What’s up with your commercials? You don’t get to punch someone for a Tiguan. And it’s called Punch Bug, not Punch Dub.

What’s with the “dub” business anyway? Dub is a form of music, based on Reggae.

Look, it’s a childish game that we’ve all played, but your marketing department doesn’t get to change the rules to suit your ad campaign. It’s a pop culture thing, and manipulating it to suit your sales ought to be a big flop.

Leave it to Wikipedia to have the whole story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch_buggy

And what’s up with the name Tiguan. Tiger and Iguana? Oh yeah, that’s the image I want my car to suggest…

I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now on several computers and have to admit, I’m pretty happy with it, despite the fact that, even with all the hype, it’s really what Vista should have been, maybe after a service pack.

You must have seen the annoying commercials like the one above, where people seem to think that Microsoft actually listened to them and took their advice on some little nitpicky thing. Well, Microsoft, here’s My Idea (TM).

Windows Vista and 7 have a pretty good Media Center built into most of the higher versions. I have been using it on a PC connected to my Flatscreen TV in my living room. I have a tuner card in it and I can use it to record TV or watch a DVD. It’s pretty nice with Netflix or Hulu too.

The other PCs that have Windows 7 on them have this capability too, but since they don’t have a tuner card, they’re missing out on the live TV part. But an X-Box 360 on the home network can connect to the computer with the tuner in it, watch TV and even control the channel selection! Pretty nice if you have the X-Box. But, can you do that from another computer? No.

I’d really like to be able to sit in front of my computer in my office/studio/radio room and tune in to TV. I watch video off the internet that way all the time. Heck, I have two monitors and a laptop there most of the time, why not put one to use that way sometimes?

But that function seems to be missing. How hard could it be to add that, if they could put it into an X-Box game console? The media center stuff is all there, all it needs is some kind of client to talk to the PC with the tuner. I just don’t get how they could miss that simple application.

My TV in the living room sits slaved to a DirecTV DVR box most of the time. The tuner card in the PC is mostly unused right now. I’m usually the only one who flips over to it to watch something off the internet, or one of the Canadian TV channels that DirecTV doesn’t provide. The local channels are usually better quality there too, but most of the time who cares if Idol is in HD or not…

So, Microsoft, I’m a PC and not long ago, I had an idea: put the same remote viewing functionality that the X-Box has into Windows 7. Thanks, no commercial is necessary.

Logorama

A good trusted spokesperson helps. I can’t decide who I want to buy a car from – Mike Rowe (from Dirty Jobs) selling Fords, or Howie Long (football celebrity) for Chevy. Somehow, though funny-guy Luke Wilson just doesn’t inspire me to switch to AT&T…

I’ve learned that the family that plays video games together, stays together, or so Wal-Mart seems to think. Several of their commercials feature families playing various brands of video games. Seems counter-intuitive to me… since when are video games a wholesome family activity? I guess it’s better than hanging out in the local bar, or tagging City Hall as a family.

So many of the commercials seem interchangeable. They’re almost cookie-cutter identical. Target, Wal-Mart, Kohls, Macy’s and JC Penney all blur together. How many times can you promise 20-50% off on the stuff you marked up on November 1st.

Old Navy and The Gap continue to try to outdo each other with pandering to our kids, selling “fashion” over substance. Listen to the one with the cute little cheerleader kids. They practically have a hissy fit, demanding the latest fashion and refusing to wear last-years clothes. They dress it up in cuteness, but the message is there: buy us what they tell us to wear, or else. The “SuperModelMannequins” aren’t much better. They pretty much represent what Old Navy thinks of their customers – mindless automatons, who buy whatever they tell them to. The problem is, their fashion is crap. It’s brightly-colored, cheap crap. It’s plain and if it doesn’t sell this year, wait a few years until they bring it back with a new name and call it “new.”

And don’t get me started with the Circuit City or Radio Shack ads. They’ve sunk to new lows and don’t even make sense at times.

The average number of commercials per hour seems like it’s climbing. You really notice it even when you are fast-forwarding through them on your DVR. I’ll bet it’s getting pretty close to 50% advertising on many prime-time shows. And I count self-promotion as commercial time as well. If a network spends 30 seconds plugging an upcoming show, it’s a commercial to me, whether they pay for it or not. Same goes for local “story at 11″ teasers.

The thing that really ticks me off is the repetition. What makes them think we need to see the same commercial several times an hour, or even twice in the same break? The two-parters are annoying as well. Do they think that 30 seconds with a minute of other commercials, then 30 more seconds make it like a two-minute commercial?

We’ve also learned (again) that it snows in December in Western New York. The weathermen would like to make you think that’s news, but I guess there isn’t much else to talk about with the Bills sucking and all… It must have really bugged them that they had to wait until now to instill their winter snow panic attacks after they got such an early start in October a couple years ago.

There appears to be no end to the tasteless, sugary, sappy, “Christmas Specials” that TV can come up with. The Hallmark Channel seems to have devoted it’s entire schedule since November 1 to showing only Christmas programming. One Big-three network showed the much-beloved classic A Charlie Brown Christmas in a chopped-short 30 minute version because it was pre-empted by the President’s speech about Afghanistan. The conspiracy theorists are having a heyday, claiming it’s an attack on Christian values by the administration. If that’s the case, there’s a lot of crappy Christmas programming coming that they can attack. I’d thank them if they could eliminate most of it. Incidentally, the Charlie Brown show is being shown again in it’s full length later.

To me, there’s about three classic Christmas specials and there is no need for any more. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (the one with the late Burl Ives as narrator), A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Christmas Story (the Jean Shepherd story featuring Ralphie Parker.) Not another one measures up, except maybe the original A Christmas Carol movie. (No need for the Jim Carey 3D animated movie version, or the modernized Bill Murray one either.) I’ll slide on the It’s A Wonderful Life if you insist. The Shop Around The Corner, is alleged to be a better Jimmy Stewart Christmas movie, but I’ve never seen it. I’ll still pass on the Miracle On 34th Street a “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” rip-off that was always a clever product-placement for Macy’s anyway.

Despite a lawsuit from AT&T over the red and blue maps, they’ve come right back with this ad that calls the iPhone a “Misfit Toy” – a reference to the place where broken and mis-shapen toy go from the Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer story.

It’s easy to see that the rumours of Verizon reaching a deal with Apple to carry a version of the iPhone never came to fruition and that, with Verizon going full steam ahead with the Google Android-powered ‘Droid phone, they no longer need to keep the kid gloves on and are attacking the iPhone for all it’s worth.

Reviewers of the ‘Droid phone have said that it’s the closest thing to a competitor to the iPhone so far. While it may not be better than the iPhone, it’s better in some areas and a close second in others. On they average, they’re calling it a toss-up and have named it, not an iPhone killer, but the iPhone’s equal.

With Verizon’s massive coverage and huge customer base, it’s hard to not see ‘Driod eventually being as big a success as the iPhone, if Verizon doesn’t screw it up.

How could Verizon screw that up? Well, their reputation for locking down every aspect of their phones and nickle-and-dimeing their subscribers to death for every little thing, Verizon could do it, if they stick to their traditional marketing.

But the Google Android software the ‘Droid phone runs on is supposed to be open and it may not be possible for Verizon to keep it from being tweaked by users. Eventually, they’re going to have to compete against the low-priced all-in-one unlimited service packages being offered by some of their competitors too.