When I was twelve I wanted a Nicer Dicer. My recipe repertoire did not extend much further than a good bowl of cruesli or a sandwich with cheese, and yet at those moments I wanted nothing more than to cut tomatoes into neat slices and chop onions into perfect cubes with that miracle device. Countless times I have spent long Sunday mornings staring eagerly at the infomercials. It has stayed with me as a striking example of the power of advertising: how to get a twelve-year-old enthusiastic about a vegetable cutter.
As you become more aware of the world of exaggeration, empty promises and consumerism behind the cheerful images, the fun naturally diminishes, and every commercial break soon turns into a garish source of annoyance. Yet I still start singing the entire Sandwich Spread jingle with abandon when I hear the word ‘fresh’ (“I like it nice and fresh! I like it nice and different!”), and I regularly quote the good-natured Limburger who was thirteen years old. ago, in a Mona commercial (which was then forty years old), he announced to everyone with an empty dessert cup on his bald head: “It’s a party.”
That deep-rooted love-hate relationship made me excitedly ready for the new PowNed panel show on Thursday evening This week in advertising: Dolf Jansen, assisted by two permanent advertising whisperers and two rotating guests, would reveal “in an informative and entertaining way” how advertisements influence us every day.
In keeping with the theme, that unfortunately turned out to be a clever example of deception. The episode started with a 15-minute conversation about baby poop and ended with a discussion about female nudity in commercials, which mainly prompted two of the attendees to make awkward jokes about porn. A program can be neither informative nor entertaining when the team captains – in this case the only ones with expertise – are continuously drowned out by presenter Jansen and guest Rutger Castricum.
The main role of the first was to repeat a number of painfully lazy puns with increasing volume between the items, while the second made a sport of filling the program with as much narrow-mindedness disguised as corniness as possible. For example, changing diapers was really a woman’s thing and he didn’t like the fact that red instead of blue liquid is now used in tampon commercials (poor!). Although team captain Anne Stokvis fortunately pushed back more than once, the first episode turned out to be a bigger source of annoyance than many commercial breaks.
Not an easy conversation
And you could already be annoyed (or downright angry) after listening to the conversation that presenter Jeroen Pauw had earlier that evening with BBB’ers Mona Keijzer and Sander Smit in Sophie & Jeroen (BNNVARA). The pair suggested that Ukrainian men who came this way (or had already come) because of the war would be better off returning to the country they had painfully fled – yep, back into the war – to fight against Russia there. That was not an easy conversation, Keijzer emphasized several times – and then tirelessly made it further difficult, including by grossly exaggerating the number of Ukrainian refugees who arrive here every week.
It was enough to make you long for the less alarmist exaggerations in familiar commercials. At the end of the evening I surrendered to it and watched the old videos: I exchanged Mona Keijzer for the Mona man, the Mona man for the Sandwichspread jingle and the Sandwichspread jingle for the Nicer Dicer. And once I arrived at the infomercial of yesteryear, week of consumerism and nostalgia, I finally gave my twelve-year-old self her way. Ordered today, delivered tomorrow. But all in all, I waited about fifteen years for that device.
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Tags: review PowNeds panel show advertising informative entertaining terms theme turned grossly exaggerated
