Random Thoughts – Randocity!

Dumb Commercials Series: Unilever

Posted in commercials, entertainment by commorancy on July 6, 2021

Here’s a brand awareness campaign. I don’t really understand the need to create this brand awareness, but here it is in all of its highly annoying glory. Let’s watch… then discuss.

What went wrong?

As you may notice, this is ad #7. Apparently, Unilever has created a whole passel of these things. I’ve watched a few of them, but this version is the one that’s being heavily played on the channels I’ve watched. Like the GrubHub delivery dance before it, it’s now being played in exceedingly heavy rotation. Whenever this commercial comes on, I turn it off.

What’s wrong with it? The pseudo rap segment in the middle of this advertising is as annoying as fingernails on a chalkboard (i.e. equal to GrubHub’s delivery dance music). If you’re planning on adding a rap segment, at least hire someone who can actually rap. In fact, this commercial is so annoying that it completely undermines the message of “good” that Unilever is actually claiming that it is doing for nebulous “communities”. Statements like these can be easily made, but which don’t need to be backed up.

In advertising, annoying advertising is fruitless and undermines the message. Clever is what bring in customers, what people remember and reinforces the message. This commercial is not clever, not unique, annoying and, most of all, completely forgettable.

I’m not even sure what the point is to this brand awareness campaign? In fact, I’d suggest that it’s actually better to advertise Dove, Suave and Hellmann‘s brands separately in their own commercial ads, then attach a small Unilever portion discussing the “good”. This brand awareness advertisement makes me want to avoid all of these brands when shopping. I don’t really care how much “good” you claim to be doing, I don’t want to hear about it in what may be the most annoying “brand awareness” commercial advertisement of 2021.

Rating: 1 of 5 (annoying, undermining, lame)

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Dumb Commercials Series: Grubhub Delivery Dance

Posted in commercials, entertainment by commorancy on July 5, 2021

Here’s a commercial that, on its surface, seems like a great idea. It’s got cutesy computer animation, a potentially decent premise, but it’s all ruined in an instant by selecting the most annoying and craptastic soundtrack imaginable. The question, though, what does it ultimately have to do with food delivery? Let’s watch…

What went wrong?

Obviously, the music. That, and Grubhub paid to put this commercial into exceedingly heavy rotation. Nearly every other commercial was this ad when it played. Worse, it was played at every single commercial break everywhere including on TV, on streaming services and even on YouTube. This commercial received so much saturation that it became sickening.

Word to the wise. If you’re planning on this heavy of a rotation for a commercial, produce three different commercials with three different songs and three different dances. That strategy wouldn’t necessarily make this specific commercial less annoying, but having three would at least reduce the need to complain about this specific ad.

Note, Grubhub has now disabled comments on YouTube for this ad. I don’t blame them. When comments were still live, most comments were not at all kind. Almost every comment seemed to complain how annoying this ad is. Thankfully, Grubhub listened and this ad is no longer in rotation, yet the comments drove the need to disable the comments.

The problem is, just like Uber Eat’s disconnected ads about its food delivery service, Grubhub’s disconnected ad is oddly cut from the same mold. This ad is not clever, it’s not unique and the music is, well, crappy and annoying. This ad is pretty straightforward and family friendly when compared to Uber Eat’s oddly stalkerish concept with Simone Biles.

Rating: 2 of 5 (annoying, overplayed, cutesy, amazingly bad music) — one extra star for the animation

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How to stop Mac dock icon bouncing

Posted in Apple, botch, computers by commorancy on September 28, 2015

AppleWhen an application starts up in MacOS X Yosemite, it bounces the application dock icon a few times, then stops bouncing once the application has started. For me, this is perfectly fine because at least there’s a positive response. Positive response is never a bad thing in operating system design.

Unfortunately, Apple decided to overloaded this same bouncing behavior for notifications to get your attention by bouncing a dock icon. For me, this is definitely not wanted. Not only is it extremely annoying, it never stops until you go touch that icon. It also performs this bouncing way too frequently. There are much better ways to get user attention than by bouncing the dock icon. Thankfully, there’s a way to stop this annoying and unwanted UI behavior. Let’s explore.

Defaults Database

Apple has what’s known as the user defaults database. It is a database of settings not unlike the old UNIX .files system, but much more extended. Unfortunately, most developers don’t document which settings can go into the defaults database and many of the settings may be hidden. However, you can easily find them by reading the values by opening terminal.app and then typing:

$ defaults read com.apple.dock | more

This command will spew out a lot of stuff, so you’ll want to pipe it to more to page through it. Each app has its own namespace similar in format to com.apple.dock that you can review. Not all apps support changing settings this way. For other apps, simply replace com.apple.dock with the appropriate application namespace and you can read up the settings for that application. If you decide to change any of the values, you may have to kill and restart the application or log out and log back in.

In short, there is a way to stop the bouncing using the defaults command. To do this, you will need to update the defaults database for com.apple.dock with the correct setting to stop it.

Stop the Bouncing
BounceIconTo stop the bouncing of dock icons, open a terminal shell and at a command prompt, type the following:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool TRUE
$ killall Dock

Keep in mind that this is a global setting. This stops the dock icon bouncing for every application on your system for all notifications. The launch icon bouncing is not controlled by this setting. For that, you should visit the preferences area.

You can always reenable the bouncing at any time by opening terminal and then typing:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool FALSE
$ killall Dock

Note that the defaults database is stored locally in each user account. So, if you log into several different accounts on your Mac, you’ll need to do this for each of your accounts.

Please leave me a comment below if this doesn’t work for you.

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