You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
The Stargate TV franchise

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
If these dorks can appear in a Stargate-adjacent production, then there’s even hope for you!

It’s always fun when commercials for a movie or TV show don’t just edit together existing footage, but have the actors film new footage just for the commercial. Even when, as here, it’s mostly them sitting behind a table saying, “Next.”

The Terrible Interviewees Montage is a well-worn comedy trope, but it’s still good for hearty laugh, and is executed well here – I particularly love the guy who just makes a dash for the Stargate.

It’s also a pretty genius way to promote a win-a-chance-to-be-on-the-show contest. Such contests are inherently gimmicky and not at all about the artistic integrity of the production, so leaning into that with some self-deprecating humor, showing a bunch of randos clamoring for stardom … I like the tongue-in-cheek approach.

Not much else to say about it, except that I miss when Yahoo! had a big enough presence to sponsor ads like this, and was a viable competitor for Google. What can I say: I’m one of maybe ten people who still has Yahoo! as their search engine of choice. Though, I’ll admit, “I yahooed it” doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as “googled it”.