TV commercials obviously exist for the sole purpose of trying to sell you something. That being said, they can still provide a lot of entertainment. If anything, they should be entertaining. If they’re fun to watch, you remember them, talk about them and and share them with others and spread information about the product via word of mouth, and you recognize the characters and logos while you’re out shopping. The audience gets a bit of entertainment while the businesses get to sell more products. It makes entertaining commercials a win/win.

Some of the best commercials out there include Wendy’s Where’s the Beef?, McDonald’s Fillet-o-Fish, and Budweiser’s Wasssup? commercial, among countless others. What makes these ads so great is that they’re funny, quotable, and lead to a lot of references and word-of-mouth advertising. People wear t-shirts with these slogans and still reference them years later, essentially giving the company free advertising. That’s because of how entertained we are by them.

It goes without saying that some mascot characters from commercials, like the M&M’s team, the Geico Gecko, and the Pillsbury Doughboy have become instantly-recognizable pop culture staples. They’re now beloved characters, and that’s because they originated in fun and entertaining commercials. All these ads that entertained the world so much also did numbers for the products being sold.

Nowadays, though, commercials aren’t nearly as great. They’re very rarely funny or fun to watch. Instead, most of them just talk at you and blandly tell you the information about the product. They’re informative, but they’re not entertaining. If they don’t grab your attention, how are they supposed to sell you anything? They’re not worth paying attention to anymore.

Remember how fun it was to see a kid’s head transform into a fruit by eating a gusher, or someone melt into a blob by drinking Capri Sun? Those days are long gone. Now they’re all boring and worth turning away from. This isn’t me trying to support capitalism, this is me yearning for the days when we at least got to see something humorous or fun or exciting while we were being advertised to.

It definitely doesn’t help that a lot of big-name companies, like Coca-Cola, are lazily and sloppily using AI to make terrible commercials. Looking at it all, this is probably the worst era for TV commercials of all time.

If these big companies wanted to maximize their profits, they would make their commercials entertaining again. It’s a bummer to see just how terrible they have gotten.

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