Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon?

Now who would want to use a food that is grey and has a last name that is, well, a little gross sounding? Most adults have surpassed the potty association with food and those who don't probably don't live at the level requiring French mustard. The name makes for an interesting television commercial and is somewhat snobbily amusing, but after the guy rolls his Rolls' window down and asks the question, it's time to watch a Twinkie or Chef Boyardee ad. Those are items to which most of us can relate and which we will probably eat lots of in our time. Notice that those snooty Grey Poupon ads aren't around anymore although the condiment by that name is still on the shelves of the local grocery stores.

This leads me to characters or situations in advertising that are humorous or clever. They are humorous or clever because they are shown to us in short snippets and, with our attention spans growing ever smaller by the day, we need the short and sweet or short and funny. We like the quick "hit" and run of a zippy little ad with its funny ideas and people. We sometimes even remember the name of the product, which makes Madison Avenue types feel very happy as they waddle off to the bank with pockets full of money from the companies that hired them to create a desire among the American public to buy, buy, buy their products.

This leads me to the bizarre concept that, because we might find a character or situation clever, amusing, or even ha-ha funny in an ad, that we would want to have that same situation or character in a half-hour comedy. To wit, the cavemen of GEICO. They now have a full-blown series on TV based on their popularity in the ads written to convince all of us to buy GEICO because it's owned and operated by people who make fun of cavemen, but show them as intelligent and sensitive beings. A little of this "genre" goes a very long way. I tuned into the show for a few minutes last night and thought I was watching a rather long version of a GEICO commercial, but no one talked about insurance, and there weren't any logos on the screen that linked the cavemen with GEICO (perhaps this is where the theory of a missing link comes in--sorry, I couldn't resist). Maybe somewhere, someone was laughing uproariously at this new comedic TV fare, but I'm thinking probably not. What was clever and had a unique twist in an ad became, pardon the expression, a Neanderthal in a full length exposure. I wasn't planning on buying GEICO insurance based on the series of caveman ads and I am not planning on watching the "spinoff" unless GEICO offers a year of free insurance for the first 20,000 people who tune in, and I am one of them.