Stealth Pun/Advertising

Examples of Stealth Puns in Advertising include:

"Charmin" toilet paper commercials featured cartoon bears. Left entirely unsaid is they're all about bears shitting in the woods.
An advert airing in the UK has an angry bear in the middle of a cubicle farm, who turns back into a flustered office worker when given a painkiller. Implying, of course, that she's acting like a bear with a sore head.
Boost Mobile has a commercial with Danica Patrick racing and going into the pit where her pit crew are a bunch of men dressed in outfits similar to the Dallas cowboy cheerleaders, one even has tan lines for a bikini. So it features drag racing.
In the 1980s, noted football/baseball player Bo Jackson appeared in a series of ads under the concept "Bo knows". Inevitably, there would be a sport he didn't know, often leading to the response "Bo don't know diddly!" The stealth was later removed and lampshaded when several ads featured the noted guitarist.
- In fact, he was trying and failing to play a guitar when the famed performer himself said, "Bo, you don't know Diddly."
- In another commercial of the same type, Sonny Bono showed up, saying "I thought it was another 'Bo Knows' commercial."
There's an advertisement for Sharp Quattron Pixel Technology, which features George Takei promoting the four-color TV in question. It would seem that Takei is only in the commercial for his hammitude, but some careful thought reveals a dastardly hidden pun. Watch:
- George Takei is very, very gay.
- He is also very, very Asian.
- The new Quattron technology adds yellow to the standard RGB array of colors in a TV's pixels.
- So, what is George Takei describing? He's describing adding YELLOW to the RAINBOW. Now, the reason why the pun in question needed to be made seems to lie in Takei's fondness for all kinds of stupid puns, as evidenced by his facebook wall. It might be hard to understand for many a good folks, but it's a sneaky one regardless.
This commercial begins with a driver placing a CD in a car stereo. A familiar song plays. The driver turns up the volume and rocks out, while the passenger is clearly uncomfortable. As they drive along, other drivers sound their horns, give the thumbs up and whatnot. Finally, the vehicle is shown and before they reach the chorus, they cut away. The song is Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" and the car is a hearse leading a funeral procession.
A UK advert for children's shoes showed kids the size of tower blocks running around a city. And the music? "Birdhouse In Your Soul". Because they might be...
The font used to write the original Cooper Tire logo is actually called Cooper Black. They redesigned the logo in a way so its name is written in a different font all because of this.
- Similarly, the font used to write the word "Optima" on a Slim Fast Optima bottle is actually called Optima.
- And the older logo for the University Inn in Seattle, WA was originally written using University Roman.

Back to Stealth Pun