No, it's not news, but we just need to Rant — the majority of the people who make commercials are complete fucking idiots. That's no surprise, considering who they're aiming at with their marketing. It's just that it's so overt and widespread, sheer stupidity hammering us at every turn — on television and radio, in magazines and on billboards. The Cult of Idiocy is surrounding us, forcing us to circle the wagons...which, naturally, just means we end up going in circles, not getting anywhere.

The specific idiocy we're referring to today is the Special Ops of dumbassery — the marketing industry. They are relentless in simultaneously displaying their own stupidity while automatically assuming the stupidity of their audience.

Take, for example, the recent commercials for the Universal Orlando resort and theme park. In big, bold letters, the advertisers call out: "Attention Workaholics." And their message to workaholics? "It's time to fall off the wagon."

Hello, morons? When an alcoholic, whose addiction is to alcohol, "falls off the wagon," that means he no longer resists his addiction and he returns to the alcohol. By the same logic, a workaholic, whose addiction is to work, would — when "falling off the wagon" — return to work, rather than attend your theme park as you're implying. Your feeble attempt at being clever is utterly ruined by the fact that you have no idea what the idiom you're using actually means. We're not the only geeks to notice this error in logic. Unfortunately, many people probably don't think twice about it, and the "ad geniuses who came up with that one" will have singlehandedly destroyed a meaningful phrase in the English language.

Then there's one of our absolute least favorite commercial campaigns — the fucking Geico gecko. Completely aside from the purely imbecilic writing in this series of ads, there are two big problems with the gecko.

First off: what's with his freaking voice? It can't be just us realizing this — originally, the gecko had a very Kelsey Grammer-esque voice, which makes sense, as (according to most references) he was voiced by Mr. Grammer himself. Then, suddenly, he changed from Grammer's deep, rich upper-crust King's English to a peppy, spunky Australian accent, reportedly voiced by Richard Horvitz. Sure, filmmakers switch actors for the same character all the time (some obvious examples come to mind). But Geico altered the entire tone of the gecko character for, apparently, no reason at all. And, of course, they figured most people would be too stupid to even notice.

The alteration isn't only larynx-deep, however — the gecko's entire point was totally overhauled. If you remember, the original commercials featured a gecko who was not associated in any way with the Geico insurance company; in fact, he was quite irate that he kept getting phone messages for them on his answering machine (presumably because consumers are so stupid they would look up "Geico" in the phone book, see "gecko," and misdial — way to compliment your customers there, Geico!). He pleaded with people, usually on his outgoing message, to stop calling him up for car insurance.

Then, suddenly, with the voice change, he was the supremely loyal spokeslizard for Geico! No explanation, no interesting storyline that followed his shift from hating Geico to working for them. Nothing. They just made up a new commercial campaign, but recycled the character from the old one. And again, no one is supposed to notice this discrepancy, because hey — the public is pretty stupid, right?

Another corporation with notoriously asinine commercial campaigns is the sandwich chain, Quiznos. We won't even go into the abomination that was the Spongmonkeys campaign — suffice to say, if you want people to eat food at your establishment, it might be wise to refrain from featuring disgusting, malformed, shrieking rat creatures in your commercials.

Now, however, the repulsive singing vermin are gone, and replaced with a talking baby — more accurately, the same talking baby from the thankfully short-lived sitcom, Baby Bob, voiced by gravelly forty-something Ken Campbell. The horribly executed CGI used to match the baby's mouth to Campbell's words is the least of their problems. Other netizens have commented on the mutual flirtation between Baby Bob and an attractive adult woman. We don't care how old Bob's voice is — it's pretty stupid to have him wining and dining grown women who could easily have given birth to him. (Not to mention the fact that Bob is actually a girl.)

Of course, Quiznos' marketing geniuses also get the blue ribbon for schmuckosity for playing a Baby Bob commercial on the radio. Oh, for crying out loud, people — the whole joke (such as it is) is that it's a talking baby! If we can't see the baby, it's just a guy talking to us about your stupid, disgusting sandwiches. There's no longer any point to it. Idiots.

Admittedly, we might not be the best judges of how effective a commercial is — largely due to the fact that advertising just doesn't seem to work on us. If we're in the market for a particular product, we research the brands and models, figure out the best deal for what we want, and go get it — the Internet is, as always, a remarkable tool for tasks like this. But commercials? We usually can't even tell you what a commercial was advertising, even if we actually enjoyed it!

Even some of the "classier" commercials can have some serious problems. Watching a recent commercial for a luxury sedan (of course, we don't remember which one), we were amazed when the voiceover actor — speaking in a polished, aristocratic dialect — mispronounced the word "familiar" as "fermiliar." Folks, there's no R there!

Mispronunciation, of course, is rampant throughout the media. We can't count how many times the morning radio guys reported on "the pope's internment" — we felt bad that the pope was being confined against his will (the word you're looking for, radio morons, is interment). And that poor family in Manhattan, trapped in an "ellervator," according to ABC's nightly newscast — what a tragic story, being trapped inside something the anchorwoman can't pronounce.

Don't worry — we're not taking the ignorant media and its advertising whores themselves too seriously. We just see them as another symptom of a dumbed down society. The sad thing is, folks, stupidity is contagious and heritable — stupid people in positions of power and influence make it possible for other stupid people to gain positions of power and influence. The stupidity trickles down to the media, who report on the stupidity with no awareness that they are perpetuating it. Our education system is largely a product of this stupidity, and therefore passes on the stupidity to the next generation — and the Circle of Life continues!

Is anyone else noticing this Idiot Feedback Loop? More importantly, does anyone have any idea what we can do about it?

We're not the only geeks to notice this logistic error.

I really don't think 'logistic' is the word your looking for here...

Nor was 'your' the word I was looking for...

Well, by a logistic error, we meant an error of logic, which we feel is applicable. Perhaps "moronic error" would have been a better fit for this commercial, though! Thanks, JY.

Always nice to see that I'm not the only idiot bothered by these things. I'm surprised at the number of people catching onto this now. Are the ads just now getting played outside of the major markets?

Anyway, since clarity is always nice, rather than the phrase "logistic error," might I suggest, "error in logic"?

Faced with Reid's, er, logistic suggestion — that clarity is, in fact, nice — we've edited our Rant for clarity.

Thanks for the assist, Reid (and JY).

Double dipping to address the part of Reid's question we missed. We've seen these ads for a while, we've just been bitching about them privately up until now. Plus, we don't exactly pay attention to commercials, so it usually takes some time for us to notice stupidity, unless it is really of the "in your face annoying" variety. This one finally got to us.

Ads aren't intended to be logical, or more correctly, they are intended to persuade which is done by taking advantage of people's biases, emotions, and well-ingrained behaviors. Logic rarely has anything to do with it because in most cases the advertisers don't want people to think so hard about the ads.

On the positive side, when you do see the lack of logic in these ads, they will be less persuasive for you, especially if you react emotionally to their stupidity

Very true, Ron. Like we said, this Rant was mostly about "venting" our reactions to marketing stupidity, and the general stupidity it perpetuates.

This lack of effect, though, is what we never really get about commercials. Most of the time, we ignore commercials outright, and we absorb nothing from them. This clearly has no impact on our buying habits. (And we just don't put stock in that bunk about "subliminal influence," either — if that actually worked, we'd be up to our eyeballs in women's razors, bathroom fixtures, and debt.)

Sometimes, we outright hate a given commercial, which only tends to make us change the channel when it comes on (these are somewhat rare, but we can think of several, including Quiznos' old Spongmonkey spot). Since we actually do tend to notice these, we also tend to remember which product or service is being pitched; but if anything, this has a negative impact on our buying habits with regard to that particular product or service. Clearly not what the advertiser had in mind.

On the very rare occasion when we see a commercial that we actually like, we usually don't even know what product or service it was for — it's more like an entertaining short film that has no other impact on us. And if we do know, it doesn't really impact our view of the product or service anyway. (Sure, we loved those "Sectaurs" commercials when we were kids — talk about commercials as short films! — but we never owned or asked for a single Sectaurs product.)

So when does advertising actually work? Are we the exception or the norm in this regard? If more people saw the lack of logic, and reacted emotionally to it, commercials would become — as you suggest, Ron — completely ineffectual. We're crossing our fingers.

[Since this was meant to be an email from a personal friend and not a comment, we have removed the comment with the author's consent. — The Two Percent Company.]

This was hysterical and very true. Ad agencies are trying so hard to be clever these days they don't even notice when they're inhhoerent.

I sometimes wish a lot of them would go back to the old Ogilvy & Mather days ... a big picture with enticing text. That's all I need.

Hear, hear! At least that way, we wouldn't have to deal with their misguided attempts at being witty.

That gecko has driven me nuts. And every time his accent changes, I wonder if anyone besides me is noticing.

I really want to know why his accent changed from a dapper upper crust Brit to sounding like Ed Sanders on Extreme Makeover Home Edition. I guess they think the average American doesn't know diddly about English accents. (Sigh, unfortunately maybe they're right.)

Don't worry, Steph, we're noticing it too! And judging by a few Google searches, so are others. Not that this will deter Geico's ad geniuses from perpetuating their annoying stupidity. If you haven't heard the latest radio commercials, Geico insists on referring to the gecko as New York's (or whatever major market the commercial is broadcast in) "state amphibian." We'd point out that geckos are actually reptiles, not amphibians, but our sense of intellectual disgust just exploded through the top of our skulls.

A little late to the the party here, sorry. I read this rant with great amusement and agree almost completely. I actually found the article because I am trying to find out who is currently voicing the Geico Gecko.

I am writing to disagree with you on Geico's marketing campaign. I remember the original commercial's featurring the Gecko getting angry with people calling. Eventually, he gave up and went to an ad audition to work for Geico. That was the commercial that featured the Taco Bell Chihuahua.

The next round of commercials featured human Geico staff singning the praises of the Gecko. They even did one with with the Gecko in a convertible sports car cruising towards his parking spot, as employee of the month.

This went on for a bit and then they changed direction slightly. They pulled the Gecko and went a different direction. Recently, the Gecko has returned and the latest ad's seem to have him spreading his message across the animal kingdom. I preferred the previous, more upper-class Gecko.

But I still think the ad campaign is funny and actually very consistent. They did, in fact, show how the Gecko went from being annoyed by being phoned, to actually being employeed by the company he was confused for.

Welcome to the party, Macey! First off, since you came here for a reason, we'll let you know that the actor who currently voices the gecko is a bloke named Dave Kelly.

We'll pause here to note that much of what we're about to say is pretty trivial. We aren't trying to make a big deal about it, and we aren't saying that it's important.

About the gecko himself, we have to respectfully disagree. For one thing, since the inception of the gecko commercials, he never has "gone away" — you're forgetting the series of "gecko conducts public surveys" commercials, where he and his co-workers talked to various folks to see what their take on car insurance is, or some such. (Remember him singing "Kung Fu Fighting" in the mini-van?)

You're absolutely right that Geico has been throwing lots of other campaign ideas into the airwaves, but they never actually pulled the gecko campaign. Instead, they had (and have) at least four different campaigns going on at the same time: off the top of our heads, they've got gecko commercials, caveman commercials, Energizer bunny-esque "fake" commercials, and "I'm a very serious voiceover guy saying absurd things" commercials. In fact, this is another thing that annoys us about Geico — why not pick one completely unfunny ad campaign and stick with it? We're put off by each of these campaigns individually, but put them all together and, in our view, it makes it even worse.

We'd also have to disagree that Geico showed how the gecko went from being annoyed to being employed (which, by the way, was a lovely rhyme!). They certainly showed how he went from auditioning for the "part" to working for the company; but exactly how did he get from being irritated by the Geico/gecko confusion...to actually auditioning in the first place? To us, there's a huge logic gap there that would need to be filled for the sake of consistency. Maybe we missed an episode during a month-long bender.

All that said, does it matter that much? Nope, and we're not really particularly upset about the gecko. We just see it as a symptom of the banality of commercial advertising in general, which itself reflects the general stupidity and inconsistency that runs rampant in our culture.

However, our opinions on the Geico commercials are just that — our opinions. If you think the gecko commercials are entertaining, you're completely free to enjoy them! We're sure some of the stuff that we find humorous would be looked at by others with confusion or derision, and we're okay with that. To each his own sense of humor; while we may not think that these ads are entertaining, we wouldn't think any less of anyone who does.

In closing, since we've seen a few searches for it in our stats, we'll just repeat: the actor who currently voices the gecko is a bloke named Dave Kelly.