Variety Is The Spice Of Life

If you've been reading this blog for a while you probably know I can't stand it when a company ties itself to an upcoming movie in a blatant attempt to make a razor-thin connection to something they expect will be a hit and thus associate themselves with a winner. The thinner the connection the more I end up wishing failure on both sides out of principle. I hate it even more when a movie studio attaches themselves to the sequel after having nothing to do with the original film, because it makes them look like they only came to the party once everyone else was already there. That not only makes them leeches, it makes them bandwagon leeches. Additionally, I also have a long-standing policy which states the more I see the characters from a movie promoting that film in odd places the more I am convinced that movie will be a failure. So as you can imagine I was ready to be thoroughly annoyed when I learned Will Ferrell was going to be acting as Ron Burgundy in new Dodge commercials for the upcoming "Anchorman 2" movie, expecting it to be a combination of three things I can't stand. Add to this the fact that "Anchorman" happens to be one of my favorite movies and I am already nervous about the sequel holding up to the original and you can see why I was not exactly happy to hear about this partnership.

As if all that wasn't going to be bad enough to worry me, the movie isn't coming out until Christmas which means there is a lot of time for Dodge to run these ads into the ground and be sick of Ron Burgundy well before the movie came out. It is not like I would be able to escape them, either. The core audience for this movie is going to be males from 18-40, which means they will get heavily played during sports, also known as the thing which takes up 70% of my TV time. One of the worst things about watching sports live is that you can't fast-forward through the commercials (I admit, lamest problem ever). I don't actually hate commercials all that much - what annoys me far more than frequent commercial breaks are when those breaks are filled with the same 3 ads on a continual loop. For example, I love the fact that the Masters has limited commercial interruptions because of corporate sponsors who foot most of the bills, but that still leaves them with around 15 minutes of commercials per hour and for some reason these corporations show up with 2 minutes of original advertising and expect it to last the entire weekend. By Sunday I can do half the scripts from memory. I don't expect them to show up with six hours of commercials so they never have run the same one twice but it would be nice if they could at least switch it up occasionally. The good news with this particular advertising campaign is that it appears someone was finally paying attention and it won't be a problem this time around.

According to various website reports, what happened on this shoot was Dodge got Farrell in a room and told him to do whatever he wanted. This was a brilliant move because if you have ever watched the "line-o-rama" features on a Ferrell DVD you know he is really clever when it comes to coming up with many different ways to say the same thing. It was the ultimate improv playground and the result of letting Will do his thing all afternoon is 70 different variations of the commercial. With that kind of variety the chances of seeing one ad too many times feels pretty remote. Even better they will be rolling them out slowly and in waves, meaning people like myself will only have to put up with the same commercial for a week or two before a new one comes along. It's a pretty clever way to keep pushing the same product without making your average viewer sick and tired of the ad. Who knows, if this works out for Dodge it could be a brand-new way for advertising campaigns going forward. I may still hate it when random products attach themselves to projects I was already excited about (still don't see a Dodge/"Anchorman" connection), but I will at least give Dodge credit for not making me watch the same damn commercial 3,000 times. Now I kind of wish they had a connection to The Masters.