Friday, November 14, 2008

infomercials

I saw this infomercial while watching America's Funniest Home Videos (yes, back to those Bob Saget days...) and a bunch of crazy infomercials came on.
But I found this one to be both absurd and hilarious.

What I like to call...
THE POCKET CREEPER




What they're selling:
Listen Up, a hearing aid for people who can't admit they need a hearing aid, has the added bonus of endowing users with super-hearing so that they can eavesdrop and generally hear things they aren't supposed to.

Hey, that's the My Lil' Reminder chick. The poor dear must have tried playing back her audio recordings only to discover that she was going deaf, too.

The hyperbole:
It starts with the old guy listening to the TV and then his radio too loud, then getting totally owned by his harpy of a wife. He takes it surprisingly well (his grin is slightly maniacal), perhaps because he couldn't hear what she was saying.

Then the whole thing strays into the reprehensible, when it boasts that you can eavesdrop on people's private conversations from "Up to 100 feet away."

Then there's a shot of an elderly couple using it in church. We found it weird that they would market their product to both eavesdroppers and church-goers in the same ad. But then isn't God the biggest spy there is?

The reality:
The false advertising is blatant. For example, the guy at the football game can apparently hear the quarterback call plays in the huddle from the stands. Unless the Listen Up is capable of some fancy Fourier analysis for isolating specific sounds, and you can be sure that it is not, then he would bleed from the ears due to amplified crowd noise before ever hearing a single call. The only reason his ears aren't bleeding is because, as the customer reviews can tell you, the piece of crap doesn't work:

"I feel like murdering all the guys who acted in the advertisement."

1 comments:

Dee. said...

i've seen it!!!!! everytime i see it im like "... yeeeeeaaaah suuuuuurrrrre" it's so stupid. infomercials are entertaining sometimes but only because they're so incredibly absurd.

 
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