Rebecca Black's 'Friday' Used In Black Friday Commercial???

On the most important shopping day of the year, Black Friday, many retail outlets try to grab your attention by offering outrageous deals. Wal-Mart, for instance, is giving away two copies of Inception on Blu-ray with every pack of gum sold and Sports Authority is inexplicably selling HDTVs at 60 percent off.


Best Buy employees just hurl iPod Nanos at people.
(source) But clothing giant Kohl's hopes to step above this ever-escalating sales war and earn your attention the old fashioned way - by making a commercial that parodies something from the internet.

<br /> There are a lot of problems with Kohl's doing a Rebecca Black joke eight months after "Friday" came out. The first is that Kohl's is doing a Rebecca Black joke eight months after Friday came out.


All memes have an expiration date. But the troubling part is the mentality behind the ad. With lines like "Black Friday/ Black Friday/ Something that rhymes with Friday", Kohl's is saying that Friday is a dumb song by highlighting how little work seemingly went into writing its' lyrics. There aren't any other jokes in this commercial - what Kohl's wants you to remember about their store this holiday season that they were smart enough to figure out how bad a little girl's first attempt at making music was and that they're cool enough to point it out.


From left to right: Consumers, Kohl's (metaphorically)
(source) I don't think we hated "Friday" because it was a bad song. Ultimately, "Friday" wasn't much worse than Katy Perry's "California Girls", but that song didn't become nearly the sensation that Friday did. Friday had something else going for it. It made us laugh at ourselves, because even though it was startlingly poorly written, we were still singing it two hours later. To a certain extent, we enjoyed Friday. It made us realize is that no matter how many civilizations we build, no matter how much technology we create, no matter how utterly brilliant we are, human beings are still susceptible to a really, really catchy melody.


Is someone playing "Moves Like Jagger"? No? Really?
(source) And then there's the laziness of the tag - "Can't get this darn song out of my head". That's what we enjoyed about Friday, the fact that two hours later, we were still singing along with it. We don't need Kohl's to point out what we liked about Friday. We know why we liked Friday. It's why we liked Friday.

That paragraph brought to you by Inception, now available on Blu-ray at Wal-Mart.
(source)
For me, this marketing is having the opposite effect that Kohl's wanted. Instead of making them seem cool or funny, I see Kohl's as joyless and shallow. A company that had so little to say about it's own products that it resorted to telling me something I enjoyed was stupid. And they were too lazy to offer a new opinion about what the phenomenon they were skewering actually meant. Yes yes, it is only a commercial, but when you're making commercials that try to be funny, you are making comedy, and call me crazy, but I find comedy important. I want it to succeed, and this one didn't because it was lazy. The fact that Kohl's surely paid a lot for this ad makes me feel sad for them. And I tend not to give money to companies that make me feel sad for them.