When I saw the first couple of TurboTax commercials of the year, I thought they had a pretty clever little idea going.  This year they went with this GPS theme where they threw out the idea of “my GPS gives me turn by turn directions to help me get where I’m going and TurboTax gives me turn by turn directions to do my taxes!”  Not bad, not amazing, but not bad.  We are just talking about tax software here, so at the very least I would hope is that the commercial doesn’t insult…. oh wait, there it is…

CLICHE WIFE: My husband isn’t so good with directions…

CLICHE HUSBAND: I’m going to turn right…

GPS VOICE: Turn left here…

CLICHE WIFE: Which is why we have a GPS to help us get where we want to go, step by step, just like how TurboTax helps us do our taxes, step by step!

Oh what the fuck, really? “Men can’t ask for directions” humor?  What is this a comedy club in the 80s?  I’m pretty sure later on in the commercial I hear her throw out a zinger about leaving the toilet seat up, ho ho!  Wow, if they tried an ad like that with a woman screwing up directions, the ladies would lose their shit.  Classy stuff, Intuit.

CLICHE WIFE: My husband isn’t so good with directions…

NON-CLICHE HUSBAND: Luckily, I make more money than you do so I can afford this GPS to tell me the way to go. Hey, that’s kind of like how TurboTax works!

CLICHE WIFE: I want a divorce…

You know, for awhile there in the 80s and 90s, there was a really bad thing happening with commercials and sitcoms.  Basically, the idea was, “according to our data, women are the ones who do all the buying in the household, so if we make them feel superior, they’ll buy our crap!”  How did they make them feel superior? By appealing to their intellect? Nope, by making men look like idiots.

Is it coming back to you yet?  Most of the men in the ads and sitcoms for a stretch there were these fat, stupid slobs… think “According to Jim” and “King of Queens” and you’ll see it right away.

Luckily, that started to wear off when advertisers started to realize that if you do that shtick all the time, the men who do buy stuff, which is still a lot of us, will stop buying your crap because you made them look like a chump.

So what the hell is this prize doing in here?  It’s not like this ad is just running during womens programming, it was on during a football game on Sunday.  Do they think just women buy their product?  I know I used to when I had a few simple tax forms to fill out (throw in a house and couple of small businesses and goodbye software), but I’m pretty sure I’m would think twice about buying from a company that thought men were stupid, no direction askin’ idiots.

Unfortunately, I can’t get a copy of the TV or radio spot, so instead, here are a couple of strippers providing tax tips:

Piece of advice – don’t insult your audience, they don’t like that. Dick.

J.

PS – I love targeted banner campaigns.  When I test posted this last night, I was getting ads for TaxACT, TurboTax’s competitor. HA!