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Ah, what’s not to love about football season?”

That’s a question I hear a lot during this glorious window in between summer and winter. And I’ll agree this is generally when sports are at their best.

But I’ll tell you one thing that is certainly “not to love” about football season: The advertising. And specifically the one’s for truck companies. I mean the truck ads, and the target audience they must be after, is only rivaled in ridiculousness by the spots for the Marines.

In their campaigns, the army wants you to believe that the Marines will teach a youth how to scale mountains without ropes, attend graduate school without money and slay mythical fire monsters without weapons. And in the end “when the journey is complete,” they’ll be transformed magically into a man (or woman) who looks awfully gay. For obvious reasons, these ad wizards think showing18-year-olds taking on fire monsters is a better sell than highlighting the sand monsters they’d no doubt meet.

Yet the truck ads are far worse. I can at least stomach the military using patriotic sloganeering, because serving in the armed forces is certainly honorable and certainly not something I want to do. But evoking the most visceral emotions in people, whether by using wounded veterans or soot-covered Sept. 11th workers waving American flags, simply to sell trucks is criminal.

As football games go to a natural or a scripted break, that’s when the saturation begins. Last Sunday, I started laughing because I saw one spot for Chevy where the ad has kids from the Great Depression playing football, then some sort of ranch-hand wiping sweat from his brow and then a dude for the present-day 49ers makes a diving catch. And it’s all cued up to John Mellencamp’s “This is Our Country.” The sequence seemed extremely convoluted and totally nonsensical.



“This is our country, and THIS is our Truck.” Making me wonder: Whose country? The little shavers from the Depression? Or the sweaty vaquero? Or the millionaire athlete? Oh, I get it now; the U.S. is all of ours. Thanks Chevrolet.

However, this is not a new campaign for Chevy. They’ve been running them for at least four or five years, and the new ads are more or less trite offshoots of the original:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=k-ZOtlQJnqI

The ad above is the definition of insanity. With only 59 seconds to work with, a customer might think marketers would be hamstringed in their quest to tap deep into the nation’s well of faux nostalgia. But au contraire mis amigos, there’s plenty of time to see footage from: WWII, the 1950’s auto boom, hula hoops, Rosa Parks, The Cougar playing guitar on a Chevy, Muhammad Ali, Vietnam, hippies dancing, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon, Neil Armstrong’s moon-walk, Forest Fires, Hurricane Katrina, Dale Earnhardt Jr., 9/11 freedom lights, soldiers returning from Iraq and the Grand Canyon.

I think if the Louisiana Purchase and the Teapot Dome Scandal could have been squeezed into the spot, Chevrolet would have run the entire gauntlet of American History in one advertisement for, eh hem, the FUCKING CHEVY SILVERADO.

Yet Chevrolet is certainly not the only truck guilty of terrible advertising. Dodge Ram, I believe, is the company that always has a really deep voice saying something like, “Truckers say if you can pull 10,000 pounds, you damn well be able to stop 10,000 pounds.”

Then the truck, which is pulling what appears to be the western side of the Hoover Dam, speeds down a runway (narrowly missing a swinging piece of concrete along the way) before slamming on its brakes right before the edge of a cliff. I mean, what demographic possibly pulls 10k’s and then needs to stop on a dime inches from the edge of a cliff? That’s like Smokey in the Bandit shit combined with some Incredible Hulk on wheels.

Toyota Tacoma also tries to stay well below the fray, spewing out ads that have their trucks challenging Raptors and winning and driving through fantasy land’s Las Vegas: The World of Warcraft video game. The Tacoma is actually a player in the game who, of course, can’t be killed. This would be a perfect scenario if people who enjoyed dinosaurs, video games and constant masturbation also enjoyed trucks. Not sure if they’ve been focused-grouped, however.



And last but certainly not least there's Ford, a company who uses the assiest of ass clowns out there: Mr. Toby Keith. The guy repeatedly makes the claim that he's a "Ford Truck Man." I'll make the claim once and for all that he's a gigantic wanker.

I’d bet that even people who hate ads like these are willing to stomach them, though, because they understand how the bigger game works. And plus now and then, an advertisement hits the right button at the right time.

And the alternatives suck too. The idea of TiVO – who promotes the campaign, “Work T.V. around your schedule rather than the other way around,” is pathetic on at least three levels - if there were hypothetically three total levels.

The point is that football is something I need to watch. But truck ads are something I can’t watch.

Damn the TiVO to hell. For I may need his services after all.