In many ways, it was an ordinary Wednesday night. I came home from work and flipped on the television, expecting Game 6 of the World Series to run harmlessly in the background as I cooked dinner.
It was chicken, as I recall.
I was completely unprepared for what I’d see next:
“Thirty percent less calories!?” I called out to the chicken. “I’m almost positive that graphic should read 30 percent fewer calories.
“I am not satis-fried. I am not satis-fried at all.”
Before we continue, some perspective: I have several friends and relatives who are Red Sox fans. I asked a few of them if they’d seen the commercial. Each was willing to overlook Burger King’s mistake.
Similarly, when I brought up my concerns to a Cardinals fan, he alos suggested that a Burger King commercial was far down his list of priorities.
Even a Rangers fan might simply have gazed contemplatively into the distance thinking, “Mike Napoli would have had such a better time running shirtless and drunk through the streets of Ft. Worth two years ago. It’s so much chillier in Boston. He might have caught a cold!”
I decided to discuss the matter with my colleague, Mark Watkins, the next day at work. Mark, in addition to his traditionalist views on chicken fried steak, also has little patience for poor grammar in advertising.
Instead of passive-aggressive blog posts, however, he actually takes the time to write to companies that erect billboards featuring slogans he finds unsatisfactory.
“Am I crazy?” I asked him. “‘Calories’ is a counting word, right?”
“You’re not crazy,” he said. “That’s lazy. That’s just lazy. They just wanted both stats to match.”
But take a closer look:
Some secretary down in legal figured it out. Why couldn’t she just write the whole thing? She’s probably bored down there, her impeccable grammar alienating her from the rest of the staff. Maybe her co-workers call her “Plain Jane.” Maybe she’s about to give up hope.
Maybe when one of the copywriters comes to her desk to offer her the job writing ads, she whirls around and her hair comes undone and her glasses fall off and it turns out she was beautiful the whole time. Then Ronaldo, the slick-haired man-vixen from the corner office, invites her to the big dance competition.
And it would all have happened thanks to Burger King’s commitment to tight and righteous copy.
If you were looking for proof that baseball is no longer our national pastime, look no further. While Corporate America spends millions so talking babies will convince us to buy stock during the Super Bowl, we can’t even get grammatically correct commercials during the World Series.
Sticking with the sports theme:
This week, voters in Houston decided against issuing $217 million in debt to renovate the Astrodome and turn it into a convention center. I think that was the right decision. Houston already has a convention center, for crying out loud. You need to do something different.
You could probably hire the kid from Bad News Bears to run around the field all summer, then maybe turn the place into the world’s biggest bowl of soup in the winter (a thick minestrone would be very nice), and I bet it would have come in at a fraction of the cost.
