Ear-ritating: How TV commercials misuse sound to get our attention

Sound is a powerful tool in advertising. Its ability to draw attention and evoke emotion is proven to affect sales. So why, then, do so many advertising soundtracks seem designed specifically to annoy, irritate, and outright enrage?

At a time when so many advertising people fancy themselves screenwriters or auteurs, how can it be that every TV commercial break is an artless, cacophonous carnival of stupid?

As a marketer myself, I understand the need for advertising to get noticed. As consumers pay less and less attention to TV commercials, and as we grow more and more accustomed to a constant level of noise pollution in our daily lives, brands and advertisers are looking for new ways to draw attention to their ads.

But is being an obnoxious asshat really the right tactic?

Let me show you what I mean.

Allstate Mayhem “Car Thief” TV commercial

In Allstate’s “Car Thief” ad, the company’s “Mayhem” character and his hapless victim antagonize viewers with increasingly louder shouts of “WHAT?”

As I said in my review, this TV commercial embodies the worst of interruption advertising because, just like the thief it portrays, it literally smashes through our consciousness to steal our attention.

Which, to me, makes this ad no better than the thugs it unintentionally glamorizes.

Liberty Mutual “Witness Protection” TV commercial

Alas, screaming at viewers is just one way advertisers use sound to break through our consciousness. Strange and distorted voices are all the rage now, too.

Consider the garbled HURGLE-BURGLE-MCGURGLE bullshit used by Liberty Mutual—one of the most prolific purveyors of ear-ravaging advertising—in this spot, called “Witness.” (Read the Cranky review here.)

Notice how these cretins get us again at the end with the brain-cell-killing jingle that blares LIBERDY-LIBERDY-LIBERDY, LIIII-BERDY four times in a row.

Liberty Mutual “Zoltar” TV commercial

The sadists at Liberty employ the same audio gimmick in “Zoltar” (review here), this time via the fortune teller’s grating voice and accent:

Liberty Mutual “Bad Job” TV commercial

Here, the company takes annoying voicework to the next level in its “Bad Job” ad (see review) which ups the ante by punctuating the spot with a series of high-pitched beeps:

GEICO “Pinocchio” TV commercial

Not to be outdone, GEICO has recently joined in the fun with its Pinocchio-themed ads:

GEICO “Little Pigs” TV commercial

GEICO is no stranger to irritating interruptive advertising. In 2010, it savaged the nation’s ears with this noise, and brought the ad back for a sadistic second run in 2019:

SquareSpace “Winona in Winona” TV Commercial

Similarly low on the IQ scale is the “Winona” ad for SquareSpace, a website-building platform. This nonsensical Super Bowl spot has plenty of problems (touched on here), but for the purposes of this blog post, I’ll just point out the idiotic outdoor premise which conveniently gives the actors an excuse to raise their voices.

Hyundai “Smaht Pahk” TV commercial

Yet another Super Bowl LIV ad, Hyundai’s “Smaht Pahk” commercial contrives to make us look by having its actors babble incessantly in thick Boston accents:

Little Caesars “Hot n Ready” TV commercial

This Little Caesars commercial defies us to look away using stupidity on an epic scale:

KFC “Deep Breath” TV commercial

This KFC ad from 2017 irritated me so much that it became the target of my very first ad review. (And no, recent KFC ads aren’t any better.)

TurboTax “All People Are Tax People” TV commercial

We’ve seen plenty of examples of ads with annoying sounds and voices. Now here’s one with music, courtesy of TurboTax. (Review here.) This $5.6 million boondoggle debuted during Super Bowl LIV:

What in the hell. Again, studies have shown that people tend to remember products in advertisements that feature songs and music they like. But this?

Oh, and the “dancing.”

Hey, TurboTax, some free advice: Your $5.6 million ad spend would have gone a lot further had you used your 30 seconds to tell people why they should buy your tax software over competing products from companies such as H&R Block.

You absolute DUMMIES, you.

Advertising voice actors and the so-called “fuck-you” read

Remember the deep, booming baritone voice of early TV commercials? That smooth-talking salesman pitch that people make fun of seems almost quaint today.

It began to fall by the wayside in the 1990s, replaced by something voice actors called the “fuck-you” read. Wry and dry, it often sounded bored of the very things it was saying.

This sardonic delivery took a break after 9/11 when advertisers attempted to put more joy into the sound. But then, voice acting “went the way of the Wild West,” said voice actor James Conroy in an interview with Audible Range titled “Weird Voices Are Winning Out.”

“Every option was on the table: deep, dry, happy, high pitched, quirky, off-tempo. It was like free-form jazz,” says Conroy. “You went into an audition knowing that they could want anything.”

And what did we get? A whole slew of new, annoying voices and speech patterns, including uptalk and vocal fry.

Which is where we are today.

Advertisers, may I have a word?

I’ve said it before: Advertisers, you cannot annoy people into buying from you.

Getting our attention is only part of your job.

Getting our attention does you no good if we hate you for it afterward.

So being likable is also a part of your job.

If you think about it, advertising is a lot like looking for love.

Let’s say you want to get the attention of that attractive person across the room.

Would you:

A) Approach with courtesy and confidence, doing your best to be your most likable and charming self?

Or would you:

B) Jump up and down in front of the person, waving your arms and blathering like a damn fool?

That’s what I thought.

Why is this idea so hard for advertisers to understand?

No place for asshats

Here’s one more reason for TV advertisers to try and do better: They’re playing to a captive audience.

Unlike web ads that can be stopped with ad blockers, television commercials enter our homes as uninvited guests set to “autoplay” with virtually no way for consumers to stop them except to pounce on the mute button.

So watching commercials is not really a choice for anyone who watches TV.

We consumers are going to see and hear TV commercials whether we like it or not. The least advertisers can do is try to make the experience enjoyable.

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Which ads and TV commercials do you find most ear-ritating? Sound off below.