Now anyone that knows me knows I don’t like commercials. Commercials were never the diversion to your TV program; the TV program was the diversion for the commercials. It was the trick to keep you watching so they could deliver you the advertisements.
I must be quite the contrarian, because even at a very young age, when people were getting excited, even gasping over Super Bowl commercials or Super Bowl commercial previews, I never gave a shit. I never laughed at them. I never talked about them with others. I never even got a boner from them, as some people have. You know who they are. The people who actually bought Budweiser frogs T-shirts, or cried from the Budweiser Clydesdale horses commercial.
In the time of streaming, I don’t watch many commercials; it’s probably more likely that the only commercials I see are during football games, where you have no choice. So, with tax season right around the corner, commercials are popping up for tax services left and right, and I’ve come across the cringiest commercial I may have ever seen.
If you haven’t already, please watch the commercial, the YouTube link we have included, before you read further.
Now, I don’t know if after watching this you will agree with me, but this has to be the stupidest, cringiest, most pandering-to-Generation-Z commercial I’ve ever seen.
You can basically call it a mix of taxes, meets Jem and the Holograms, meets karaoke, meets anime, meets Generation-Z girls just having a good time singing, and ya know….singing about taxes. Please on God’s (formerly) Green Earth, tell me one person who has ever…EVER sang about filing their taxes!!!
So the commercial was put out by Intuit TurboTax, which is more than likely one of the biggest tax preparers in the whole country.
I could just picture the boardroom meeting right now with the marketing company, and they’re sitting around thinking,
“How can we really reach out to the young girls? What’s going to make them really want to file their taxes with us?”
And one of the geniuses in the boardroom comes back and says,
“Well, they love karaoke, and they probably have not much to do on a Friday night—why don’t they sing about their taxes and who they’re going to prepare them with?”
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at this, as it is so embarrassingly cringey that I really hope I never see this commercial again, but unfortunately, I’ve seen it ten times. And I’m certain that with the Super Bowl coming, eleven through fifteen are right around the corner.
Now, maybe I’m overanalyzing it. And I say maybe. But just the whole point of reaching out to girls, and using this as the strategy seems very odd to me. And honestly, it’s just a terrible commercial. It’s actually embarrassing.
I wonder, after you see this commercial if it is going to make you want to file your taxes with Intuit TurboTax? It’s a fair question.
