It was so bizarre that I had to post it on Mashable. It's already on top of Reddit as well. I'd say they're getting the bang for their buck with this one already.<p>It also comes with a slew of easter eggs, starting with the basketball at 0:42.
Doesn't anybody find this funny in a weird way? I'm actually in shambles over this one. Just like the subtle weird humor in David Lynch movies. It's surreal.
I thought this ad was excellent. I chuckled at first, but 10 minutes of entranced viewing later I felt vividly confronted by the absurd and actually had to go lie down. Taken in a very broad context it actually feels like a modern internet art house film.
You guys are missing the point. Microsoft did something like this a while ago (I think it was microsoft?). The idea is to make a an <i>so horrifyingly bad</i> that it gets covered in "the news" and viewed by millions and millions of people who then spend several minutes reading comments about the commercial and thinking about the product.<p>It's brilliant.
Simpsons clip: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W1OrcMPMb0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W1OrcMPMb0</a><p>I remembered this clip <i>because</i> it lasts about five second longer than I thought it would. In a quick moving network tv show like the Simpsons, that's an eternity.<p>Sometimes the humor comes from just going for it, and taking something past where people think it "should" stop. The internet is different from network tv in that 10 minutes of absurdity is much cheaper.
It's definitely a joke.. at about 5 minutes in you can hear one of the production guys laugh uncontrollably. The t-rex poking out behind the city scape at 6:45 is pretty good too.
I wish I was amused. This is what you get when you conscript unwilling programmers into video advertising.<p>In programming, the difference between<p><pre><code> 5.times { say 'pizza' }
</code></pre>
and<p><pre><code> 200.times { say 'pizza' }
</code></pre>
is, what, an order of magnitude or so off. What's the big deal? Fix the bug later.<p>In advertising, the difference is astronomical. I'd say this is nearly unwatchable, and I'm a fan of quirky humor.
This ad works on several different levels:<p>1) It shows a revenue generating, easily understandable action being done hundreds of times in different locations
2)It serves as a sendup of subliminal advertising while also standing as a textbook example.
3) The easter eggs and length encourage people to forward it, making it viral
4) Any reenactments will be yet
What's strange is that the commercials for Chrome are pretty good. This ad is painful to watch. I kept seeking around to see if it got better or at least was different after awhile.<p>Do the people who made this think that everyone wants to find pizza all the time? It seems far more likely is that you're in Newport RI and you want to find the best Lobster Roll or you're in Memphis and want to find the best BBQ nearby. That's how I end up using the location features of something like Yelp.