Ellen Gray: Musing about that Ikea commercial & more

WITH ABC's "Lost" not due back until Jan. 21, I find myself spending time on other mysteries, some posed by advertisers.

There is, for instance, the older woman who haunts the kitchens of Ikea customers.

You've probably seen her, hovering over a solitary figure, sometimes male, sometimes female, offering a running commentary.

In my favorite, she seems to be using the power of suggestion to lead a young mother to the chocolate stashed in a drawer behind the spices, then watching as the woman's daughter looks pointedly at Mom before running off.

"Good thing those drawers shut silently," remarks the older woman. "But I'd keep an eye on the girl. I think she suspects something."

Sure she does. Kids can be very intuitive. Either her mother's chocolate cravings have triggered auditory hallucinations, or there's a ghost in the kitchen, and, what's more, she's an enabler.

Notice that, like Bruce Willis in "The Sixth Sense," the older woman talks a lot but doesn't seem to be in actual conversation?

What's that about?

At Deutsch New York, the agency that handles Ikea's U.S. advertising, she's referred to not as a ghost, but a "muse."

"That's the handle that we've been using to describe her," Peter Nicholson, the firm's chief creative officer, said yesterday.

"She's the voice of reason and support and your consciousness of why you made a good purchase of an Ikea product," he said of the character played by Venida Evans. "She's got this Mary Poppins quality to me."

Well, she does pop in and out.

I'm also intrigued by the commercial where the gruff motel desk clerk seems to be trying to warn off a potential guest by telling him the room's a "dead zone."

When the guest, a Verizon customer, points to the ridiculously large entourage accompanying him, he's given a room, and though warned that the towels are "kinda scratchy," isn't charged for any extra adults.

So, OK, I see the horror-movie overtones, but am I being overly sensitive in noticing that the guest is black and the clerk who's so reluctant to rent to him is white?

For that matter, is there subtext in the casting of an African-American actress to play the ghost/muse in Deutsch's Ikea commercials?

Because while the agency's ads for Ikea have been notable for their multiculturalism, it wasn't really so long ago that an older black actress might have expected to spend her time in one TV kitchen or another.

"We want to avoid stereotypes, especially Swedish stereotypes," Nicholson said. "We wanted someone to reflect kind of your inner conscience."

They also thought they needed someone older. "We didn't necessarily say she had to be an African-American," he said, noting that they were hiring "one muse for everybody."

Whether or not I'm overthinking the Ikea and Verizon commercials, I know I've been expending too many brain cells on the car commercial where a woman driving a Chevy Traverse encounters a sudden downpour - of shoes.

Putting aside the question of why she immediately begins loading up her "best-in-class cargo room" with shoes that probably aren't in pairs, much less in her size, isn't there a safety issue here?

When I was a kid, I was warned that if I were to throw a penny from the top of the Empire State Building, I could kill someone.

Discovery's "MythBusters" eventually made a liar out of the grown-ups who'd encouraged me to keep my change in my pockets, but high heels are heavier than pennies, and I have to think that, dropped from what appears to be a considerable height, they could at least put out an eye.

Or dent a car.

And, oh, yes, while I'm being PC, isn't it kind of sexist to assume that 51 percent of the population is merely in the market for a shoebox on wheels?

Not all the commercials run between the programs anymore, of course. And sometimes product placement can be puzzling, too. Not to mention distracting.

Fox, for instance, has loaded next Sunday's "24: Redemption" movie with so many logos, you might wonder why it needs five-minute commercial breaks.

The network's already promoting the movie's tie-in with the Hyundai Genesis - yes, you'll see it - but if you want a wireless plan that works even in fictional African countries, you'll have to watch for the prominent logo on the phone Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) uses.

No idea if roaming's included.

President-elect Barack Obama's Sunday night interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" drove the news magazine to its highest ratings in nearly 10 years, the network said yesterday, with an average of 24.49 million viewers tuned in for Steve Kroft's chat with Obama and his wife, Michelle, according to the preliminary Nielsens. *

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