Obsessive Spokesperson

It's expected that characters in Advertising Campaigns will spend most of their appearance enjoying the advertised product. We usually don't need to learn about their lives when they're not using the product, so we don't expect their in-universe existence to revolve around the product — the commercial is just a snapshot of their life that happens to involve the product.

In other ads, the spokesperson isn't just enjoying the product like a typical customer, or even just doing their job as a mascot. Their entire life, even off the clock, is dedicated to the product. They're incapable of having a normal conversation without bringing up the product. They will go to extreme lengths just to get their hands on the product, and won't accept any alternative. The worst thing they can imagine is not having the product, and it may drive them to go insane. Other characters in the commercial, even those who also enjoy the product, are likely to be weirded out at this character's behavior. Alternatively, they might be just as obsessed with the product, and either beg the character for assistance scoring the product or start a rivalry with them. Either way, the company doesn't expect you to take this character's behavior very seriously, even if they want the product itself to be taken seriously.

This usually appears in Long Running campaigns that flesh out the everyday lives of their mascot characters, but still have them constantly refer to advertising. The kind of product can also affect how reasonable the obsession appears to be, since a Trademark Favorite Food is more likely to come up more in casual conversation often than, say, an insurance comparison site. This often falls into Self-Parody territory by mocking the unrealistic nature of a character that exists to shill a product.

Compare Flat Character and The Power of Cheese, which often overlap with this trope. Also compare Abusive Advertising, when not only is the product Serious Business, but the mascot will threaten anybody who doesn't buy it, and Stepford Consumer, when the consumer is ridiculously happy about the product they buy. Contrast What Were They Selling Again?, where the characters barely talk about the product at all, and Our Product Sucks, when the characters hate the product.

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Examples:

Automobiles

• Joe Isuzu, the former mascot of the Isuzu car company, obsesses over making the Isuzu car the number one car in America. He drives over to rival car companies just to taunt them about Isuzu's superiority and stalks other customers in order to direct them toward an Isuzu. He even pretends to be hit by rival cars just so he can tell their drivers the benefits of Isuzu. He does briefly return to a normal life, but after a Training Montage where he works out and reminds himself of all the benefits of Isuzu, he's back in business. He dispenses wisdom about Isuzu cars to some visibly confused children.

Financial

• The singing tenor of the Go Compare insurance comparison site, Gio Compario, shows up singing whenever somebody mentions insurance. As the campaign progressed, the other characters became more and more uncomfortable with Gio's obsessive approach, to the point where several ads had people try to kill him.
• Liberty Mutual's "LiMu Emu (and Doug)" commercials have Doug talk about insurance while doing various unrelated activities, such as beach volleyball. A man in the elevator not hearing Doug's insurance pitch prompts Doug to drop to his knees and unleash a Big "NO!". While on vacation, Doug's girlfriend gets weirded out at his insurance talk and insists he just relax for a change.
• A series of ads by Progressive auto insurance put their spokeswoman Flo in everyday situations with her family (all played by the same actress). Flo is apparently so obsessed with her work, she plugs it into every mundane conversation. One commercial dares her to go a single minute without mentioning Progressive. She can't do it.

Food and Drink

• Charlie the Tuna spends most of his time doing activities that appeal to StarKist Tuna so they'll appreciate his "good taste" and catch him. The problem is, he doesn't necessarily taste good, so they always reject him.
• Sonny, the cuckoo bird mascot of the Cocoa Puffs cereal, is so obsessed with Cocoa Puffs that he literally bounces all over the walls going "cuckoo" for them. Many ads have him try to avoid Cocoa Puffs, but reminders of Cocoa Puffs are everywhere.
• A series of commercials for the coffee creamer CoffeeMate stars a man who dresses like the CoffeeMate container and fills his home with pictures of CoffeeMate creamer. In one ad, he wonders if he loves CoffeeMate too much...then decides such a thing is impossible.
• The "Gotta Have My Pops" campaign for Kellogg's Corn Pops depicts characters having insane inner monologues just because they're out of Corn Pops. The commercial plots follow a similar trend: They realize they can't eat their cereal, start worrying about someone else eating it, and then, in a series of quick and jarring cuts with horror music playing, freak out and insist that they just "gotta have [their] Pops!". This is downplayed, however, as they can at least put on a sane facade so others don't know how obsessed they are.
• Swedish coffee brand Gevalia used to have commercials with the Gevalia family. They talked about nothing but coffee and seemed to like it that way. The plot of the commercials would be like this one: Before the father leaves for work, he is told not to forget to buy coffee. The mom thinks that she'd better buy some while she's out since the father probably will forget. Everybody else in the family thinks so as well, and once they get home they realize that not only did everybody buy coffee just to be sure — the dad actually remembered to buy coffee! What a laugh!
• The "Crazy Cravings" campaign for Honeycomb Cereal featured bug-eyed furry monsters who destroy anything in their path trying to devour the cereal, screaming "Me want Honeycomb!" In several commercials, people transformed into these creatures and went berserk once they started craving Honeycomb.
• A 2013 commercial for Subway's avocado sandwiches depicted two women competing over who loves avocados more. This involves wearing avocado merchandise, tending to avocado trees, and driving an avocardo. It ends when one of the women introduces her firstborn son named Avocado, rendering her friend speechless.
• Parodied and played for laughs by an advertisement for Trident Layers gum, in which a slightly-eerie Stepford Smiler family is thrilled that their patriarch is now getting paid in gum. A chimney sweep even pops out of the fireplace to share their joy, and the camera pans to show a disappointed-looking electrician complaining that he never gets paid in gum. The commercial hook itself is parodied in a later ad which depicts a man as being ecstatic that his new job pays him in Trident Layers, but his family doesn't share his deranged psychosis and is worried about how they're going to pay the bills.
• The Trix Rabbit has resorted to many life-risking Zany Schemes just to eat a bite of Trix Cereal. Ironically, he often ruins the chance to eat some because he goes crazy thinking about how good the cereal tastes and blows his cover.
• Wilkins Coffee:
  • The main character of the ads is Wilkins, a vaguely lizard-ish puppet who regularly visits Disproportionate Retribution on his friend Wontkins for the crime of disliking said coffee. This includes shooting Wontkins, stabbing him with a rapier, blasting him point-blank with a cannon, flattening him with a steamroller, and blowing up his house—and then Wilkins implies the same fate will befall the viewer as well, if they don't drink Wilkins Coffee. When he isn't inflicting over-the-top violence in the name of coffee, Wilkins will gleefully soak his head in Wilkins Coffee (literally), and may even be willing to pay a million dollars for a single cup.
  • Some ads imply that everyone in the world is similarly obsessed with Wilkins Coffee, and Wontkins is the only outlier. For example, in one ad Wilkins competes on a game show, and for the grand prize, he gets his choice of either a new car or Wilkins Coffee. Without hesitating, he chooses the coffee. The game show host laments, "We'll never get rid of that car."
• An ad for Frosted Mini-Wheats Cinnamon Roll cereal featured a family whose house and outfits were exclusively themed around cinnamon rolls (with the son painting a giant cinnamon roll on an easel) holding an excited family meeting about the new cereal.

Household Products

• A Charmin ad campaign stars a family of bears who literally sing the praises of their favorite toilet paper. They have family gatherings that consist of nothing more than rubbing the toilet paper on themselves. Changing the toilet paper too much horrifies them, and the parents read their son a scary bedtime story about running out of toilet paper.

Politics

• A variant in this ad for Gerald Daugherty's re-election campaign. To sell himself as a concerned politician, Gerald is depicted as unable to talk about anything except his policy ideas, even when he's just hanging out with his family. His wife wants him re-elected just so he can get out of the house.

Public Service Announcements

• In first half of A Case of Spring Fever, the protagonist Gilbert gains a new appreciation for springs after seeing how dull the world would be without them. In the second half, Gilbert becomes an evangelist for springs: when he goes golfing with his friends, he spends the entire trip monologuing about springs and their many, many uses. His friends get annoyed at him, or bored to the point of falling asleep, and he just keeps talking about springs.

Stores

• A 2010 campaign for Target starred Maria Bamford as an eccentric wide-eyed lady who spends all her time preparing to "win" Target's Christmas sale. She stays up all night making a Target store out of gingerbread and pulls two carts of Target items up a hill as a workout. She even has a Training Montage where she carries heavy items in baskets and does sit-ups on the big red ball outside a Target store.

Television

• SpongeBob SquarePants has Patchy the Pirate, the SpongeBob Fan Club president who hosts several special episodes of SpongeBob, as well as SpongeBob promotional material. His house is filled with SpongeBob merchandise and he goes to extreme lengths to see new SpongeBob episodes, including a lost episode, and even tries to meet SpongeBob in person. Even his pirate getup seems to just be an extension of his SpongeBob obsession, since he lives in modern-day Encino, California.

Other/Multiple Products

• Internet Historian's sponsorships tend to include over-the-top scenarios and really obsessive spokespeople.
  • There's Shadow Man, a man dedicated to making sure people know about Raid: Shadow Legends, going as far as to cause car accidents and plane crashes for it. In one ad, he gifts Raid: Shadow Legends to his children on Christmas (instead of telling them their mother died), and they respond with delight.
  • There's NordVPN Man, who once tried to coerce a woman into letting him use NordVPN, and also once stalked and harassed a different woman to "prove" how easy it is for hackers to collect data.
  • There's Raycon Man, who is on a personal quest to replace all wires with Raycon earbuds. On his journey, he cuts the wrong wire to a bomb causing untold amounts of injury, cuts an astronaut's oxygen line, leaving him to die in space, and cuts power to major cities along the American east coast. He also proposes to a woman with Raycon earbuds.

In-Universe Examples

• In the CollegeHumor video "Extremely Real People Who Are Definitely Not Actors," a group of "real people, not actors" in a battery commercial go absolutely berserk over the obscure-award-winning power of Omnivolt batteries. One girl breaks a table and another guy's head explodes after learning that Omnivolt was the second most reliable battery in a consumer survey.
• The Critic: The episode "Eyes on the Prize" parodies the food commercials that Orson Welles did late in his life. Welles has a low opinion of the peas and wine commercials, doing them only for the money, but has an intense attachment to the frozen fish sticks ones. Several times when filming other works, some of which aren't even commercials, he'll switch to plugging fish sticks and eating them on camera. Even as a ghost, he's still snacking on them, claiming they taste even better when one is dead.
• Drawn Together parodied Sonny the Cuckoo Bird's Cocoa Puffs obsession by depicting him at the hospital in a straitjacket, screaming, "Somebody get me some fucking puffs!"
• The aptly named 'Magic Bullet' special of Meme House is about a 'family' of spokespersons based on the actual real-life Magic Bullet (a food processor) commercials. In the episode itself, the main couple are cultishly obsessed with said food processor, constantly cooking beyond what's necessary, on top of being extremely mean to the designated Butt-Monkey Ralph. The episode ends with Ralph murdering everyone else in the household, and the reveal that the entire episode was just one long, extremely weird commercial In-Universe.
• Game Grumps: A bit in the Grumps Dream Course playthrough had Arin mimic Larry the Cable Guy's Prilosec heartburn medicine commercials, except the impression derails into Larry worshiping Prilosec as a god and eating it in the place of normal food.
• Played for Laughs on Ned & Stacey where Ned refuses to accept anything but a certain biscuit brand:
  Ned Dorsey: Uh, hon, these don't taste like Family Goodness Biscuits.
  Wife: I tried a different brand tonight. Hope you don't mind.
  Ned Dorsey: Mind?! Of course I mind, damn it! I want Family Goodness Biscuits! Get out of here, you wrong biscuit-buying slut!
• Parodied in an article of The Onion introducing a violent McDonald's mascot, "The Hammurderer." The article mentions another (fictional) recalled character, "Shakes McJunkie," who was so addicted to McDonald's shakes that he committed robberies just to get money for shakes. This mascot was apparently retooled into "The Machead" who used "panhandling and gay prostitution" to fund his burger addiction.
• Sky Does Minecraft: Parodied. In the mod showcase video for the Minecraft Obsidian Realm Mod, Sky shows off the mod-exclusive Obsidian Lamp item in the style of an infomercial, where he (acting as a salesman) obsessively rants about how great the item is before transitioning to screaming about how the lamp is the only thing that matters in life, and how his wife left him because he kept buying lamps. Later received a fan animation that Sky featured on his channel.
• Homestar Runner parodies this. It had previously been established that Homestar Runner's favorite drink is melonade, but in the cartoon "Hremail 7" he reveals that he's actually a paid spokesman for the company, and therefore contractually obligated to act obsessed with the product: "As a national spokesmodel for the Ethical Advancement of Melonade, I am contractually unable to drink, talk about, or bathe in any other liquid!" Homestar ends the Hremail by telling anyone who wants to know what his non-melonade favorite drink is, they need to ask him again in two years, when his contract expires.

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