Cringe time

Why so many local ads can be so bad --and so successful

by David Andrew Stoler

A Cardi's spot

You have worked hard. Your limbs, body, brain is tired. You grab the chips and salsa, the low-cal colored sugar-water, and plop down in front of the couch for a night of well-deserved relaxed and restorative hypnotism in front of the boober. You feel the nerves start to unjangle as you think less and less. Time slips by and the stress of the outside world is almost forgotten. You are in the zone.

Now, suddenly, you're pulled, jerked violently, out of approaching nirvana by . . . Superman? Not the real Superman, it quickly becomes clear, but a bizarre parody of Superman. And he is invading your sanctuary of peace. He is . . . portly, the standard tight-fitting blue suit even a bit obscene.

In the televised land where you find a certain secret satisfaction in the fact that you would in a second date even the "average" Party of Five character, where every "geeky" girl takes off her coke-bottle glasses on prom night to reveal her stunning beauty, you are shocked out of your well-deserved stupor by the incongruity of what amounts to yet another not-at-all-in-shape American in Spandex.

And he wants to sell you a car, this bizarro Superman. That's why he is here. He is the owner of a PVD used-car lot, and he has just forced you to enter the land of local television advertising. It's a painful place to be, filled with thick Rhody accents and thinning hair, populated, generally, by people from whom you wouldn't buy a candy bar, never mind a big-ticket item like a car or couch.

Aside from a few standouts, local television advertisements tend to feature non-actors in sloppily edited spots peppered with the requisite product shots. Not at all product-flattering. And yet, they are the standard -- they give the advertiser a little face time, bypass the time and money investment of ad agencies, and, on occasion, are even successful.

More often, though: painful. It's like a disease (Local Advertiser's Syndrome, maybe?), the major symptom being a complete and total loss of judgment and self-control. What are local advertisers thinking when they decide to put themselves in a spot doing something they're clearly not trained for -- e.g., reading a cue card?

The answer lies with the stars of local advertising -- those who have been doing it long enough, and successfully enough, to be known, like stardom's greatest, by only one name. To discover the truth about local advertising, you need to spend time with its kings.

Why people with no business being on TV think starring in their own ads is a good idea

"Our competitors can't have us. They can't copy Nick, Ron, and Pete." This is how Nick Cardi explains why he and his brothers, Ron and Pete, are personally involved in making a commercial every week for the furniture store that bears their name. If one word signifies the cream of local advertising, it is "NiRoPe," that famed Cardi slogan so perplexing to so many. It stands, duh, for Nick, Ron, and Pete, which is the order in which the Cardi brothers usually appear, and are sitting now, at a table in a conference room in the upper regions of their Swansea showroom.

Every week the Cardis, three men who have helped make Cardi's one of the top 100 furniture stores in the nation, three men who clearly know their stuff furniture-wise, devote a good chunk of a day and a ton of resources to doing something that has little to do with their true expertise -- and herein lies the key to Local Advertiser's Syndrome.

Television just may be the antithesis of the furniture business. Not only is it fast-paced and always changing, but it is the main cultural catalyst in our country. It shapes our lives and then influences the way we live them. We discuss TV, think about TV. Our actions are constantly informed by what we've seen on TV.

As for furniture, we sit on it. When was the last time any major news/society magazine put a five-piece living room set on their cover, as practically all of them did with Seinfeld and friends last month?

The fact is, by paying a gob of money to make their own commercials, local advertisers buy themselves not just glamour but a chance to do really cool things that most of us would love to do. This week, for instance, the Cardis are making an advertisement for Father's Day by spoofing a national Nissan commercial in which a dog leads its owner on a high-speed and obstacle-laden coast to a truck store while the owner sleeps in a recliner. In the spoof, NiRoPe appears dressed and smiling as the odd Asian guy Nissan uses at the end of their spots.

Outside the Cardi's showroom, Pete Cardi has basically taken over production of the Father's Day spot, directing the 18-wheeler (one of the obstacles the dog and its owner roll under in the recliner) into position, consulting the director on camera angles, stopping the runaway chair on each of its under-truck runs. At one point, Cardi even directs traffic as customers try to get in and out of the showroom parking lot in front of which the Cardis are shooting.

Clearly, Peter Cardi is no director. In fact, he is paying two professionals -- director Sam Parisi and cameraman Rick Valles, both of whom work for Channel 12 -- to do just what he is doing. Still, the detail of Cardi's involvement is astounding.

He confers with Parisi on lighting, discusses road effects with Valles. While Cardi's employees hang about the set ready to do his bidding, Cardi lugs camera equipment and makes sure the dog sits astride his master in the exact same way each take. In other words, Cardi does everything but what a furniture-business oligarch normally does. Not once during the commercial shoot does he, say, read a memo on possible maple armoire acquisitions.

And now a customer drives by, a black man with a white cap. He sees the whole shebang going down -- the dog, the recliner, the 18-wheeler, Pete Cardi presiding over it all -- and yells out, smiling wide, to Pete. "That's good. I want to see this on TV!" And really, there you have both the reason and the justification behind why the Cardis do this.

This random guy leaving the Cardi's parking lot feels that it's okay to yell out to Pete in a manner in which you'd think they were best friends. The justification of taking the day off to shoot themselves in a spot rather than paying an actor to do it is that the Cardis enhance the public opinion of their accessibility.

The key to good advertising, the Cardis say, is to show their furniture without boring the TV viewer. If you just show a bunch of your product, Pete says, "it's so boring, people are gonna turn it off." And, of course, he's right. Not the most compelling stuff, furniture. You can bet, too, that the daily work that goes into owning a large furniture company isn't exactly glamorous either. You sell couches. You order new couches. You figure out how to display new couches.

But while the Cardis are doing something that has proven to be popular and good for business, something that rarely offends anyone's sensibilities, other locals are another story. Most do things that are plain painful to watch, and they do them much too often. The most common judgment errors occur when a local advertiser attempts to get in on a national advertising trend -- e.g., linking a product in some way to puppies or babies.

Indeed, while companies like Michelin have proven that cute things sell stuff, a bit of basic advertising theory is a dangerous thing in the hands of those not trained in anything but selling an '88 Caprice. The problem is that Local Advertiser's Syndrome (the first symptom of which, remember, puts the owner in the spot in the first place) has the tendency to change "Hey, I need dogs and children, too," to "Let's put my kids in the commercial!"

Witness Furniture City. From 1992 until last year, this local furniture store ended almost every commercial they did with owner Larry Leskowitz's two kids bleating out the company's tag line, "Furniture City's package pricing!" Painful, not just because of the high-pitched young voices slurring through braces but because the kids were clearly going through what you'd call that "awkward stage" that is so adorable in animals but so gawky in humans.

Even Alperts Furniture, which had the recognizable voice and name of "John from Alperts" firmly ensconced in the Rhode Island psyche, got the happy bug. In a move that basically paralleled Furniture City's, Alperts featured, at the end of their commercials, an employee's pride-and-joy Lhasa apsos, primped and coiffed and leaping from bed to bed in the furniture showroom. Awkward this time not because the pets were non-actors (they did a comparatively good job, actually) but because, Who wants to buy a bed that's had dogs walking all over it?

Boogie nights: My days as Boy in Recliner #1

The Cardi's shoot has moved inside their warehouse, where a "sea of recliners" has been set up for the product shots. While Nick and Ron don the bow ties, blue blazers, and silly caps of the Nissan man, Joe Rossi, the Cardis' main makeup guy, applies powder to Pete.

Pete and Joe joke about some of their past ads, which ones they like best, which were hardest to do. Today's filming has been going well. Everyone is relaxed, having a good time. And now Pete hits me with it, out of the blue: "David, do you want to be in the spot?"

I am stunned, jaw agape, at the prospect of leaping into Cardi commercial history. "Hell, yeah!" I say, tossing my journalistic objectivity out the window at the merest whiff of personal glory. "Do I ever."

The rest of the shoot passes with me in a sort of daze of anticipation. Then my big moment finally arrives. It's time for Parisi to shoot me as "Boy in Recliner #1." My job is simple. I am to sit in a large, tan recliner. I am to look around at it, inspect it. Then (and here's where the acting skill comes in) I am to recline the recliner. "Dig in," as Peter Cardi put it, as if it were the most comfortable recliner in which I have ever laid glutes.

Valles fiddles with equipment, while Rossi approaches with some sort of beige makeup applicator thingy. "No way," I say. But it's too late -- Rossi has already laid a sponge full of some skin-colored yuck on the schnoz and forehead of yours truly.

Rossi, laughing, says, "It's not makeup; it's just to dull the shine." I grimace, display the visible indicators of annoyed. But inside, I admit, I am feeling not annoyed at all but . . . giddy. Makeup! As in, "goes with `lights, camera, and action!' " Television. Movies. Celluloid and caviar dreams flash through the mind.

But I can't let anything distract me from my role. I am "Boy in Recliner #1." The camera rolls. I sink in and am one with my role and with my recliner.

"Cut," yells Pete Cardi. He says the take is no good. "David, stop swiveling your hips. It's too provocative," he says. Valles and Parisi crack up. We do another take. Now another. Now another. But I can't stop swiveling my hips. I'm a lover, a dancer in front of the camera. That's just the way I do it, baby.

How Mr. Food fits into it all

There is, it seems, an almost irresistible urge to be, in some small way, famous. You see it at almost every live broadcast -- every time a TV news guy goes anywhere, there is the site of people passing by the camera a dozen times, throwing up a peace sign as a crush of humanity stands behind the reporter.

Everybody wants in. The drive to be known and recognized and just to be on the damned boober makes fools out of us all. To be seen is to be famous, to be famous is to be recognized, and to be recognized is, above all, confirmation of being. In some small way, we matter.

Fifteen minutes of fame (or, in my case, .63 seconds after the final edit) can be an overwhelming temptation for even the sanest of business minds. When I was in the 5th grade, my best friend was the nephew of one of the most successful average guys out there. Much like the Cardis, Mr. Food had cultivated a huge national following by being a likable and normal guy and by making simple food. But even he couldn't resist throwing in his cute nephew for his famous "Ooh, it's so good" line.

He was a totally successful television personality, local in a national way, and he made the same mistake -- and not even with his own kids. The spot rolled, and there were my best friend and his sister, slobbily licking the bowl from Mr. Food's fast oatmeal cookies, smiling, and whining "Ooh, it's so good" in their mouth-full-of-cookie-dough children's voices. Hideous. And yet there I was, at home and watching and so jealous.

The point is that TV just tends to do this to us. We realize the idiocy of people on TV and yet we want to be on it -- and often do idiotic things to make it happen. The boober represents fame and excitement and an escape from something that you never actually see on the television screen -- real and oh-so-very-essential daily life. And then, too, damned if I won't send my old best friend and his sister a copy of me shaking my booty in a recliner c/o the Cardis.