There is a sort of mini-trend in advertising, now, to be as bizarre as possible, drawing people into some twisted little universe of non-sequiters and oddball characters in order to sell, say, Skittles or Burger King flame broiled burgers. And sometimes, those ads are amusing... "Hit me again, Tube Sock," still makes me laugh when I see it or think of it... in fact, I'm laughing right now. "Ha ha!" I'm saying, aloud, as I think about an old guy demanding tongue shocks from anthropomorphic hosiery.
Weirdness, however, is an art, not a science... Why one weird thing can be delightful while another weird thing can just be a total drag is kind of a mystery, but I think a lot of it has to do with the very subjective sense that the weirdness hinted at in the ad is part of a larger picture, and not the tossed off whim of an ad exec trying to be hip. I know I'm thinking about this far deeper than is necessary, but the best weird ads tend to build little pocket dimensions of oddness, where there's a sort of parallel reality to the situation... Skittles ads, especially, tend to do this well, and for a brief moment, I'm drawn into the world of the boy with the Skittles tree growing from his abdomen. I think, too, that the seeming simplicity of weirdness tends to attract a host of imitators, folks who think creating a memorable surreal moment is easy as just stringing together nonsense... Velveeta's "Wield The Skillet" ads prove that good weirdness isn't easy to come by...
Again, there's a relatively high production value to the Wield The Skillet ads, meaning that thought and effort went into these unpleasant little films. The skillet wielding... blacksmith? Goldsmith? Cheesesmith? is a totally off putting presence... He appears from nowhere, dirty and disheveled and incongruously pompous by way of overwrought dialog. He has the unnerving power of slipping into women's imaginations, dragging them to a dark, medieval workshop and recreating the sexy pottery wheel scene from "Ghost" in an incredibly skeevy manner. These women, by the way, never seem seduced by the Cheesesmith, but always leave the encounter shaken and scared. While that's certainly logical, given the predicament, it seems like a bad way to sell macaroni and cheese, unless the goal is to get consumers to just make the damn stuff before having to be "persuaded" to do so by a time traveling, working class frotteur.
Also, a good rule of thumb for any food ad is to make the food being advertised seem palatable. Does equating Velveeta to a liquified metal and then showing a flood of neon-yellow, wholly manufactured cheese-like-product attacking some poor noodles really accomplish that? It does not.
The commercial definitely attempts to mine our ceaseless appetite for the bizarre, but fails spectacularly. It doesn't help that this creepy dude keeps reappearing in ad after ad after ad. Weird characters, when they work, work best as one offs... nothing dulls the sense of oddness not like repetition. So it would be wise, for so many reasons, to retire the Cheesesmith as soon as possible.
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