Of hamsters and men

Animals can be quite effective when used in advertisements for human products. Think Spuds Makenzie, the Budweiser frogs, maybe even the cute puppy in the toilet paper commercials.

But a couple of current commercials leave me wondering what the ad agencies, and the corporate execs who approved the ads were thinking.

Quiznos advertises its $3, $4 and $5 sandwiches using animated, to use the word loosely, cats. Singing, again using the word very loosely, cats.

The jingle uses the tune to "Three Blind Mice," an the voice is, I suppose, trying to sound like a cat would sound if a cat could sing, only the sound reminds me of blackboard produced screeches.

This is one of those commercial that makes me grab for the remote so I can hit the mute button. Perhaps the company hopes we'll be so annoyed and put off by the commercial's lack of production value that we'll run down to our nearest store, buy a sandwich, and help the company to make enough profit to produce better commercials.

Less annoying but just as puzzling to me has been the whole Kia Soul hamster series. One of the early commercials showed a bunch of giant rodents in cages on downtown streets. Good image. Commuters are like hamsters running on plain-jane wheels. I can buy that.

Then other hamsters, which look for all the world to me like giant rats drive by in a Soul, making the other rodents jealous. I admit that the Soul is kind of cute, but I'm used to the concept that the car will some how pull me out of the humdrum world I live and work in. Here they're saying, Hey, you're still a rodent, but you can drive around in a prettier cage.

Now, the commercials show the rats, er, rodents, I mean, hamsters in hip-hop dress chanting, "Oh, you can go wit dis, or you can go wit dat," while showing other rats, er, hamsters driving a box or a washing machine or some other square conveyance. The Soul, by virtue of its name and sloped roof, is cooler than all the box wagons out there, making you hipper than rodents who drive box wagons. Except you're still a rodent.

The thing about box wagons -- Elements, Scions, Cubes --is that they already appeal to people who like a vehicle that's out of the ordinary, so they really don't fit into the rodent on wheel mold, and really, who wants to think of himself or herself as a giant rodent?

We don't want to be hip rodents; we want to be hip.

Around here, lot's of people seem to be buying Souls, so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the campaign's memorable enough to drive buyers to dealerships, and they buy the autos to be hip, to show they're not part of the rat race.

Or maybe the cars are just inexpensive.