The 2001 Beer Commercial Report
(A Scathing Look into Stuff we Found in a Dumpster)

Back a while ago, I had a theory about the creation of the Cox Cable Man. Such a brilliant corporate icon could only be created, I speculated, after scads and scads of market research. There had to be all sorts of late-night think tank sessions where Chinese food was ordered and dozens of sexually predatory cartoon characters were examined and rejected. But most importantly, there had to be consumer surveys, in which the people unanimously chose the Cox Cable Guy as someone they'd really like to see more of. I really wanted to get my hands on these surveys.

I spent dozens of nights rummaging through the dumpster behind corporate America, but I was unable to find a trace of these theoretical surveys. I did, however, find a report by an advertising company that may shed some light on why beer commercials look the way they do.

Some of the results may surprise you. For instance, everyone is accustomed to the standard beer-commercial trope of pretty ladies frolicking about. It seems inevitable now that it should be so, but those particular subject and verb clauses didn't write themselves. In the original vote, "pretty ladies" only beat "dog-ugly ladies" by 8% of the vote. Furthermore, coming in at 40%, "frolicking about" was actually a less-popular lady activity, but the remaining 60% of the vote was split between "wrestling naked in lime jello" and "wrestling naked in a lot of lime jello." This is a classic example of a time when democracy doesn't work.

I thought I'd give our readers a crack at some of the survey questions. I'm not sure, but I have a hunch that beer commercials would be vastly different if they were primarily directed at the readers of L&E. The quiz you are trying to access does not exist. Please check the URL and try again.