off the wire hanger it was on is "just loving" her "silver boxing lesson" which her friend Edna recommended, I suppose. Never mind- that's quickly interrupted with Edna saying something that sounded to me like "Zero dollar monkey plan premium" the first six times I listened to it, followed by "Thank You Edna" which makes zero sense unless they are both named Edna.
The second Edna gives us a long drawn-out "Uh-HUHHHHH" to let us know that she's urban and black despite living in a house that is obviously in a wealthy suburb and then reveals that even though she's enrolled in "silver boxing" despite having arms that look like she shared a cage with John McCain back in the late-60s she needs to be constantly reminded to do things by Edna # 1. Things like getting to dental appointments. We know she did that because she wants to protect a "million dollar smile" that we never see and no, we aren't going to complain. We see more than we wanted to already.
Instead, let's complain about Aetna's marketing team deciding that this was a good representation of well-off elderly black people. As I said in my opening sentence- oh my god. What on earth were you thinking, Obviously Entirely White Advertising Firm hired by Aetna?
So I guess the answer this guy's question "what would happen to me if I didn't have a Navy Federal Credit Union Account and it's identity protection services" involves a very complicated but nothing resembling logical series of events: Someone wearing a penguin mascot costume would steal his credit card and then wait to be noticed so that he could point out that he stole the credit card- rather than, you know, just running away. The guy wearing the costume would then wave at the marine he stole the credit card from while holding the stolen credit card in his wing instead of concealing it. The guy wearing the penguin costume would then carry out the next step of his ingenious plan- running away from two twenty-something marines while wearing a penguin mascot costume (the REAL genius comes in knocking over a trash can to slow down his pursuers, since obviously the marines couldn't possibly disobey the Do Not Walk on the Grass signs that I assume exist even though I don't see them because if they don't exist this makes even less sense than....well....then it already does.
I don't know. This doesn't strike me as a particularly compelling reason to get a Navy Federal Credit Union card, but I'm not in the navy or in the market for a penguin mascot costume so what do I know. By the way, I apologize for the weird formatting- this always happens when I have to embed an ad from iSpot.tv for some reason.
...but I've never been more happy to discover that I was watching a commercial for cologne. That's because for several seconds I was convinced that another classic song was being used to sell a car or a phone. Since it's for a perfume, for some reason I'm ok with it; I suspect the reason is because it's not for a car or a phone. Tomorrow I'll probably be irritated that the Moody Blues sold out, but for now, I'm just glad they didn't sell out for the standard crap companies that seem determined to gobble up the songs of my youth like Pac Man going after pixels.
