Saturday, July 4, 2009

PSA: Recession Aggression with Office Depot

On hulu.com, The Office episodes 5.19-5.21 (at least) offer you the option of watching a long version of an Office Depot ad rather than shorter ads interrupting the episode.

If you choose, as I do, to watch the longer ad and get it out of the way, you'll find what I think is an ingenious advertisement for a fake product: The "Recession Aggression" giant beanbag-type product was designed, apparently, to help small business owners cope with the economic downturn, and the ad features such suggestions for abusing the beanbag as "brand it with a branding iron," "call it on the phone and keep hanging up," and "take it camping and throw it in the campfire."

The longest, most bizarre and therefore funniest suggestion is "Rent a dentists [sic] office for three to six hours. Rent a dentist costume that same afternoon. Invite it over and tell it you're a dentist. Proceed to take all of its teeth out, Then say: 'I thought you wanted to have no teeth. I'm not a dentist. Get out of my office.'"

To put this tongue-in-cheek-but-with-the-same-mock-sincerity-as-many-of-the-show's-characters ad on an Office episode is brilliant.

But what I think is probably the best detail is the fact that the ad is advertising Office Depot -- an office supply outlet store, the exact kind of company Dunder-Mifflin is fighting against to maintain its bottom line -- but gives only the website TheSurvivaloftheSmartest.com.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

FYI, I saw this ad on Hulu as well, but before an older episode of The Daily Show, so it's not solely associated with The Office. Very funny commercial, I'm hunting for the video clip...

Unknown said...

Woohoo, found it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJQiENt61Zw

Arielle said...

We love this ad so much at my house that we've taken to saying "I thought you wanted to have no teeth" as a household saying for anything that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I find myself having to check my urge to say it to people in public lately too since I know they'd have no idea what it was in reference to!