Musing of the Month: June

Greetings readers!

This month I'm highlighting this hilarious ad by Manhattan Mini Storage. I've had a love/hate relationship with ads recently. But first, a brief tangent. In the very first blog I've said that I'm a proud lover of commercials and advertisements. Traditionally, all of your programs were programmed to have a commercial break on cable. This to me was fair. The rise of streaming has disproportionately made this experience tiring. Many streamers like Peacock offer a barrage of ads to watch before you watch a movie. But many choose to place them during peak moments. YouTube recently made the decision to place ads during "peak moments" of the video. YouTube shows you which is the most popular moment of the video when scrolling through the time duration bar. TechCrunch says that Google will leverage Gemini AI features to use these "Peak Points" to identify the highest viewer engagement for ad placement. I've lived through early Hulu placing ads in the middle of George Costanza monologues. It isn't pretty. It's already an obnoxious experience with streamers placing full banner ads when you pause something. For many, the premium options are no problem to upgrade. I don't see that in my future. For starters, I get my muses from the ads I watch between youtube essays. And second, I'm just not interested in YouTube TV's big red repackaging of cable. I love talking about silly and creative ads, but it felt important to speak on the climate of things. We may be leaning towards a future of more intrusive ads built by AI and price hikes.

But enough of that, it's silly storage time. This ad campaign uses the tagline "A Storage Unit has never...". The tag line reminds me directly of the infamous early 2000s anti-piracy ads. "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" and this meme constantly came to mind when thinking about this ad. These ads are basic, with a small amount of dialogue in them. But I must commend the actors for performing so genuinely.

Below are the other set of commercials that Manhattan Mini Storage released. Enjoy!

Thank you for stopping by my wacky corner of the internet.