An inner-city cafe gathering last Wednesday - the usual cabal: three university emeritus professors, a hairdresser, two surgeons, a lawyer with an Aberfanian social conscience and a window cleaner of very long standing - all made the same point to me at precisely the same moment: why don't we see the American TV ads shown during major sports contests?
Superbowl ads cost, on average, $2.2 million apiece, but they are restricted to American viewing audiences only.
Not surprisingly, these ads are truly exceptional, creatively superior to probably 88% of what is currently on New Zealand television masquerading as drama.
But of course 114 million people watch the Superbowl, serious money.
Right now I am gripped by the NBA playoffs, which we are streaming, hence we are getting all the American ads.
As exciting as basketball can be, almost as exciting as a rugby ball in the hands of Ben Smith, these ads are often even more thrilling.
I go straight to YouTube after the game to watch them again. My coffee group is right on the button.
It would be naive to suggest New Zealand TV ads during major sporting contests should be as good as what America, a country built on advertising, can produce, but our ads should still be a whole lot better.
Look no further than Fujitsu during the recent Cricket World Cup.
Stephen Fleming has been fronting Fujitsu heat pumps for some years now.
Incredibly, he has become worse and worse as the years have rolled on.
A fine batsman, captain, coach and business manager, Fleming has inexplicably decided to add a fifth skill to the previous four: he now wants to become the worst New Zealand television advertising actor of all time.
But he won't achieve this, because during the World Cup, Fujitsu brought in Nathan Astle to sit on the sofa with Fleming and make jokes.
Every ad looked like Take 67.
What a tragic pair of nongs these two once-great cricketers were!
Astle, whose double hundred in that England test we nearly won is the finest innings I have ever seen, crept nervously from inaudible to incomprehensible, setting up Fleming for a succession of wretched punch-lines.
Could Fujitsu perhaps provide some sales figures since these ads went on air?
Surely, SURELY, they have slumped.
But then we turn to America and I look no further than the Sprint ads.
There were a few of them, but my favourite was the one where they show how stupid people can be, that is, the people who aren't on a Sprint phone plan.
How do they show stupid?
They have a mother and daughter bidding AGAINST each other, each pair of hands raising their bidding placard at ping pong speed.
They are bidding for a photo of a cat.
Brilliant.
Misogynist, I guess the thinking was, men don't like cats, but brilliant.
Or maybe you like drama?
The New Zealand Army has advertised on TV, but they could never do what the American Marines at marines.com do.
We see a huge wall, soldiers on top like ants to emphasise the size of the wall.
Walls are barriers, intones the narrator, they divide, separate, segregate.
Then comes a massive explosion which blows the wall into a billion bits and a billion marines pour through the hole with their giant guns.
But they have always fallen, concludes the narrator.
Because of the marines.
The Autotrader ad recreates The Dukes of Hazzard, two crazed country loonies evading the cops at high speed bashing into stuff.
Buy Your Car Your Way, concludes the ad.
The Taco Bell ad, yes, just a bit of food, will more than likely win the Oscar for Cinematography next year.
I can only imagine what it looked like on the 200ft screen in the Taco Bell boardroom as their management watched it for the first time.
Or the slogans!
A beer ad ever-so-slowly drips the company's icy product down the screen.
A drop, says the narrator, deep and resonant, seductive, is the expectation of what comes next.
This is how you advertise beer during sport.
If New Zealand seriously thinks it can stage Fifa's World Cup, it had better make better ads.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
