Now THIS Is a Weird Ad

Visit Scotland, because it's the home of bagpipes and...penicillin?

Yeesh.

This Is Usually a "Feel-Good" Blog...

...but I have to single out AccuQuote for having the worst on-line ad I've seen this year. A girl in cut-offs weeping in front of a gravestone? Yeesh. (Bonus Demerit: The name of the graphic is "Devastated.")I guess the ad people for AccuQuote don't go in for the light touch. Hey, did this ad beat out some other "second-place" idea? I wonder what THAT ad was. (Maybe a girl dancing on someone's grave?)

The Ad That Had to Be Stopped

If you have thirty seconds, watch this mildly amusing ad:


Now then, were you enraged by the patronizing way the daughter and wife treated the father? Yeah, me either. Even so, after a campaign led by Glenn Sacks, the ad was taken off the air. Sacks explains his opposition here, stating the ad is “symptomatic of a larger problem in our society—the denigration of males in popular culture, and the decline of fatherhood.”

My favorite part of Sacks’s broadside is this: “One father sent me his letter of protest to Verizon, adding ‘I never knew what love really was until I had a daughter.’”

And THAT’S why this ad must never again see the light of day!

Bathroom Kabuki and Mysterious Adverts

Here is a little bathroom kabuki; this person was the victim of someone sprinkling baby powder in the hair dryer.

Oh, and I'll give you a thousand yen if you can figure out what's being advertised in this Japanese commercial before you get to the end.

Human Piñatas and Rejection

I'm fascinated by advertising's better efforts even as I scorn the vast majority of ads. Walt Whitman felt the same way when he wrote:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Anyway, I want to give credit where it’s due, so kudos to the creative team that concocted this Skittles ad.

Bill Shapiro (whose previous project was Other People's Love Letters) has sent out a call for writers who've been treated like human piñatas. That is, he wants their literary rejection letters. The cream of the rejected crop will be collected into a book: Other People's Rejection Letters. (The book will be large. It will contain multitudes.)

Writing in the Guardian, former editor Jean Hannah reveals that she rejected about 1,000 book proposals when she was in publishing. She fears that this new book will overlook the art of the rejection letter in favor of gratuitously pleasing material. Hannah notes:

“[W]riting rejection letters is a delicate skill... For it is not easy to achieve and balance the two central goals of a truly accomplished rejection letter: trying not to make the writer feel distraught whilst also discouraging him or her from ever contacting you ever again…. what I really wanted to write was, "Dear 'Writer', Please throw your laptop out of the window and never go near it again because this typescript is a shocking abuse of a perfectly good and innocent alphabet."

Guardian reader Mike Petty comments that his favorite rejection was, “Your work is so finely wrought and so divinely inspired that it would expose the rest of our output as the shallow nonsense that it is, leading to loss of face and a catastrophic fall in company morale, so we are reluctantly forced to return your manuscript to you.”

Without checking my own rejection slips (a trauma I'll avoid today, thank you), I'll tack on that also frustrating are editors who inform you that while THIS project of yours isn’t quite right, please keep them informed of your next great idea. This encouragement ("They like me!") leads one to immediately submit another proposal, which also ALMOST makes the cut but doesn’t… and so on. It’s almost enough to make one switch to decaf.

But in case you're feeling like a human piñata, let's end on an upbeat note: This very kind (uplifting, even!) form rejection letter (not mine!) from the literary magazine zyzzyva.

Graffiti Advertising Helps Me Decide!

Like many European cities, Berlin is plastered with graffiti. Don’t get me wrong, I actually like the stuff when it’s artistic, clever, or just happens to besmirch lame-o advertising. (Graffiti artist Banksy’s stencil on Israel’s West Bank wall, above.)
But Berlin’s street artists are crying foul because lately the ads have been besmirching their work. You see, advertisers looking for an edge have increasingly turned to ads camouflaged as graffiti (see above)… Ooh, they’re tricky!

Take the mobile communications company Ogo for example. According to Der Spiegel, there was a mysterious overnight appearance of “hundreds of round cartoon monsters… in the form of graffiti, on Berlin's high-rise buildings, on posters and construction site fences.” Later, the truth came out: They were ads.

Guerilla ads are nothing new, and co-opting pop and youth culture to sell stuff is likewise not very shocking. But while graffiti has been around since humankind learned to build walls, it was a big deal in 1969 when a kid wrote his nickname (Taki 183) all over New York. Der Spiegel points out that graffiti’s modern variant then “gained strength in the 1970s when it reclaimed public space from advertising. ‘Reclaim the streets’ was one of the slogans of the early activists, who saw themselves as critics of commerce armed with spray paint and magic markers.”

So much for that. And these new ads aren’t even vandalism! Charges of property damage don’t stick when ad stencils wash away in the first hard rain. But those advertising images will stick in our heads longer than that. Mission accomplished. (Right, a meshing of commerce and graffiti from Palermo, Sicily that sums up my feelings. Oh, and I love this graffiti story.)

Killer Billboard

Where: The Yinji Shopping Mall in Zhengzhou, China.

What: A mannequin hanging by his neck from the top of the billboard.

Ad Translation: "It's better to invest money here [in China] than put it into the stock market." (Yes, it's a reference to the global financial crisis.)

Public Reaction: Panic. Crying children. Lots of complaints.

Official Reaction: A deputy director of the local trade bureau: "Without the hanging man, it's really not that shocking."

Jiang Chengpu (creative director of the ad): "We are making fun of the depressing stock market here. And the place the mannequin is hanging is right next to the stock index line."

Advertising Helps Me Decide: Burying the Goldfish

"Everyone casts an admiring glance."

The Chinese Lives blog shares news of an ad campaign promoting the Mini Cooper Clubman.

They're using bikes (or rickshaws) to sell cars?! Arg.

This blog entry's title is the English translation of the ad above.

To the right: "Beijing Exclusive 2008 MINI Man-Powered Pedicab!"

(Thank you to Aaron Judd of Yale for the translations.)