{"id":12,"date":"2006-06-12T00:26:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-12T07:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/2006\/06\/12\/citibanks-identity-theft-commercials\/"},"modified":"2006-06-12T00:26:06","modified_gmt":"2006-06-12T07:26:06","slug":"citibanks-identity-theft-commercials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/2006\/06\/12\/citibanks-identity-theft-commercials\/","title":{"rendered":"Citibank&#8217;s Identity Theft Commercials"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the last couple of years, Citibank has been promoting its identity theft protection services through a series of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.citibank.com\/us\/cards\/cardserv\/advice\/commercial.htm\">TV commercials<\/a>. The somewhat humorous spots have become <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/5591893\/\">quite popular<\/a> and have even earned Citibank an Emmy award.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/06\/thelma_and_norma.png\" height=\"157\" width=\"211\" border=\"0\" hspace=\"0\" vspace=\"0\" alt=\"Thelma And Norma\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Somehow, I&#8217;ve always found these commercials slightly annoying. I never knew why; there was just something about them that bothered me. Today I happened to catch the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Thelma and Norma\u00e2\u20ac\u009d spot while watching the NBA Finals, and that&#8217;s when it hit me: The commercials have it all backwards!<\/p>\n<p>You see, the premise of each commercial is that the person on-screen has had his or her identity stolen. That&#8217;s the reason why the characters speak in a voice that doesn&#8217;t match their appearance. But wait a minute&#8230; That&#8217;s not how identity theft works!<\/p>\n<p>If someone steals my identity, they&#8217;ve effectively stolen my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153voice,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d right? In other words, identity theft allows a criminal to speak with the victim&#8217;s voice. But Citibank shows the exact opposite: The victims speak with the criminals&#8217; voices, which makes no sense at all. I realize that these commercials are supposed to be funny, but you&#8217;d think they&#8217;d at least get the concept right.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, well. Now that I know why the commercials always felt wrong to me, maybe I can begin to enjoy them for what they are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the last couple of years, Citibank has been promoting its identity theft protection services through a series of TV commercials. The somewhat humorous spots have become quite popular and have even earned Citibank an Emmy award. Somehow, I&#8217;ve always found these commercials slightly annoying. I never knew why; there was just something about them [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","category-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vocaro.com\/trevor\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}