{"id":5604,"date":"2020-04-11T17:49:05","date_gmt":"2020-04-11T21:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/?p=5604"},"modified":"2020-04-11T17:49:05","modified_gmt":"2020-04-11T21:49:05","slug":"favorite-ad-mayhem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/2020\/04\/11\/favorite-ad-mayhem\/","title":{"rendered":"Favorite Ad &#8211; Mayhem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/files\/2020\/04\/allstatecommercialguyfeatured.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5605\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/files\/2020\/04\/allstatecommercialguyfeatured.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"967\" \/><\/a>Our buddy, our good pal, Mayhem. He is played by Dean Winters, an actor for Allstate Home Insurance commercials. He is the embodiment of Mayhem, and in each commercial, he\u00a0 represents a rather common, but often forgettable event\/person that can cause damage to our your home. He&#8217;s been a cat, an aspiring beauty blogger, a bad cleaning lady, overly confident dog walker, and everyone&#8217;s favorite, a teenage girl.<\/p>\n<p>The opening line is always &#8221; I&#8217;m a ______&#8221;\u00a0and the commercial ends with &#8220;keep yourself protected from mayhem &#8230; like me&#8221; Truly iconic. Every commercial is a surreal comedy, with violent, dry, and deadpan humor, with a grown man acting out these absurd skits. For the teenage girl commercial in particular, there was a wonderfully done balance of some accuracy to teenage girl speech\/thoughts, but also a detached commentary on how absurd it is. A masterpiece, truly. The common phrases and hilarity burns the commercial, and the company Allstate, into our minds. I feel like we as humans also just adore characters in general, with their dynamic nature. In a similar way, we love Flo from Progressive. These characters gain a life of their own and gain a &#8220;fanbase,&#8221; but unlike celebrities, they are inherently bound to the companies they represent.<\/p>\n<p>No matter the absurdity, however, there rings a deep kernel of truth in everything. What if some unforeseen event really does dame our homes or cars? It&#8217;s a constant fear that we often choose to conveniently forget. And so, overall, Allstate really does succeed. It reminds us consumers of these fears\/wants, and then Allstate is here to say &#8220;we can offer you these services.&#8221; Well done, for sure. And its cut its own place into the culture of people my age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our buddy, our good pal, Mayhem. He is played by Dean Winters, an actor for Allstate Home Insurance commercials. He is the embodiment of Mayhem, and in each commercial, he\u00a0 represents a rather common, but often forgettable event\/person that can cause damage to our your home. He&#8217;s been a cat, an aspiring beauty blogger, a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4678,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4678"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}