11 of the Weirdest Commercials of All Time
Most commercials only want your money. These want your sanity.
In the world of advertising, grabbing the viewer's attention is key.
Sure, you could just list off the benefits of whatever you're selling in a straightforward manner, but is that going to leave an impression?
You want your audience to take notice. You want to keep them thinking about your ad for days and weeks afterward — to infect their brains with a little consumerist parasite that reminds them to cough up their money in pursuit of a false sense of fulfillment. So anything you can do to make your ad stand out from the crowd is a good thing, right?
Well, maybe not anything... Sometimes commercials try so hard to achieve that memorable or viral effect that they veer into strange and disturbing territory. They stop being little tributes to capitalism and become vivid flashes of madness.
These 11 ads took that attention-grabbing ethos to strange and upsetting new heights. Maybe they were hoping for the kind of quirky virality that Old Spice has made iconic. What they got instead was...
Softbank - Otosan and Tommy Lee Jones Japanese Commercial
Softbank is a tech company that offers mobile phone service in Japan, and they advertise that service with the help of "the White family" made up of two Japanese women, a Black man, and a talking Shiba Inu named Shirato Jiro (AKA Otosan) — the stern and mysterious patriarch of the family.
All of these commercials are absurd, but they reached their peak when they crossed over with another long-running series of ads featuring Tommy Lee Jones as an alien who has developed a taste for Boss canned coffee. The White family hires Alien Jones as their housemaid, and brain-melting insanity ensues.
You can skip to the 3:20 mark in the video above to see the dramatic moment when Jones reveals his true form.
Now go buy stuff.
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