Marketers Are Morons - Cox Communications Edition

TV advertising just keeps getting worse and worse. My current nominee for populating their marketing department with total morons is Cox Communications.

Like every other cable company, they are pushing their bundle of services. In the commercial that is currently running there is some lug who tells us it's his anniversary and he bought his wife new phone service. OK, this is totally lame and the people at Cox know it. So he addresses the stupidity of doing such a thing and says he knows it's outlandish and makes him look like a cold-hearted bastard.

Now if they had stayed here and played this with a tongue-in-cheek irony, it might have been OK. Play up the fact that they are fully aware they are suggesting something that no one in their right mind would really do. But they don't. He completely defends his "gift" because it makes so much sense. At this point the commercial becomes totally sexist and sets back the women's movement 40 years.

First of all, he says he "pays all the bills" so he knows how much they are saving. Obviously his moronic wife - who does nothing in the commercial but talk on the phone - isn't capable of handling any of the family's finances. When they finally do allow her to speak, she excitedly tells us that she has been spending her day calling all her friends to let them know about her wonderful anniversary gift.

What a horrible cliche is being perpetrated here. The husband handles the finances and makes all the important decisions; the woman fritters away her time talking on the phone.

This just completely sucks and the people at Cox Communications should be ashamed of themselves. Any woman who watches this commercial should immediately cancel any services she buys from Cox - or as Cox would portray it, have her husband cancel them because she's probably not capable of doing it herself.

Clueless.