Friday, April 13, 2018

The Vanna White Of Ambulance Chasing TV Ads

A couple of years ago my daughter in law bought me a flat screen TV.

It’s fairly big.

I have an over the air digital antenna that gets some stations some of the time.

On balance it’s so much better than Comcast that I liken it to the parallel fact that I don’t own a boat anymore.

The real thing of consequence, though, is that the stuff that comes in digitally over the air has a whole different viewer base.

I guess.

Because the commercials one sees are from a different world than I have ever inhabited.

That different world is weird, but substantially more interesting than the one that I perceive myself to normally inhabit.

When I first started plunging into this world, watching whatever the antenna could capture, as I prepared my dinner – a couple of years (or, perhaps more) ago - a dominant commercial type was the “call our law firm because we know how to get a lot of money from evil doers who are all out there to screw you” type.

The shill who drove those campaigns I almost immediately dubbed “The Fierce Woman”.

She was a slender, younger than, but, pretty much, looks like version of Kellyanne Conway.

And she was fierce.

If the law firm she was shilling was half as fierce in court as she was on TV I could not imagine a pharmacy company that could remain out of Chapter Eleven.

Years have passed and the same ads – generically – dominate my limited over the air digital TV nightscape.

And the Fierce Woman is still there.

But she has morphed.

She still appears at varying levels of fierceness – varying levels being a new thing – ranging from the old time fierce to sweet and loveable, almost, but still fierce.

But now she has had a some near clones added to the shtick.

They are also younger that Kellyanne, and younger even that the fierce one.

I think a new genre of TV personality has been born.

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