This year's award for the most generically quirky person on Earth goes to...
Jazz. Action movies. Fast food. Mind-bogglingly awful local commercials. These genres all spread worldwide, but they all started in America, and we still do them the best.
This example from the East Hills Mall in St. Joseph, MO blends three of the best-known styles of local ad: the underwhelming mall ad, the back-to-school sale ad, and the irrepressibly bad local actors ad. Together, they make you want to visit the town, go to the mall, burn it down, and then travel door-to-door making locals sign pledges never to appear on-screen again. What's funniest is that when you visit their website, you realize this is a perfectly acceptable mall. They literally could have put the map and the list of stores on screen for 30 seconds and it would be a more convincing ad:
Why didn't I shop at Justice for my children's apparel? Sounds awesome.
Ok, so I guess the ad is actually a little bit endearing, kind of like this music video that the town of Ames, Iowa put together to convince people to move there. It's certainly a lot less terrifying than this ad for a local nightclub gone horribly wrong. Nothing, of course, compares to what is considered to be the best local ad of all time: this lawyer's special-effects-laden Superbowl ad that ran only in Georgia.
(by Johnny McNulty)