Has anyone besides me noticed an increase in meanspiritedness in commercials of late?  I know that businesses have been more cutthroat in their advertising with regards to each other, but it seems to be spreading out from the competitor to other entities now.

As an example, there was a recent Compass Bank ad series (I think it was them, it’s been a week or two since I heard this one) that was touting the result that 98 percent of their customers would recommend their bank to someone else.  That’s an impressive result (if true), but they seemed to feel that it wasn’t enough.  The whole point of this series of commercials was to disparage the “2 percenters” as nuts.  The one that I remember most was one where they asked the lady why she wouldn’t recommend them and her reply was that if she did then people would constantly be asking her for advice.  The commercial, at least on its surface, was treated in a humorous fashion.  Maybe I’m being over sensitive here, but it came across the wrong way to me.

A second example (which is what prompted this entry) was some commercial on TV where they said that “4 out of 5 dentists” would recommend their product (I don’t remember what it is right now).  Once again, they tried to be humorous about it, with a skit where one dentist was swatting a fly with a clipboard, hitting the last one, causing him to pass out and hit the “No” button.  Even so, it still came across as mean-spirited.  It also comes across to me that the company isn’t secure in its use of “statistics.”  It’s like they feel some need to explain away any and all possible dissent (i.e. there can’t be anything wrong with our product; there must be something wrong with the person who didn’t like it).