So I’m sitting here watching the NBA Playoffs. I’m not sure why either, they last for like a year and a half and the same four teams make the semi finals every year but “The Pacific” isn’t done recording and I’ll probably fall asleep if I watch a movie so here we are. The topic of today’s blog is advertisements.

Few channels have good self promotions (ESPN maybe?) but the Turner family of networks (TNT and TBS) have the absolute worst of any major network. I didn’t even realize until today that Meet the Browns and House of Payne are two different TV shows. I had been working under the assumption that it was a Family Matters/Steve Urkel dual name thing. If the ridiculous commercials for these shows aren’t bad enough (and I understand that I “just don’t get it” but these ads are awful), just wait for later in the playoffs when you can’t even see what’s happening on the court because Kyra Sedgwick is walking around the screen interrogating giant CGI graphics. (Also, we’re already getting inundated with ads for “Are We There Yet?”, which doesn’t start until freaking June.)

But whatever, that’s not the real problem, the real problem is companies putting ridiculously bad commercials on TV. Over the course of the NBA playoffs I’m going to be counting up the companies that piss me off with their crappy commercials. The list starts with the worst of them all:

Capital One - How does someone screw up Vikings? 

IF I were going to get a credit card, I would pay an extra 5% of interest rate to make sure that none of my money was ever going to go to Capital One. Whoever does their commercials deserves nothing less to be forcibly banished from the planet forever. They don’t even make sense. It’s like there’s a room of interns who have halfway decent ideas and then send them up to someone else for approval. Only the person that is in charge of taking them from point A to point B is an underpaid mail boy who is believes he is really a marketing genius in disguise. So he goes through the scripts and adds all sort of really stupid crap.

The off-the-charts crap factor of these commercials is mostly due to what I’m calling “Over-creativism.” Here’s an example. A viking trying to use a computer would be funny. And someone asking the Viking for a new mouse and then a viking bring them an actual mouse, while not funny, would be an acceptable commercial pun. You wouldn’t laugh out loud, but your brain wouldn’t want to murder anything because it would process “oh, see, that’s silly because Vikings didn’t have computers so he didn’t know what she meant.” But instead Capital One decided to cram these together. In the commercial, this viking has the computer on, SOMEHOW MADE IT TO THE CAPITAL ONE WEBSITE, but then tries to click an actual mouse. So instead of one of two things that would be okay, we’re given something dumb.

This is all already making the assumption that you’d be able to explain the idea of money (not even to mention the idea of credit) to a race/tribe/whatever of people who basically ran amok and burned everything to the ground. Good luck explaining the annual interest rate to someone who’s entire monetary understanding can be summed up by looking at everything like this.

1) Is it alive? Y/N - If no, steal it. If it’s too big to steal, burn it.

2) If yes, would you like to rape it? Y/N - If yes, rape it; If no, kill it.

And whatever, I get it, it’s a commercial, and you’re probably not supposed to think about it, but it’s just annoying. You basically have two routes with commercials. Route one is you or a famous person telling us about your product or showing off what your product does, route two is having a funny commercial so that we think you’re a fun loving company and who doesn’t want to buy things from fun people. These commercials just flat out suck though.

And Vikings would never go on vacation to somewhere tropical. They’d probably murder everyone in sight just at the idea of an airplane. And if you did somehow get them there they probably wouldn’t bring their armor. You know how much that crap would cost to check in at the airport?

Up Next : McDonald’s needs to fire their coffee marketing team.