Anti- Commercials

I love TV – who doesn’t? How I’ve long sat in front of the tube, like a man waiting for a bus that never comes. How it has kept my attention! How I love moving objects and sound, given to me in an easy to swallow 30 minute serving. What a great and marvelous friend my TV is to me! That is until it starts hiccupping consumer diarrhea in my face in the form of COMMERCIALS – the variable raisin in my snow cone.

Commercials suck. They punctuate our favorite shows. They control our daily routine, dictating when you eat, when you sleep, when you go to the bathroom, when you do your homework, when you get on the internet to watch people make asses of themselves. Most importantly, commercials suck because they aim to do one thing – sell you something. Whether it’s vacuum cleaners or car insurance, the evil that has interrupted my Saturday morning cartoons wants me to buy their shit. Hell, these commercials even tell me to buy into NOT buying drugs, and since the late 90’s that has included cigarettes. It’s bad enough that I should be drinking Budweiser to be funny and score hot chicks, and now my TV is saying that certain undesirable things will occur if I “get high”, or incidentally, steal pills from my grandmother. In that regard, I ask those evil makers of American commercials to MAKE UP THEIR MINDS. Unfortunately, that is not my main quarrel with these so-called “anti-“ whatever campaigns.

The main purveyor of the anti-drug commercials in America is ABOVE THE INFLUENCE, the commercial product of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign (according to their website, AboveTheInfluence.com, “a program of the Office of National Drug Control Policy”). Their website claims “Our goal is to help you stay above the influence. The more aware you are of the influences around you, the better prepared you will be to stand up to the pressures that keep you down.” Ironically, it seems that they realize that their word is just as valid as, say, the word of a crack dealer when they state, “You might even consider this Web site an influence.” That’s all well and good, AboveTheInfluence, but how do your commercials stand up?

For a while, they hired a four year old to draw a couple cartoons under the instruction that “they look cute dammit!” These cartoons were comprised of a group of Sharpie doodles that told a short story about Anonymous Pot-Smoker and the response he’d get from such invaluable real-world influences as his girlfriend, or his dog, or ALIENS. As you can figure out (or have witnessed if you still watch cable TV) the response is always of disgust, prompting Mr. Smoker’s once loyal entourage to leave his ass on the curb to smoke a blunt by himself. Although this offering from the AboveTheInfluence campaign is so squeaky-clean simple and effectively aimed straight for the elusive K through TWEEN demographic, they all fail where they ought to succeed – us young adult twentysomethings want to roll a doobie and fire up a couple of these ads on the ol’ youTube for an hour and a half. All these commercials are lacking is Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry playing in the background.



Recently, the campaign has aimed to make a more psychologically charged caliber of propaganda. The basic equation for these appears to be one awkward pre-teen to 12th grade burnout subject, add a backstory of a night gone too wild (of course when someone brought the weed to the party, those damn kids), and subtract the friendship of one or possibly multiple friends who have witnessed how much of a jackass the subject is when he’s “hopped up on goof balls.” Hmm…does this sound like a familiar story?

Repetitiveness aside, the this-could-happen-to-you scenario only works on those who let the television dress, feed, and bathe them as well, or to put it another way, people who are INFLUENCED by TV (dun dun dun!). Again, I am left with a poignant desire to change the fucking channel, and oddly, go do some crack.