Shyzer.com

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of extraordinary commercials. That’s right, those little 30 and 60 second blurbs that most people hate and skip straight through are at times small drops of Heaven for me. I say “at times” because truly it often feels as if I’m searching for the proverbial diamond in the rough. I can’t count how many local car dealership ads and childish soft drink commercials I’ve sat through with the hopes that maybe, just maybe, the next commercial to air will be one that I’ll fall in love with and race to the computer to download. It’s not often enough that I find a great commercial, mainly due to the fact that I don’t really watch that much television in the first place. But trust me, when I do, it brings immense joy into my life.

If a company spends money on an ad campaign, one would assume that their main goal is for as many people to see the ad, correct? We can take that assumption a step further and find that there are certain advertising agencies that are known for producing better commercials than your garden variety, run of the mill ads. These advertising agencies might have a vast portfolio of memorable ad campaigns that were not only wildly successful, but in turn massively profitable. Therefore, I’m guessing that these advertising agencies would charge a higher fee for developing and producing a series of ads and such, if a company hired them, they would expect a high quality ad in exchange for the high price tag.

Which leads me to a question that I’ve yet to find a reasonable, or even competent, answer to. Why is it that almost every company out there fails to make their ads readily available and easily accessible for their consumers on the Internet?

How much more dense can these companies get? They’ve shelled out high dollar for an ad campaign, they’ve managed to land a series of ads that don’t make people want to immediately flip to the next channel, and they now have a base of consumers who are actively seeking out these ads just so they can watch them repeatedly and share them with others. So why is it that whenever I see one of these types of commercials, I’m forced to search countless forums and Google result pages in an effort to find a video copy?

Whether it’s by myself or someone else, the ad will inevitably be found either buried on the companies website on some remote server or directly ripped from a TiVO feed and posted to the web. To make matters worse, half of the time when the commercial is actually found, it’s usually encoded in such a manner that it can’t readily spread. Most of the time this means that the video is encoded in flash format and embedded in the webpage, which means a nerd like myself is going to have to figure out a why to rip it off the page and encode it into something more easily transferred. Hell, half of the time I give up and shell out a few bucks for a month subscription to Ad-Rag and then rip it straight from their server…

And don’t even get me started if all I wanted in the first place was the musical score!

What is the point of this? Why spend time and money on an ad campaign and then execute it so poorly that your consumers who enjoyed it are prevented from viewing it again! I’ll admit there are some companies, such as Apple, who at least make it easy to find and view their latest commercials. But even then, you can’t download the commercial or soundtrack unless you view the source, find the code, load only it, and then save page as. And frankly, I think it’d be a lot easier to simply hit a “download” button instead.

So listen here all you Fortune 500 companies out there. First, stop making shitty commercials. Make them funny. Make them memorable. And then make them available for download.

Is it really that hard of a concept to grasp in this day and age?