So I was chilling with Nik over spring break watching television, sippin on Sierra Nevada, and basically shooting the shit about career paths in the soulful regions of law and accounting when this wonderful commercial came on.
So, you may ask, what the hell are you talking about? The commercial is actually sorta fucked up, you might say. It's not even remotely interesting. In fact, it's the world's third-largest corporation, an oil company, advertising some bull-shit about the very clean sustainable energy that would undermine its profits and cut into its enormous margins on oil. True. But it offers a moment that I would like to call: Seriously? That made it through?
So witness 0:39 in the commercial. In the midst of well-composed scenes of life meant to connect to the viewer and evoke moments of reflection comes a very scientific diagram, and it's quite simple: "geothermal = earth's heat" and a simple line on the diagram indicating "magma".
Now this may not be as gut bustingly funny to you as it was to us, but we sorta sat there and thought through the making of this commercial. I mean, Chevron is a BIG corporation with a LOT of smart, ruthless, calculating people. Big Oil is also very image conscious, so they must hire the best of the best advertising people (as is demonstrated by the quality of the rest of the ad). Plus, they must endlessly vet these things to make sure this is the right image they want to put out in the world. So from the very bottom creative teams, through the partners of the advertising firm, through to the marketing divisions of Big Oil, and probably in front of the eyes of some senior execs...passed the geothermal = earth's heat / magma diagram.
And if the words weren't there to begin with, but the diagram was, then at some point during the process...someone stopped everyone else and said "hey, guys...wait...this diagram might be confusing if we don't label it...it just looks like a bunch of random lines." At which point some other college grad says "I got it!" and writes "geothermal = earth's heat" and then writes the word "magma" and draws a line. And then everyone else in the room makes tentative eye contact with someone else...and everyone slowly nods in approval, until the room bursts forth in applause.
All that, or man these companies think that we are just a bunch of stupid turds.
(Nik: I really just wanted to see this commercial again, and I figured you did too. haha.)
8 comments:
same book. still available.
j
Awesome, nice find! I was looking for this the other day, btw I think you can setup a new url and then just fwd it to this one, geothermalheatmagma.com still available!
J: I don't think I get the joke.
N: You forgot "equals" It has to have "equals".
I think what happened was that a bunch of people were sitting around planning this commercial, and realized that most people probably don't know the definition of "geothermal".
But nice dig at Chevron's "massive margins." Please tell me you aren't going down this Obamasocialist "all corporations are evil/people not profits" populoelitist path.
RS
Let me start by saying that it's abundantly clear I think the purely anti-corporatist stance is stupid. That's precisely my explanation for why part of me has forever abandoned a large segment of the left.
I will not, however, that Chevron did post 18.6 billion in profits this year. My point was to point out that Chevron is currently #3 on the Fortune 500, which is an indicator about the humor of "geothermal = earth's heat".
And Obamasocialist and populoelitist? You couldn't manage to throw Islamofascism or Defeatocrat in there somewhere?
Since this post had no intellectual or political bent whatsoever, I'm going to assume that you've simply adopted the hysterically prickly right-wing stance that automatically conflates all pragmatism and reality-based policy with communism. Wait wait, you said socialism. Got it.
:D
Actually, I was just trying to make up new words. I give "Obamasocialast" a B- and populoelitist a C+ on my ranking scale. Perhaps a conflation of Obamelitipopulsocialist?
RS
yeah, seriously. What's up with the creation of new words?
Do we have liberal recombinant words? Something akin to Defeatocrat, Taxacrats, Islamofascism...
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