In need of an irony supplement

 
 

These two ads, the top for Enterprise Rent-a-Car, the bottom for Capital One, appeared about a minute apart the other night on CBS. I have no idea which sponsor signed up that guy first, but Enterprise clearly has gotten the worse of it.  Cap One's ads are brilliant. I give it my coveted Rewinder imprimatur -- meaning that I rewind it over and over like a happy five-year-old. (Another Cap One ad, the one where cubicle walls fall like dominoes, is a Rewinder, too.)

Not only is Enterprise's ad aggressively unhip like all of its ads, it's actually a little more square than the usual Enterprise ad because I think it is trying to be ironic.  The juxtaposing of an ultimate reunion fantasy -- multiple girls hanging off him, a trend captured perfectly by Esquire magazine in a recent article, "Group Sex for Sale" -- with the hot rental car is so over-the-top, they must be kidding, right? But because the ad is packaged like all the other Enterprise ads (picture me drawing a perfect square in the air), you're just not sure if the unhipness is intentional or not. And because it's got that guy in it, people are expecting him to deliver the funny. They want a loser, not a winner.

In the end, I couldn't care less: Enterprise is my preferred car-rental company -- great prices, great attitude -- and you couldn't get me to sign up for a new piece of plastic if it charged negative interest.  But if I were handling Enterprise's ad account, I'd have some 'splainin' to do.

Update: On the jump page, that guy's identity revealed!

 

Andy Rose writes:

I don't know if you care, but the "other" actor's name in those two commercials is Nate Torrence.  I saw the Capital One ads before the Enterprise ad, although I don't know which one was filmed first.

I've seen Torrence in at least a couple of ads besides, although I can't remember which ones.  For a while, he appeared to be kind of the "it" actor of the moment for commercials... much like David Bowe was several years ago.