More fun is had with overly literal realizations of mundane expressions in this new spot for Pep Boys. A woman in her car has a guy dressed up as a warranty run out on her, literally. He’s dressed as a paper document, with the world: “Warranty” written on him, and after saying: “That’s 36,000 miles: I’m outta here!” he gets up and very zanily bounces around and bounds away from the woman and her car. So she says something to the effect that now that her warranty has “run out on her”, she’s glad she can depend on the Pep Boys to take care of her car for her, and then the camera cuts to a POV shot of the Pep Boys bobbleheads on her dashboard nodding their bobbling heads in unison.
Anyone who reads this blog will know instantly that I love this type of silly, overly-literalized comedy, and this ad works well for me because of it. They could have gone the informational route of explaining the situation succinctly, but that would have risked boring us and making us tune it out, if not simply mute it. But this commercial is fun and silly enough that it makes you consider watching it, and it’s short enough that it’s easy to just sit through it without wanting to snuff out the sound or flick the channel. That’s a big help when trying to sell anything, but in this case I think they’re really doing a great job of quickly and pithily communicating a potentially dull message, and making it fun. What a nice job they’ve done here! Kudos to youdos!
I’m sorry, but I can’t find this ad online. It’s getting harder and harder to find the ads I’m looking for online nowadays. I like to attach a link to the ads so people can see what I’m talking about if they haven’t seen them before, and this is especially important for foreign readers of this blog, of which there are surprisingly many. It seems to me that if advertisers can get people to watch their ads away from the usual television run, well, great! And if the product company can actually get people to want to see the ads for their products without having to pay extra money to run them, then isn’t that just more (and free!) advertising for their products? I’d think they would jump at the chance to put them up for everybody to see them easily! Well, hopefully they’ll start putting them all up on YouTube soon. But it seems to me it used to be a lot easier to find the new ones online a few months ago. Oh well.
