We’ve seen Susie’s meteoric rise to fame in a series of Verizon commercials, but here she’s the most successful yet. She’s buying more smartphones and tablets, she’s buying all the strawberries in the country, and she’s buying pink vans like they’re going out of style. (Actually, I think they are out of style! Maybe that’s how she gets a good deal on them.) And then they show two kids who she violates child labor laws to force to work for her, and one says to the other: “How does she do it?” And this makes me think of some possibilities.
Look, we all know what’s going on here, don’t we? It’s graft! She’s greasing palms with bribes! How else could she turn a front yard lemonade stand into a global empire when everyone else gets fined, arrested, and shut down by the cops? Well, there’s only one way to do that, and it’s got nothing to do with smartphone technology or cellular carriers. She’s obviously donating lots of money to the right politicians and attorneys general and sheriffs: that way, they’ll take the heat off of her, and she can strong-arm her way past all the other kids’ lemonade stands, getting them busted and shut down, and all so she can rise to the top and continue the cash rolling into those politicians’ re-election campaigns! You know that’s what’s going on here!
So rather than trying to gin up more business for themselves, Verizon is trying to expose political corruption! Naturally they have to disguise the message so they have plausible deniability in case the political establishment gets wise to their messaging subterfuge by reading between the lines (then they’ll just say it’s supposed to be a cute spot, rubbing a child’s immediate success into the faces of so many unemployed adults to put a fire under their asses to go get a job and get the economy on its feet again), but we all know what they’re trying to expose, right? And thank God someone is doing something to expose political corruption and bribery! Hey, the media isn’t doing it, they’re all just pushing propaganda, so I guess they felt like someone had to speak up, even if it is a message you have to read between the lines to understand.
I can make fun of these ads until the cows come home and make me do commercials for milk and cheese (but they won’t let me do ads for beef: go figure! They always say: “Eat Mor Chikn!”), but this campaign is pretty slick. Apart from the thing about it being illegal to have a lemonade stand these days, and the fact that it’s illegal to force children to do corporate work, there’s nothing wrong with these spots. Okay, that’s another joke, but as a very immediate storytelling device, this campaign works really well. If only Verizon cared about getting jobs for the people who really need them: unemployed adults! (Maybe that can be their next campaign: some unemployed adult watches this ad campaign on TV and is inspired to start a new business that takes off immediately due to cellular and tablet technology by Verizon! Hey, it’s worth a try, even if it’s not as cute.)
Here’s the corruption-condemning cellular commercial:
