(This is the minute-long version of the spot I’m writing
about here.)
In this commercial for the American Express Card, the
popular comedian Aziz Ansari meets a girl in a bar, and he likes
her, so he looks up her interests and goes out to buy stuff to help him get
into these activities to hopefully impress her. Naturally, in standard comedic
happenstance, he overdoes it, and scares her away. This is really cute and fun,
but I don’t think it’s a good ad for a credit card. Why not? Well…
Okay, so because he’s got this credit card, he is free to
splurge on all this stuff, and he goes totally overboard and scares this girl
away, right? So then isn’t this showing us how having a credit card can be a
bad thing? It demonstrates
right there why using your credit card a lot can bite you on the ass and
completely foul up your whole day. Plus, after doing all of this stuff just to
shoot himself in the foot, he still has to pay all of this stuff off! This
seems to me to be an object lesson in why you should avoid using credit cards,
rather than being a good ad for why you should want one. See what I mean?
But this scenario is charming and fun, and these two actors
(Aziz and his date) are very likable and stuff. I like the spot. I just don’t
think it does a good job at selling its product, because it looks rather more
like a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when you get this credit card, rather than a good dissemination of why you should want to get it.
But, if they were selling a feature where you can return
anything easily, or cancel a purchase that doesn’t work out despite a store’s
“no returns” policy or something, then this would have been a great manner in
which to illustrate this service! Also, just as an extra plus, when he goes to
return this stuff, he could return it to a store employee who is a gorgeous
woman who comments on how sweet it was of him to make such a romantic gesture
and how she wishes she could date someone like that. And then, their eyes would
meet, and… (And then it would look like there is even a reward in failure, and
a silver lining in everything when you use this credit card.)
Here’s the overwhelming ad that charges too much:
