Idiot Ball/Advertising

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Idiot Ball in Advertisements.


  • One commercial takes the Idiot Ball to truly staggering heights. A Comcast commercial features contestants on a show called You Might Think DirecTV Has More HD But You're Wrong. The contestants only have to answer a single question - which has more HD, satellite or cable? The host, a voice-over, and the name of the gameshow tells them that "You Might Think DirecTV Has More HD than Comcast But You're Wrong," and yes, they get it wrong.
  • Infomercials make the actors look like morons. Example: "Too stupid to figure out how to use a blanket? Get a Snuggie!"
  • Geico implies the Squick factor and raises the Idiot Ball in one of their commercials where a couple says they're not happy with what they did to save money as sushi is expensive. Their daughter comes in holding an empty fish bowl and looking for her two missing tropical fish. The commercial implies that they processed and ate her fish for sushi in order to save money. Ignoring the fact that even a guppy costs US$3.25 and maybe weighs one ounce, you'd need at least 16 of them to make a pound of sushi. So they're saving money by rendering their kid's fish, notwithstanding that commercial processed fish like surimi in a supermarket is about US$10 a pound, while a pound of sushi made with your kid's tropical fish would cost a minimum of US$52 a pound.