These Hamfisted Car Ads Embedded In TV Shows Are So Hamfisted They’ll Make You Want To Fist A Ham

I remember just how relentless the onslaught of commercials was when I was growing up. A half-hour sitcom would usually have four commercial breaks, with about four commercials per break. That’s why anyone over a certain age knows the context of the phrase “pretty sneaky, sis” or has a healthy respect for the strangely European-coded mild rule-breaking and irreverent problem-solving of habitual Mentos consumers. [Ed note: Related, I walk around eating peanut butter from an open jar to this day – Pete] And yet now I look back on that era fondly, as ads seem to have broken free from TVs and now infest pretty much anything we look at. It’s kind of maddening. What’s even worse, though, is when ads adapt to try and be sneaky, and not just interrupt other forms of media, but infect them, like a greedy virus.

One of the more insidious ways this happens is when a television show will get handed some bags of cash by a company and asked to just, you know, sorta work a commercial into the story, but don’t make a thing of it. Just get the characters to say the sorts of things one would say in a commercial about some product, but don’t even mention it. Let it just happen. Naturally.

This kind of product placement/integration is almost always, of course, miserable and obvious. And so very much worse than just having a commercial you can ignore. It’s like if you have to take some kind of foul-tasting medicine, and you can either choose to take it in one quick shot and then get served a nice big slice of Key Lime Pie, or you can mix the bitter, battery-acid-and-cat-food-tasting elixir into the pie itself, ruining it. These kinds of clumsy attempts to hide a commercial in your entertainment are like the latter option.

There’s an Instagram account called Moderndunphy who has been combing through TV shows to find some of the worst examples of this kind of hamfisted product placement and integration, and oy, are some of these painful. There are some car-related ones, so that’s enough of a justification to talk about these here! Like when Toyota tried it with the show Bones, something I never actually watched, but seemed to be some kind of crime/medical procedural about a forensic anthropologist and an FBI agent.

Here, just look at this mess:

 

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Oh, jeezis, that’s bad. There are reasons why it feels so wrong, too, mostly because it forces the characters to talk in ways that people, generally, never talk. Like the annoying specificity of mentioning the car’s name, which we see in both examples shown. Here’s the Prius one:

No one would say “Oh, the Prius helps you stay in your lane,” in this situation, they’d say “oh, the car makes some annoying beeps if you cross over the line or something, I haven’t figured out how to turn that shit off yet.”

And then it gets even worse:

That first bit is where they have to set it all up and justify why they’re using some other car rather than whatever the characters normally drive, so we get awkward things like “Your Sequoia was, uh, it was blocked, so I grabbed Angela’s Matrix” when any normal human would say “your car was blocked, so I grabbed Angela’s.” Then there’s the “there’ll be lots of room” because Toyota has the roominess of the Matrix as an important talking point, and then there’s the clumsy use of the parallel parking assist, which derails all other conversation as everyone marvels over the car parking itself.

Here’s that parking clip on its own:

It’s so bad! But you have to have some sympathy for the writers who get saddled with this shit; there are almost definitely points they need to hit, and there’s money involved, so there’s no getting away from that. They have to do it.

The actors and other people on the show have even discussed how clumsy  this all was:

I have to give some credit to the writers of the show New Girl, which is not something I’ve ever watched, but our publisher Matt seems to have an affection for it that I find, and please don’t tell him this, a little creepy. But whatever, I’m not here to kink-shame. I’m here to product-placement-shame, and while I think we can do that for New Girl, the writers at least had enough self-respect to make the inherent weirdness of it evident to the other characters:

That’s not the worst way to handle it. I mean, really, how the hell else can you do this kind of crap elegantly? You can’t, really. You have to just kind of admit that’s what’s happening, and laugh it off and just hope people will forgive you. There’s some fourth-wall-shattering that comes with the territory, because it’s clear that normal people don’t behave the way people shilling for some company behave.

Maybe, eventually, influencers will just be paid to insert product placements into their regular lives non-stop, on or off camera, and soon this kind of weird-ass behavior will seem normal. That’ll be a dark day.

And, look, if I’m honest, I’ve tried this here before! I was trying to get dogfood maker Ol’ Roy to kick us some cash with some on-spec product placement references in articles like this one:

I get that there is some initial costs to adding systems like this, and those of you reading this who own parking garages may be reluctant to invest in new equipment, but I think the quality of experience you’ll be giving to your parking customers will be worth it. Look, maybe you eat dogfood for a couple of weeks – I’m okay with that! Especially if that dogfood is Ol’ Roy, which has a Country Stew complete with corn, peas and carrots! Why, with dogfood like this, I bet every parking garage owner will happily upgrade their systems to include visual free parking spot indicators!

So far, no one at Ol’ Roy has reached out.

There are plenty more examples of this kind of crap, so if you have some good ones, let’s talk about them in the comments! Comments you may enjoy inputting via the responsive keyboard of your Apple-brand computer or portable phone, so sleek and well-designed!

Top graphic images: Bones