Hasta La Creative!

Lowe’s must have known its human-size robotic “shopping assistants,” which are rolling out this holiday season, would be mocked, right? They couldn’t possibly have believed that people would just let that slide.

Enter John Oliver and Nick Offerman.

The Last Week Tonight host, who expertly skewers corporate buffoonery of all kinds, smartly posits that employees at home improvement stores aren’t just there to sell you stuff—they’re there to referee the impending nuptial doom that such stores cause.

Check out Oliver’s fake ad below—showing the nonrobotic, personal touch of rival chain Home Depot’s employees, as epitomized by macho do-it-yourselfer Offerman.

It’s a great bit, with hilarious performances, too, by Louie guest star Sarah Baker and Archer/Bob’s Burgers genius H. Jon Benjamin.

Oliver isn’t wrong about these stores and the tension they cause, either. There’s even a scene in He’s Just Not That Into You where (2009 spoiler alert!) Bradley Cooper reveals to Jennifer Connelly that he’s been cheating on her in a Home Depot.  

While it's true HBO is not an ad-supported network, Last Week Tonight's John Oliver made an exception Sunday, uttering the words rarely heard on the premium cable network: "We'll be right back."

Of course what followed wasn't a real commercial, but instead a GM ad parody created to punctuate Oliver's hilarious (and disturbing) dissection of internal practices at GM, where a long list of defects in cars over the past decade led to an even longer list of no-go words and phrases compiled in a memo, which blacklisted phrases like "deathtrap," "defective," "catastrophically flawed," "Hindenburg"—you get the idea.

Obviously the point of the memo was to make sure none of those words ended up associated with the cars once they got to the market—a sensible notion, from a branding perspective, but probably not a directive that was terribly wise to put on paper. So after a lengthy segment eviscerating GM (remember, this is the guy who stretched potshots at quetionably healthy drink Pom Wonderful over two episodes), Oliver cut away to a fake GM ad containing almost all those words the car company didn't want associated with its brand.

Just to tie a bow on the whole takedown, HBO is even running Oliver's GM bit as a lengthy pre-roll ad on YouTube this week. From a comedy perspective, the segment is gold. From a marketing perspective, it's like watching a Hellraiser movie.

When John Oliver mercilessly skewers an ad because the taxpayer-funded product it promoted flopped, what's the agency that created the ad to do?

One option would be to ignore it. Another would be to write a lengthy public defense.

Some background: Last year, Portland, Ore., shop North launched a campaign to promote Oregon's healthcare exchange, Cover Oregon. Last week, Cover Oregon shut down its $200 million website after failing to get it working properly. On Sunday, Oliver—in his first HBO show—took the effort to task, using the most twee of North's music-themed ads as the lightning rod. The parody, hilarious and scathing, went so far as to bring in Lisa Loeb to sing about "stupid Oregon idiots," while a set behind her reads "You Fucking Idiots."

Yesterday, North chief creative officer Mark Ray responded in a blog post titled, "Yes, John Oliver, We Are Stupid Fucking Idiots." It's worth reading in full, but among the core arguments are that North had nothing to do with the website, the ad was one of a diverse group, and the campaign was effective in its purpose—raising awareness of the site.

Those are all reasonable, substantive points, and Ray's indignation on the whole is proudly and skillfully communicated, even as it devolves into defensiveness that a good-faith effort was met with such vicious ridicule.

Unfortunately, all of that is sort of besides the point—insofar as the point was for John Oliver to be funny without particular concern for substance or nuance. North's commercial, which leaned into an Oregon stereotype, was simply manna from heaven in that regard—a perfectly packaged device for illustrating the state's ineptitude in delivering a functioning website. Cheap shot or not, the joke connected.

Ray's response, meanwhile, may actually fuel the fire, tying the agency directly to Oliver's routine (which mentioned only the ad, not the creator, though there's certainly been plenty of ink spilled on its provenance). Indeed, it reads like performance art. And while the campaign itself may be a classic case of good advertising helping to kill a bad product, it's a probably rarer case of good advertising helping to make a good TV skit.

As frustrating as the reality of the exchange's failure may be, John Oliver probably couldn't have done his bit half as well without North.

Via Willamette Week.