Marketers' Lawyers Are Idiots Too

DO NOT ATTEMPT!

How come you never see "Do not attempt" superimposed on the screen during a television show or motion picture when one of the characters does something dangerous? Why do the corporate lawyers think people watching television commercials are going to go out and drive their cars over a cliff because someone did it in a TV spot - but they don't need to protect themselves against this kind of behavior in a show? Why the double standard? When Bruce Willis launched the police car into the helicopter in Live Free or Die Hard, why wasn't there a super warning us against trying this the next time we are being chased by a French mercenary sniper?

More to the point, would a judge really rule favorably for a plaintiff who went out and did something totally stupid just because he saw it in a TV commercial? I know there are plenty of Darwin Awards candidates out there, but don't we pretty much agree they are responsible for their own behaviors? I guess there have been enough court cases that have gone the wrong way to make marketers' companies nervous, but common sense needs to prevail. Some of the ridiculous cautions on most consumer products today probably says I'm wrong.

Of course some of the stunts you see in television commercials are pretty much impossible to do in real life. Can you really walk into a room with a bag of fast food and have it burst into flame like it does in the Taco Bell commercial? ("Professional. Do not attempt.") If you had access to heavy machinery, could you really run over your old washing machine with a steam roller as in the LG spot?

Like so much in our society today, the lawyers rule. Still, I would love to see a whole bunch of people take it upon themselves to try every outlandish stunt they see on TV and if someone gets hurt, try and sue the pants off of the sponsor. Let's see what the lawyers come up with then! We'd probably get a lot of boring commercials (not that there aren't a lot of those already) with pages and pages of text like you see in magazine ads for drugs now.

Common sense...where have you gone?