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:
Trivago hotel booking service

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
Not only will we save you money, we’ll help you socially dominate the hotel lobby.

Ever since I first saw this commercial, something bugged me about it, but it wasn’t till YouTube showed it to me about a jillion more times that I realized what that was.

You see that guy on the right? The one in the red sportcoat? Everything about the guy says they’re the rude, swaggering asshole who thinks they’re hot shit, who the audience will delight in seeing humiliated by the hero. Everything about the guy says that … except for the actual script.

Like, absolute worst thing you can say this guy does is talk and laugh a little too loudly on a cellphone in a public place, but that’s it. Look at each of their three lines:

“Well, you’re in the big leagues now!”
Said into a phone, with no context for the rest of the conversation – no reason to assume it’s an assholish remark.

“Not bad.”
Reaction to being told their loyalty rewards program has gotten them a low price on their room – a harmless enough comment.

“Hold up, how?”
Said after hearing the other guy paid a hundred dollars less for their room – asking how that happened, seems like a reasonable question.

Nothing this guy is scripted to do paints them in a negative light – it’s all in the performance. The voice, the body language, the laughs when they think they’re on top, the stricken look when someone else has outplayed them: it all screams “cocky asshole who needs some comeuppance”.

Watching the ad, you instinctively want to root against this guy and see the suave hero take them down a peg, even though nothing that actually happens in the ad justifies such vitriol. Upon realizing this how unjustly manipulative the ad was, it began to piss me off a little …

… until I saw this other ad Trivago did, where they don’t try that approach.

Here, the Trivago virgin doesn’t come off as an arrogant douchebag, but just a regular guy. And, as a consequence, the other guys who laugh at the dude come across as smug assholes, looking down on anyone who “didn’t check Trivago”.

So, damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I guess.