Scene and heard

Their new commercial has been on for a couple of months now…. long enough for me to hate it almost as much as I hated their previous efforts. Gone are the obnoxious happy yet empty stereotypes. They have been replaced with a couple whose relationship is based on the New York Times; people for whom the New York Times is the highlight of their weekend; people who are “fluent in” sections of the New York Times (yes, the woman is fluent in the Style section!) and a man who knows beyond any argument, that the very best journalists in the world work for the New York Times. In other words, shallow people who don’t have a life beyond the New York Times, plus an opinionated idiot.

As before, the commercials come on all too frequently and feel more like harassment than an attempt to sell me a product. They come across as an attempt to lose the traditional customer base and run the paper into the ground. If there are many other people – advertisers nightmares – who, like myself, tend to use commercials more to determine what not to buy than what to buy - the criteria being that if they are aiming at morons they can’t be trying to sell me anything so I won’t buy it - then their strategy is probably doomed to lose them readership at an even faster rate than modern trends would otherwise predict.