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:
Boost Mobile

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
We can give you the best deal, ’cause we’re a pack of idiots.

A lot of ads will tell you that their product is cheaper than their competitors. Some will go whole hog, and tell you they’re not only cheaper, but also better than anything else on the market. Failing that, they’ll tell you they’re at least as good as the competition, just at a lower price. And very, very rarely you’ll get a commercial that admits, okay, they’re not quite as good as their biggest competitor, but the difference is so negligible, the cost difference still makes them the better option.

Then you get this ad. It presents a truly incredible offer: an unlimited data plan that costs just $25 a month, with a guarantee that that price will never go up. That sounds too good to be true. How, you have to wonder, can this company provide such an amazing deal?

The answer, according to this ad: because the company’s run by dum-dums who don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Maybe that wasn’t intent behind the ad – maybe they just wanted to insert a weird joke to make their commercial funnier and thus more memorable. But the way it plays out … I mean, the Boost spokesperson talks about how they’ll provide the data plan at $25 a month forever, then their computers immediately go down, because they thought putting a shower in their office was a good idea.

I should be clear: I have never used Boost Mobile – I don’t know if their data plans are prone to outages, glitches, or other forms of mismanagement. I’m just going off this ad, where the message is clearly (if inadvertently) that you can get a data plan at such a great price, but the catch is … well, you get what you pay for.