I don't actually hate the Ancestry.com commercials on the whole. They're pretty well put together, if usually nondescript, and the recent holiday one with Santa Claus was pretty clever. But there's a couple of them that really bug me.
One commercial features a guy who's super duper excited that his ancestors lived next door to the Wright Brothers. Wow! People you never met were neighbors with great Americans?! What a huge achievement for you. The guy in the ad is a bit incensed that nobody in his family ever bothered to bring it up. You know why they didn't? Because who cares about your great-grandpa's neighbors, that's why. If you, maybe, found out your great great uncle Phil was the secret third Wright Brother that they kept chained up in the basement and fed fish heads while Orville and Wilbur got to pioneer flight, well, that's one thing... but just being near 'em? Lame.
The commercial that REALLY gets under my skin, though is this one:
There's something so odd and off-putting about this lady's demeanor as she talks about how many of her great great grandma's kids died... It skeeves me out. She's so excited to share her family's tragedy, like it's a cool new bit of trivia she just discovered. I think the ad takes an odd tact anyway... "Log in to Ancestry.com and learn all about the dead children that litter your family's past!" But if you ARE going to go that route, at least find an actress who can convey a bit of solemnity about it instead of looking kind of stoked that at least HER great grammy didn't bite it before procreating.
To be fair, it's not like she's leading a pom routine shouting "Ooh ra ra!" for childhood mortality, but still... she's all smiles by the end of the spot. The whole commercial has a casual creepiness that I would almost find admirable if it weren't unintentional. "You don't need to know what you're looking for, you just need to look... and maybe you'll find just how miserable the past really was."
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