Have you seen the series of annoying Electrolux ads with Kelly Ripa? These have been high on my annoy list for some time, but the latest one, which is for a washer and dryer, has just maxed it out for me. It just seems to me that every message in this all wrong.
First of all, Kelly Ripa is frighteningly thin. Some people wear thin well, but she just isn't one of them. Back when she was a young actress on All My Children, she was very pretty, and not at all stick thin, so there's nothing that would convince me that there isn't an eating problem involved here somewhere. She looks all wrong, and it gives the ads an air of the surreal. And in today's society, if you're too fat, that's bad, but if you're too thin, you get TV commercials and the cover of fitness magazines. When are we going to learn that "fit" means "healthy", and that too far on either side is unhealthy?
Secondly, the whole "message" of these ads is that these appliances reduce your work time to zero so that you can skip around like a magic elf. I'm sure that I'm being silly here and taking this all far too seriously, but you know, even with the most fabulous washer/dryer in the universe (and I have to say that those Electrolux front-loaders look pretty nice...), laundry is still work. Not work like in it was in 1900, but still work. So is loading the dishwasher, emptying it, cleaning the kitchen, and so on (not that I think that Kelly Ripa actually does any of these things, so maybe she does skip around like a magic elf).
Thirdly, and this is the one that really put me over the edge on this particular commercial, the thing that these appliances apparently free up you time for is making massive chocolate chip cookies for your kids, so they can eat them while glued to the TV (hard to tell but that's what it looks like to me). Fine message. The way to be a good mom is to feed your kids huge lumps of sugar and park them in front of the television.
Sigh.
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