One Two Three... Shut Up!

By now pretty much everybody who owns a television or knows someone who owns a television or walks by a store that sells televisions or isn't busy dying his beard in a cave on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has seen the new iPod Nano video commercial. You know the one. A Nano is onscreen playing the music video for Feist's "One Two Three Four" and hands keep grabbing the Nanos, showing off all the pretty colors. It's a clever commercial for a cool new product. And it has a nice, catchy tune by a relatively unknown artist.

But here's the issue I see: while the commercial is probably helping Feist find a larger mainstream audience and selling some iPod Nanos to boot, it's ruining a perfectly good song. Since I hear that song at least once an hour whenever the television is on (and it's on quite a bit at my residence), I'm starting to get sick of it. In only a couple of weeks, I've gone from thinking "That One Two Three Four is a nice little ditty from a cute Canadian" to thinking "Damn, I hate this song, I wish the Seahawks were on TV here." This isn't the first time that a good song is so over-played that it becomes despicable. "Hey Yeah" comes to mind as another good example.

So my plea to Apple is simple: put some other song(s) in the Nano commercials. Make a couple of different versions of the ad. You could even be really crafty and play different songs during different shows to target the primary viewing audience (like playing the new Kanye during shows targeted at "suburban youth" and playing High School Music 2 during Monday Night Football). If Apple takes my advice, they could expose more "undiscovered" artists to the American viewing public and improve the effectiveness of their targeted marketing. Plus, I wouldn't have to suffer through several more weeks of "One Two Three Four" at every commercial break. Seems like an all-around winning suggestion.

Or I could just watch everything on Tivo.

The Danny