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:
Sprint cellphones
The Promotion:
The Pitch:
Anything can be a crime deterrent if you throw it hard enough.
There are a whole bunch of rules about what commercials can and cannot do. Even if doing something’s not explicitly illegal, it can still leave you open to a lawsuit if anyone finds they can claim damages because of it. That’s why every prescription medicine commercial is like 80% disclaimers, warning folks about side-effects, telling them when not to take the medicine, and mentioning (as briefly as they dare) that they should really leave the judgement on this up to a doctor.
For other products, the legal hurdles are usually not so cumbersome. Still, it’s kind of amazing there’s a national commercial for a major company that actually encourages customers to commit assault using their product.
It kinda reminds me of those Ladder life insurance commercials with the pitch “life insurance so good, they’re gonna want you dead”. Though at least those ads included the disclaimer, “But seriously: intentionally killing a policy holder will void all life insurance benefits”.
But here, no such disclaimer. While it may be played for laughs, they do still list using your cell phone as a weapon to be one of its many functions. And you know there’s someone out there dumb enough to take that idea seriously.
As far as I’m aware, Sprint was never sued because their commercial encouraged someone to commit assault via cellphone, but damn, were they living dangerously with this ad.