Over Saturation

I can't stand this commercial. While it is cute and all, I have seen it so many times that it is starting to seem like a recurring "Ground Hog Day" nightmare whenever I see it.

Let me give you a little background here. This is a regional thing, so it may not be common knowledge in the rest of the country (United States) and certainly not the rest of the world.

As big fish gobble up smaller fish, the big fish wants to assure all the other fishies in the sea that nothing has changed and in fact, things are getting better. Such is the case when one of the major telephone / internet providers in the American Southwest (Qwest) got swallowed up by a bigger fish, called 'Century Link' recently.

Strangely enough, prior to the acquisition, Qwest was boosting how they had been around forever and would always be here to serve their loyal customers. Two months later, they were history. This was something that their major rival in telecommunications (Cox Broadband) was quick to exploit in some of their commercials. So much for longevity.

I learned in college that when this type of acquisition happens, it is common for the new company to put out 'feel good' advertising to assure the public that this is actually a GOOD thing and that they are going to benefit from the newer bigger company. Reality has shown that this is rarely the case, since acquisitions tend to mean leaning out the smaller fish to assimilate it, which usually means lost jobs and less customer service.

But my point here is, this is one of those 'feel good' commercials. An invasion of Slinkies that appear to take over the planet to a catchy little pop tune by some up-and-coming middle-of-the-road artist about 'moving forward'. Yet, in essence, this commercial tells you nothing. It just makes you tap your foot and smile. Thereby, making you think that, "Gee, Century Link must be a really swell company. They have darn cute commercials!" They could be employing child labor in Indo-China and overworking their employees to death, but you wouldn't know it.

If this were the case across the spectrum, when Lockheed/Martin acquired Northrup Aviation, we should have seen a bunch of school age children singing and dancing around a B-1 Stealth Attack Bomber singing 'Lockheed/Northrup is good for us all!'.

To compound the horror of the whole Century Link commercial, there is the repetition. I only watch about one hour of television a night and I SWEAR I have seen this commercial at least 100 times in the last 30 days. Often times three times in a single hour of network programming.

I'll cry UNCLE for Christ's sake, just make it stop!!!

....and don't even get me started on this commercial. I have seen it even more in the last 30 days, and until I linked to it on YouTube, I really didn't know who it was (ATT, I had assumed Verizon), although I knew it was for some cellular provider.





Considering that these companies have to be making money hand over fist, don't you think they could put together a more diversified ad campaign, instead of showing us the same commercials over and over until we puke?