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It’s like encountering a floating Band-Aid® in a public swimming pool, and every frenzied splash that’s meant to put some distance between yourself and the gummy biohazard only serves to bring it closer. For the purposes of this analogy, the stray bandage is warbling along to the melody of a mostly forgotten 25-year-old pop song, somehow, and you can’t quite figure out how to get out of the pool.
At least that’s about the best way to characterize the reaction to the AT&T “What a Pro Wants” commercial, a 30-second sales pitch that pretty much everyone on the Internet seems to hate. If you haven’t seen the spot (lucky duck), it’s the sort of impenetrably weird marketing effort that seems at once half-baked and overstuffed. Basically, all that happens in the ad is an a cappella duet by young Oklahoma City Thunder stars Chet Holmgren and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who give it their none as they mumble their way through a revised version of Christina Aguilera’s 1999 single “What a Girl Wants.”
The twist is that the two tone-deaf NBA players sub in “pro” for “girl,” which: Hey, check out Don Draper over here. The revised lyric, then, goes something like, “And I’m thanking you for knowing exactly / what a pro wants, what a pro needs / whatever makes me happy sets me free.” SGA notes that the performance was “a little bit flat” before the two guys get on a bus, whereupon you’re probably supposed to dump your phone provider for AT&T.
If you sit through the ad a few times, you’ll likely indulge in a little performative eye-rolling—while it certainly doesn’t qualify as a good commercial, it’s also not whatever the hell Quiznos thought they were getting up to with those early aughts “Spongmonkey” spots—but by the time you find yourself on the sixth or seventh run-through, a feeling of disquiet begins to descend. Why me?, you may think, as you pour yourself an unnecessary past-your-bedtime drink. Or perhaps your nocturnal beseechings will focus on the creative itself: Why is Chet Holmgren dressed like a Latvian arms dealer? Is any of this on purpose? Do I hate basketball now?
In the dark night of the soul it is always 3 o’clock in the morning, and yup, the commercial’s still playing at that hour. Which is a key factor in why so many sports fans are exasperated by the AT&T spot; of the tens of thousands of aggrieved social media posts that have addressed the ad since it bowed during March Madness, it has appeared on our screens with what amounts to a sort of watery ubiquity. In the last week alone, “What a Pro Wants” has aired on national TV no fewer than 473 times, a frequency that has rendered it all but inescapable—especially if you’ve been putting in a lot of time with the NBA and NHL playoffs.
Since the NBA postseason tipped off last month, AT&T has run the sprockets off the “What a Pro Wants” spot, buying time in 106 ad breaks across ABC, ESPN, TNT, truTV and NBA TV. The ad is even harder to shake if you’re a hockey fan, as it’s already appeared 212 times during live coverage of the NHL playoffs. Don’t care for either sport? Well, then, you’ve bound to run into the spot on SportsCenter or during the 2024 NFL Draft, or across at least a few of the hundreds of times it popped up throughout the NCAA basketball tournament (men’s and women’s).
All told, the spot has garnered an estimated 729 billion impressions, give or take, which means that Chet Holmgren’s Lincolnesque face is now probably as familiar to you as your own. In exchange for making people almost unreasonably agitated, AT&T has spent in the neighborhood of $23 million in TV time, which is peanuts given the amount of exposure the spot has garnered.
But what good is drilling your marketing message into the nation’s collective skull if the ad itself is so roundly disliked? As it turns out, repetition is a deep-pocketed advertiser’s best friend, at least if you believe the sort of research that the ad industry pumps out every year in an effort to justify its wicked ways. While sentiment surveys are largely bunk, viewers claim to enjoy greater brand recall after multiple exposures to the same ad; watch a spot six times, and supposedly you’ll be able to retrieve the name of the advertiser 92% of the time.
Unfortunately, the same people who are said to exhibit the highest brand recall scores also tend to start taking a marked dislike to the thing from which they cannot seem to escape. After six ad views, consumers are 48% more likely to be annoyed by the spot, which in turn has predictable downstream effects on the viewers’ sentiments about the brands themselves. As consumers get increasingly honked off by repetitive marketing messages, their purchase intent begins to plummet. AT&T may have everyone talking about their commercial, but this may be a situation where one contradictory cliché wins out over the other. (You’re either on team “familiarity breeds contempt” or “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”)
If trolling tens of millions of would-be customers might seem about as logically unsound as a beer koozie embossed with the “Serenity Prayer,” AT&T’s customer-conversion metrics must support the company’s decision to keep flinging the Thunder teammates in our mugs. Nobody seemed to enjoy hearing Denis Leary snarl about aluminum-alloy bodies and government five-star ratings every Sunday, and yet Ford wouldn’t have kept the campaign going for nearly a decade if the comic wasn’t moving F-150s off the lot.
In other words, as much as advertising doesn’t seem to work on you, it stands to reason that companies wouldn’t spend in the neighborhood of $65 billion every year on broadcast and cable TV spots if that inventory wasn’t making the cash registers ring. Beats me how any of this works; the one time I can remember buying something I saw advertised on TV that wasn’t a movie ticket, I came away from the experience with a horrible taste in my mouth.
As in, literally. The reason that there’s never been much demand for fennel-favored toothpaste is because it’s like brushing your teeth with a box of Good ‘n’ Plenty. At any rate, the NBA and NHL playoffs will be over by mid-June, which means we’ve still got another six weeks of “What a Pro Wants.” Someone eventually is bound to come up with an even more exasperating campaign, one which will make everyone mad all over again; in the meantime, there’s always the mute button.