Riotous DirecTV Ad Warns Of Bizarre Costs Of Using Cable TV

Yet another hilarious ad, the seventh in the same vein, mocks cable TV and reminds viewers that cable TV, will ultimately lead to desolation, humiliation and embarrassment and that you will be personally pressing the self-destruct button in your lives, if you don’t switch to DirecTV.

This ad also explores the same extreme and ridiculous limits, where cable TV users are shown to lose everything they possess; they get thrashed and thrown into roadside ditches. They confront Charlie Sheen and recreate scenes from Platoon with the explosive star. They see their houses blown up and as in this particular spot, you make-believe you are dead and surreptitiously attend your own funeral service, you see your house explode.

All these are part of a script that shows the main character in the spot, having a problem with his cable TV that leaves him so bored and frustrated that it eventually ends in unimaginable and horrendous consequences.

Grey associate creative director Steven Fogel said that he and his team designed the concept in belief that, ” Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if this annoying cable issue spiraled into a domino effect of events that turned into total awfulness for you?’ ”

It has garnered immense popularity and is regarded as one of the funniest ad campaigns of the year. This is the seventh ad and the agency says that two more in the pipeline and they are not averse to doing more.

The latest spot, like its predecessors, is narrated, by a narrator with such deadpan seriousness, as if he is announcing the commencing of the third world war. He describes the scenes as they unfold on the screen.

The ad begins with a guy waiting for the cable guy to come and restart his cable service. He is bored and restless. To pass time, he walks up to the window and looks out of it and from the chain of ludicrous events begins.

“When you wait forever for the cable guy, you get bored,” he says. “When you get bored, you start staring out windows. When you start staring out windows, you see things you shouldn’t see.” At this point, the hero sees two thugs loading a body into the trunk of car. One of the thugs notices him and gives him a menacing look.

The narration continues. “When you see things you shouldn’t see, you need to vanish. When you need to vanish, you fake your own death.” The hero is shown swimming to safety from a boat that has caught fire. “When you fake your own death, you dye your eyebrows. And when you dye your eyebrows, you attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Shifley. Don’t attend your funeral as a guy named Phil Shifley.” The voiceover somberly admonishes.

The script writers said that they finalized the tone and structure of the background narration in the first three spots “The contradiction of what you’re seeing and what you’re hearing just makes things funny,” said Fogel.

To ensure that similarity was maintained and that there was no monotony, the scripts were written and rewritten. Visually the ad has a dark somber edge that goes with the matter. The main character is also well chosen and is the “pathetic-slash-tragic types.”

Steven Fogel said, “We might have a beginning or an end joke we like or a sequence we like.” We figure out a fun place to end things and then backtrack and fill in the gaps,” added Grey assistant creative director Doug Fallon.

Importantly, there is no music in the spot. Whatever, you hear is natural – a foghorn in the water, the drone of a fluorescent light in the bathroom, crickets in the bathroom, all add to the seriousness of a fun spot.