During the postseason baseball games, the commercials have tended to be dry and highly repetitious. Not so for the Emerald Nuts commercials, each of which has made me at least giggle. First there was the Egomaniacal Normans, and I was hooked from there.

So I finally found the product at the grocery store. We Noggles are nut consumers, especially on salads, so I picked up some cashews, since we already have quite a stash of both pecans and walnuts. Mmm, cashews.

Slate seems to agree with me about the Emerald Nut mania.

There's no better way to make us remember a name than to shape the entire campaign around the name itself. Each ad hammers home "E.N." for "Emerald Nuts." I can't think of a campaign more likely to "get credit" for its spots—the mnemonic ensures that we'll never forget which product these ads are for.

And the ads themselves are goofy and appealing. My favorites: "Elegant Naysayers" (a teenager wears a frilly, aristocratic costume—and hates everything) and "Evil Navigators" (a guy in the passenger's seat gives directions from a map ... and then calmly spins his head 360 degrees, a la The Exorcist, before grabbing a handful of nuts from a jar on the dashboard).

But the true genius here isn't the content of the ads. It's the length, the abundance, and the careful scheduling of the ads. According to Diamond's vice president of marketing, Sandy McBride, once the "E.N." idea was settled on, everything else fell into place. They decided to run a whole lot of 15-second ads instead of a few 30-second ones. In part this was because the joke is so simple, it can't fill even 30 seconds of airtime. But Diamond also knew that, with a limited budget, it would get much more bang for its buck. There are 15 different spots in the campaign right now. (McBride says they shot them all together, in three days.) The diversity helps prevent ad fatigue, where we've seen the same spot so many times that we tune it out.

Posted by: hln at 06:57 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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That was the big headline on the Drudge Report this morning. Yeah, I clicked it.
Who "fakes it" more? Democrats. Perhaps that alone is the answer.

I'm waiting for the "who's happier with self" poll. I bet the answers will be the same, especially among the personally responsible crowd, which is usually in the conservative/libertarian arena.

hln

Posted by: hln at 08:25 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Brian and I have been following the Cardinals in playoff baseball. Because neither of us is a TV watcher except for live sports, we're really not all that attuned to commercials. But we have seen quite a lot of the two new Subway commercials wherein Jared lightly snarks on McDonald's fat content.

Brian said, "yep, Jared's gained back a bit of that weight." And he has, that Jared boy. Probably nothing that will affect his health, but you can see a bit of pudginess and lack of muscle definition even through his dorky sweater (that thing will probably show up on e-Bay some day, and boy is it ugly).

So I paid more attention each time the commercials appeared (oh, those half inning breaks). You know what it really is. Jared Fogle has MANBOOBS!

They're not huge or anything, but they're there. Some incline presses posthaste, m'man.

hln

Posted by: hln at 12:18 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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