Heating oil, 40% off from "our friends in Venezuela"

I imagine only the Yankee-dwelling folks like me have seen these commercials. I didn't actually know the Times had done a story on it until I Googled; I just thought the commercials were kind of amusing...

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/business/media/04citgo.html

Venezuelan Link to Nonprofit’s Ads Draws Some Conservative Criticism

By MARIA ASPAN
Published: December 4, 2006

The Citizens Energy Corporation, the nonprofit heating assistance program run by former Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II, supplies low-income households with oil provided by Citgo, the state-owned Venezuelan oil company. Now for the first time, Citgo is also paying for the corporation’s television commercials.

The commercials, which advertise “heating oil at 40 percent off from our friends in Venezuela at Citgo,” began to be shown on Nov. 17 in local television markets in the 16 states served by Citizens Energy. Citgo supplied Citizens with oil last year, but this year is the first time that Citgo will be footing the bill for the nonprofit’s commercials, as first reported by The Boston Herald and confirmed on Saturday by a Citizens spokesman.

In previous years, before Citizens expanded beyond Massachusetts, Mr. Kennedy had approached local television stations and asked them to donate time for commercials. However, as the program expanded to 16 states from six last year, Citizens and Citgo began discussing paid commercials to raise the program’s visibility in the new markets. The commercials “are an essential part of our program,” said Brian O’Connor, the spokesman for Citizens. “We could not depend on public service announcements to do an outreach” on such a large scale.

But the commercials have drawn some criticism from, among others, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and on Sean Hannity’s talk show on the Fox News Channel, for their acknowledgement of “our friends in Venezuela” and their reliance on the Venezuelan government’s financing, especially in the wake of President Hugo Chávez’s speech at the United Nations in September. Hardly popular with many Americans, Mr. Chávez provoked widespread ridicule by calling President Bush “the devil.” But Fox News, as well as other cable news channels like CNN, may find themselves running the Citizens commercials in at least some of their markets. Citgo advertises with both networks, according to AdWeek; while press officers for Fox News and CNN said that they were not running the Citizens commercials, Mr. O’Connor said that Citizens had purchased commercial time on local cable.

And according to Mr. O’Connor, Citgo and Citizens began discussing the commercials last spring, long before Mr. Chávez’s speech at the United Nations. Nor were the commercials scheduled around Venezuelan politics, though they began a few weeks before yesterday’s presidential election in Venezuela, which Mr. Chávez was expected to win.

“The timing was entirely to do with the beginning of the cold season,” Mr. O’Connor said.

***

The commercials are really pretty funny. The one I've seen most often (in the Philadelphia market) has these old people doing voiceovers while there's video of them suffering in the cold. There's one guy who says "I wear two pairs of long underwear and a sweater... and that's inside the house!" and a woman who says "I'm 80 years old. I had to drag an iron cot from the basement to the kitchen just so I could sleep next to the oven." Can't you just picture the group of ad wizards who came up with that one, trying to imagine the worst possible scenario for a broke old person? An IRON COT. NICE.

Anyway, Venezuela going after Northeastern hearts and minds - thoughts?