Superficial impressions are what's important when it comes to commercials. Ameritrade rocks. I don't buy online stocks but I know that if I ever do I'll probably look at them first. Their ads are inoffensive, and include a relatively broad, slice-of-life representation of individuals without being wincingly PC. Almost of their characters have names; they look like normal people, but not the kind of hyper-normal pod people you often find in ads, where the actors stare out at you anxiously from the box, or seem distanced or trivialized by the camera--which in most ads tends to focus more on a product than on the incidental humans who may be handling it. In Ameritrade ads, there's a stylized cinema verite thing going on instead; the camera wanders around lazily, tracking the people, unconcerned with the capitalist agenda running in the background.
The ads are funny in a subaudible way; dramatic but whimsical gestalts of contemporary life, always focusing on the point of intersection where the old corporate culture meets the zeitgeist. But if the players were just yuppies and slackers, the ads would be all pose, no heart. Even more endearing than the new breed of millenial office geeks, and the suits struggling to come to terms with the Internet culture, are the ordinary people. Take the salon crew: they don't have upscale jobs, they may even be considered marginalized by daily life; you can sense the tension and ambivalence in the salon when the fat corporate cat comes in to be waited on. It's a complex dynamic. They're making a show of their savvy; they're fronting an intense and even exaggerated focus on their own interactions while simultaneously playing to the businessman they wait on. They have their own established drama but, for the duration, he's their audience. They're self-conscious in the most subtle way possible, and there always seems a potential for class confrontation: economics is more than just the raison d'etre for the ad, it's the underlying principle of the relationships it dramatizes. A lack of direct eye-contact in many of the camera shots is noticeable, at times emphasized--very unusual for ads, where most participants are ostentatiously pitching to each other.
All of this is in line with the goals of the ads. They're really selling a concept rather than a product, of course; but they're not just selling the idea of online trading, they're selling the Internet, and the idea of receptivity to new ideas even when those ideas come from unusual sources--Stewart the offbeat office boy, salon workers, people whose insights usually go ignored by big business.
More rambling to come.
Apparently a good site to view commercials online is AdCritic.com--at least if you have QuickTime, which I don't, so don't ask me to confirm this. I do know that as of writing they're not update on Ameritrade ads, so they're pretty irrelevant to my immediate needs.