There’s an Easier Way…

I would like to officially call a moratorium on television commercials that use the “There’s an easier way…” premise. They drive me berserk.

I think the concept started in the marketing of cleaning products. And many years ago, they were tolerable. The stock harried housewife would be using some old-school cleaning product to scrub some surface, and then she’d be given the new product, only to declare it so much easier, then throw her old product in the garbage. Fair enough.

Now the concept is used to sell everything, and, in what I can only assume is an attempt to be “funny,” the marketing geniuses behind these adverts show someone doing something in a way no one does them. Instead of the stock harried housewife using an old-school cleaning product, it’s now the equivalent a woman lighting a cigarette with a blowtorch and setting her kids on fire. “There’s an easier way—ABC Lighters!” Or a man looks at his pictures of his son’s soccer games, but the album is, sadly, just full of CDs holding digital images, rather than any pictures. “There’s an easier way—Joe’s Pharmacy digital prints!”

No one was lighting cigarettes with a blowtorch or putting CDs in a photo album before ABC Lighters or Joe’s Pharmacy got the technology to print digital pictures. No one was finding themselves unable of detangling wet hair, or shaving, or brushing their teeth, or applying lipstick without smearing it all over their faces, or taking out the garbage, or drinking hot beverages without spilling them, or doing any one of a number of everyday things without the task resulting in some catastrophe before the miracle products to prevent such tragedies came along.

The actual commercial that finally broke this camel’s back was advertising a laser level. Better than this other stinking laser level that left its users with a crooked mantel. To demonstrate how crooked the shelf was, and thereby how crappy other laser levels are, the bowling ball the couple has put on their mantel rolls off the tilted shelf into their aquarium, which then shatters on the floor. No one puts a bowling ball on a mantel!!! And neither of them make a move to try to catch the ball; they just stand there and watch it happen. It’s so absurd that it drives me bonkers every time I see it.

Enough. Find a new hook. I am declaring “the easier way” dead.