An Awful Commercial

Bryce and I don't have cable anymore. What we have is a Roku box, which streams Hulu Plus and allows us to watch all of our favorite shows (which isn't actually that many, since we don't watch that much TV) at our convenience. It's even better than DVR, because you don't have to remember to program anything. It's just there for you, the day after it airs.

With cable, you get all kinds of commercials. With Hulu, you get just a few commercials, targeted for the demographics of the shows (supposedly) and run over and over. And over. So, if you have a particularly heinous ad that is in rotation, you get to see it a lot. It gets burned in your brain.

The commercial that is haunting us currently is a Slate Blueprint credit card ad. It sucks for many reasons, the least of which is the catchy song it uses, "One-two-three..." In this lovely commercial, a woman who looks to be in her third trimester of pregnancy has gone shopping. She tells her husband not to worry, because she used this new credit card so that they can pay for monthly small stuff like diapers outright, and pay down interest faster on bigger items ("Bigger?" the husband says, "Bigger" the wife says as she opens the door to the nursery). Here's the punchline... she went to the doctor and now she had to go out and buy three cribs because...surprise...they are having triplets! Dad passes out on the floor and then wakes up to a plush pig being dangled in front of his face by his endearing wife, and then he sighs "triplets" with a dreamy smile while the voiceover idiot says "Slate Blueprint. For life's...little surprises."

So many things about this commercial piss me off. First of all, I am pretty sure that triplets don't hide out until your third trimester. What kind of a shoddy OB do these people have? Admittedly, my perspective on ultrasounds is skewed. As a fertility patient, I get one as early as 6 weeks for confirmation of a sac/yolk (sadly from experience this is in part to make sure it's really in your uterus), and then you get at least one more before graduating from fertility clinic to regular OB so that you can hear the heartbeat (or, so that you can make sure there really is a heartbeat in there and you are still good to go to your regular OB). Then you might not get another ultrasound until 20 weeks for the anatomical scan. However, I'm pretty sure that the heartbeat ultrasound or the 20 week scan would ferret out THREE heartbeats instead of one. And if that woman is supposed to be 20 weeks, then the fact that she looks like she's well int her third trimester should be a big tipoff that she's carrying multiples. Argh. Did no doctor vet this commercial at all?

Then there's the "for life's little surprises" tagline. Which is the most asinine thing I have heard (or at least among the asinine things I have heard). I'm sure what they meant was either a) babies are little or b) we're cutely sarcastic. However, as someone who would give my eyeteeth and someone else's to have one surprise, having two extra surprises (especially when according to the paragraph above THIS SHOULD NOT BE A FREAKING SURPRISE) is not little. Having three babies instead of one is not little. And everyone being so smiley and giddy about it? I don't think that's how that would actually go down. Unless these are independently wealthy people (and they might be, as those look like fancypants cribs and so there's at minimum $2400 in just the sleeping furniture alone), suddenly finding out when your wife is waddling already that there are two more tiny humans to care for would be stressful. Because that's 3x the diaper cost, 3x the baby stuff, 3x the childcare expenses. And let's extrapolate... 3x the college tuitions. Even a little plush pig dancing in your face would not be enough to take that terror away. But I guess that's why this is a credit card commercial and not a pregnancy product commercial. Maybe the power of this particular credit card gives you so much control over your financial stability that a suckerpunch to the uterus like surprise triplets in your 8th month when you've already had your shower is nothing to you because you can make your own plan to avoid interest. Uh-huh.

Maybe I'm a little rough on the copywriters/ad execs who created and approved this concept. But this commercial rubs me the wrong way. And it's on all the time. Even during Grimm, which I totally would not peg as targeting the "new parent" demographic. I guess I'll just grit my teeth, leave the room when I hear that "One-two-three" jingle, and hope that maybe we can be graced with at least one of life's "little" surprises, which won't be a surprise at all but a carefully orchestrated event akin to a miracle.