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The Weekly Geek: Bad ad days

I have to say, I’ve seen some mighty strange tech commercials in my day. I’ve seen long, flowing underarm hair used to hawk cell phone service, and watched weird, 1980s flavored Big Brother imagery cleverly put forth to herald the coming of the Macintosh. I’ve viewed some seriously odd spots for videogames and even pens.

Friends, I have to tell you that today’s find truly takes the bizarre cake.

Imagine if you will, the brainstorming session that birthed this Msi X Series laptop commercial.

“OK, so our computers are skinny”, says the overworked advertising exec, fresh from six hours of Red Bull-infused internet trend surfing. “So skinny that you could totally catch one ? with your rear end! We’ll throw in some wrestling suits and YouTube-style cinema verite, and voila! Our ad campaign is born!”

I’m not sure exactly what it is about consumer tech that lends itself to oddball commercials. Perhaps it’s the presumably dorky target audience — we gadget geeks do tend to have slightly off-kilter senses of humor after all. But not all who purchase games, gear and copious electronic doodads are 22-year-old CS majors. Some genuinely cool people like slim laptops and impossibly awesome cell phones too — and they’re as likely to be put off by a depiction of a muscular blond dude catching a computer with his gluteus maximus as they are to be amused.

I’ll say this for it, however — it certainly catches the eye.

If this commercial works on you, and you become the proud owner of a notebook slim enough to carry around in your posterior, but you’re looking for a slightly more comfortable solution, Amazon is having an excellent blowout sale on SwissGear computer backpacks (thanks to Geeks are Sexy for the linkage). There’s no better way to make a good impression on the bookish ladies than with a sexy backpack designed to carry your lifeblood/computer. Go with a bright red hue for maximum attention (and dorkiness).

In all seriousness, these are among the best packs a techie can buy, and the 50-75% off is a truly sweet deal. It’s a pain finding a comfy, rugged bag that will safely transport my rather large 17-inch baby, along with all her accessories. And, yes, I just anthro-pomorphized my computer. (Don’t we all?)

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