You also get to spot certain tropes and formulas that, despite being really obvious, must work, otherwise they wouldn't keep appearing.
First up, you've got the parental guilt-trip:Do your children have gold-plated eyeballs? Why not? Don't you love them? Wow, you're a real ass-hat.
Its a cheap & nasty trick, but there is little that makes parents more emotive than the well being of their child. So using them as a tool is bloody clever!
A sub-set of the parental guilt trip is the in-house brand manager, where kids are groomed into selling the product to their parents on behalf of the supplier. This is achieved with a bit of carefully orchestrated mass hysteria:
Kids? KIDS?? AAAAAAARRRRGHHHHHH!
Next up: fear-mongering. This is mostly found in insurance or medical ads.
Do you sometimes scratch your nose? Does it smell bad when you poop? Is your vision impaired when you jam a fork in your eye? You've probably got poopy-scratch blindness. It affects 1 in 7 trillion Americans. Seriously, don't stress it. You're much more likely to die from being hit by lightening. Or being eaten by coyotes. You should probably buy lightening insurance and coyote pills, just in case.
A more tricky one: product placement
Did you know that HP pay The Office to have their products placed? Me neither. The funniest is when companies deliberately disguise a logo, because the company wouldn't pay them to advertise. Like when the replace a glowing Apple logo on a very distinctive Mac Book with a glowing kiwi fruit.
Also...SMOKE MARLBORO CIGARETTES. SUPERMAN DOES. PROBABLY. I THINK HE STUFFED A FEW CARTONS DOWN HIS TIGHTS AND THEN SNUCK OFF BACK TO SMOKE THEM IN THE DAILY PLANET TOILETS. YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO, BUT THE FIRE ALARM HASN'T BEEN WORKING IN THERE SINCE JIMMY BORROWED THE BATTERIES FOR HIS REMOTE CONTROL CAR. Anyway. I digress. Finally, and this is a new one on me: Promotional consideration
On a legitimate level, this can be a company providing a prize for a game show and getting a few seconds (apparently 7 seconds is the norm) dedicated airtime for a bit of descriptive blurb to be read.
On a slightly more sneaky level, it might mean free hotel breaks for the station owners in return for a few seconds mention on a morning chat show. How many times have you heard the presenter tell you an anecdote about the restaurant they ate in last night, or the film they watched, or the musical they went to see? Hmm? Its always a bit creepy and rehearsed, isn't it? "So, Ian, what did you get up to last night?", "Well, Brenda, thanks for asking, I had a really fab time at Bernie's Steakhouse in downtown hicksville..."
Quid pro quo, Clarice...
