What kind of creepy ad agency doesn’t know the difference between a muffin and a cupcake? Did your parents never let you into the kitchen, or what? If you bake batter into a muffin pan, that’s not called a “cupcake” unless it’s made from cake batter and is in a little paper cup.
What you show on your commercial is called a “muffin”. The idea of frosting muffins is disgusting, and there’s no way it can’t be messy. The idea of cooking cake batter like a muffin and then pretending it’s still a cupcake and frosting it…. messy. Yucky. Geez, just cook them in sphere shapes, put sticks in ‘em, dip them in frosting, and serve them as lollipops, why don’t you. It’d be cleaner.
I suppose you are trying to claim that cupcakes baked in Pam won’t burn their sides and bottoms or get dry. I seriously doubt this. I’m sure the non-stick properties do work, or mostly.
But why would anyone even try this out with cupcake batter? That’s what pretty paper cups are for, or parchment cups for the truly dedicated. And frankly, I like my muffins in cups, too. It keeps them moist, clean, and free of crumbs. (Unless you’ve got one of those really solid, oily cornbread muffins, like the ones at Cracker Barrel. They wouldn’t dare fall apart on you before you bite in.)
(What doesn’t go in cups? So nice, so neat, so good a container for crumbs. You know, I should bake something so I can use my cute little cupcake cups!)
Anyway, you try to gross us out by portraying the poor mother as unable to get her “cupcakes” out of the muffin pan. (Because she didn’t put them in cups, duh.) She never uses, say, a spatula or any other household hint; you just show her shaking the pan like a madwoman and then tearing at the “cupcakes” with her hands. This would be funny, if the commercial was for cupcake cups. (How kind of you to make that commercial for them!)
You then have the woman awake from her horrid nightmare to happiness, because she used Pam. What every viewer is actually thinking is, “Why the heck didn’t she use cupcake cups? What was she thinking? Ew.”
Then they’re thinking is, “Ew. She’s frosting all those muffin/cupcakes in her hands, instead of holding onto the paper, and then she’s serving them to these poor kids in the middle of winter. Hope the chick doesn’t have a cold. Maybe that’s why she’s having a dream sequence — fever.”
You add to the stupidity of your alleged cupcakes by having her frost them, and then pile said nasty frosted muffins on a plate before a bunch of children. At a party. Not only does this invite crumbs to be flung everywhere and frosting to smear all over when the piled muffins inevitably tumble off the stack and the plate; it cries out for a food fight.
On the bright side, it’s good to see that your ad agency is determined to create new entries for Lileks’ Gallery of Regrettable Food. Someone has to. And I’m sure cupcake cup sales will go up.