Yep, it’s that time of year, football season. And that means the return of one of my favorite brands for bad commercials: Pacific Life. You know, the one with the awesomely horrible CGI effect of the whale flying out of the water?  Their latest commercial features elderly people surfing, which could be kind of cool, if there wasn’t a pixilated whale soaring into the air behind them multiple times within thirty seconds.

Now, if Pacific Life really cared about old people, they wouldn’t have a whale do a belly flop right next to them. And what’s even more amazing is that this doesn’t seem to faze them one bit. They just go on their merry way surfing. I guess you’re supposed to think that they either have more balls than Laird Hamilton or their Alzheimer’s is just so bad that they think it’s normal to surf with whales.  What I’d like to think is that we are watching delusions of old folks that are actually in a retirement home somewhere.

(*Editor’s Note: the embed function on the youtube video was disabled by PacLife; click on the pic to see it there)

And this is almost more outrageous: Pacific Life actually set up a YouTube page to display all their advertising gems. The surfing commercial has a whopping 129 views. Here you’ll also find “tail slaps” – the one they aired during last year’s football season to annoy the shit out of everyone. To those of you who are not familiar with this ad, the whales play a college fight song by slapping their tail on the water. If only the whale’s tail could slap some sense into the marketing person who okayed this campaign and maybe slap some of the account people too. I don’t blame the creatives. Well maybe I do just a little bit. But you know as well as I do that they don’t really want to do this crap. The creatives could come up with an award-winning idea and the account people and the client would say, “That’s great. Now where are the whales belly flopping?”

Pac Life YouTube Page

- Tommy Troncoso