Auntie Charo's Soapbox

My girlfriend and I watch ABC 14 between the hours of 9 to 11 pm on Sunday nights. For two hours we escape into the wacky world of wacky people and when the shows are over, we return to our normal lives. What was different about watching the shows last night was the constant I-Connect ad that ran a zillion times. It had to be an in-house job because no ad agency could have done such an awful job putting together such an ad, but then again, I've been wrong. I wonder what target audience I-Connect had when it decided to place that obese man dressed in ghetto doing a a ghetto dance which was(in my opinion)stupid. Does it imply that I-connect customers are fat slobs that do ghetto dances at Manila Mall, their pants falling down and have camera phones? Is this the kind of people that have cell phones that only work inside the mall? Gosh, they could've had an ad about a car having a flat tire somewhere in the south and the driver, maybe a female teenage calling her brother, to come help her change the tire, or something like that which shows the need for the phone...
Then there's the really, really stupid GTA ad with the two men checking each other while urinating. That takes the cake and no one seems to care. They're peeing and you're led to believe they're doing the penis size envy thing when all along, one has 'phone envy' because one of the two is peeing with his cell phone, the other looking. Imagine this, two men, urinating, both using their cell phones, two men watching and envying the other's phones. Is that a terribly dumb ad or what? And we wonder why there's an increase sexually transmitted diseases here....gee, I wonder why...Watch some of the phone ads and see how skimpy the girls are dressed...some of those girls make Madonna and Britanny appear overdressed...'you're too cool if you have a cell phone with a ring tone if you're barely wearing any clothes and have your nose pierced and chew gum like a cow chews its cuds!
The next time you're at GPA or the Manila Mall, check out the kids that have cell phones and see if the little babes aren't clones of these ads....check today's Guam Cell ad out in the PDN, the cute little girl texting her frienc, she's about 13? Cute and she's got a phone for 200 minutes, a student plan, I bet...nice pink blouse, very
provocative, suggestive, from this angle, one could almost see her belly button. She's a child model and probably doesn't mind that her body is exposed like this but if I was her mom, I'd be upset that her body wasn't respected, she is after all, just a child. Couldn't Guam Cell's image makers have done just as well having this same child model pose in a middy blouse as if she were a school girl texting a friend, or, wow, novel idea, borrowed a child from a school that wears a uniform, use the phone in an ad?
Some companies have good products but ruin it by the way they advertise it.
There are a lot of fat ghetto types so I-Connect should have sold a lot of phones by next Sunday....so I hope that they find another target audience by then...maybe they'll find a skinny old lady sitting in a wheel chair that belts out 'I will survive' talking to her friend on her I-Connect phone, that would be a good commercial...bet St. Dominics would even let them film it there. So much for good targets!