UPDATE: Read the comments for Mer’s video footage and horrifying account of a face-to-face encounter with a violent group of Yes-to-Prop 8 protesters.
In anticipation of California’s chance to vote on Proposition 8 (which aims to ban same-sex marriage) this coming November 4th, YouTube has exploded with professional and “fan-made” commercials from both camps. How do they compare? Let’s take a look.
While opponents of Prop 8 have a slim lead in California, the Mormon Church has poured millions of dollars into the effort to support Prop 8, which adds just the right touch of irony to the following:
The above ad tries to inject a viewer’s ambivalent attitude towards gay marriage with an instinctive revulsion towards pedophilia/incest. It does so by creating a sequence that’s superficially linear, yet quite visually consistent (and fun to look at), making this the strongest ad on the “Yes” side. Other ads are not so smooth. For example: who in the history of plastic dolls ever made Ken and Barbie marry each other? No, no – this is how every normal girl ages 6 – 8 plays with Barbie (the rest of us blacked out their eyes with Magic Markers before decapitating them). Mattel itself couldn’t have possibly made it more clear than when they released Ken’s buddy, Allan, back in 1964 (note the use of quotation marks on the outside packaging).
Even less realistic is the following ad – who are these people? I love the girl who says that “adoption agencies may be forced to place children in same-sex marriages.” Would they be forced to provide dowry as well? Most baffling of all is this official “Yes to Prop 8” ad, in which an annoying WASPy girl fails not just to produce a convincing argument, but in fact to produce any argument whatsoever. Verbatim quote: “uhh I hate this! You know I’m no good at arguing this kind of stuff… uh, uhm, I tell you what – I have a website, and you can look at it, and we’ll talk about it, OK?” And South Africa and the Iraq and such as. Except this was scripted.
So, what’s the best that the “No” side has got? Despite the fact that lampooning Mac vs. PC ads is a bit 2007, here’s my personal favorite:
I’m going to start using the word “amend” more. My choice for runner-up? Margaret Cho and Selene Luna, the latter appearing in “mom drag” as Margaret’s well-meaning but confused neighbor. The Molly Ringwald ad is also cute. And if it’s Serious Business you want, here’s a touching ad from a straight couple that’s been married for 46 years.
This week, let’s take a look at a highly questionable bit of “ambient” advertising, as it’s been dubbed in my buzzword happy industry. La Hacienda, tagline “The Hottest Food In Town,” is a chain of 37 Mexican eateries dotting the heartland of America. They are known for the spiciest, south-of-the-border specialties. To totally ram that point home, they’ve apparently installed mini refrigerators filled with rolls of chilling toilet paper into their restroom stalls. Erm. I guess we could give them brownie points (sorry) for their brutal no-shit honesty? Maybe they should hire attendants to hand out mini-tubes of Preparation H cooling gel, too? What do you think of this south-of-the-waistline stunt? Me, I think it might have put me off of mole poblano sauce for life. (images via: scary ideas)
I apologize right here up front for this post, which will absolutely put this fucking song in your head for days. Here, as part of a new print campaign out of Belgium for Love brand condoms, the head (sorry) of Microsoft makes yet another embarrassing ad appearance, this time minus Jerry Seinfeld’s dickiness. I guess Love figures Bill won’t sue. And when you (or at least I) think about it, the scenario of someone seemingly as asexual and powerful as Bill Gates suing a condom company is pretty ridiculous. But not as ridiculous as this ad! Dressing up penises like beefy finger puppets? How 6th grade! Belgian ad agencies sure have some crazy-ass notions about what effective condom advertising looks like, yes? This disembodied dick-work was created by Brussels shop Troy — ha, they have a Trojan horse on their landing page. Jump for a second ad featuring a tattooed theoretical Arnold Schwarzenegger schwanz. You can view the rest of the campaign, including a super-tasteless John Lennon execution, here.
The separation between advertising & editorial was likened by Henry Luce to the division between church and state; a vital, necessary wall that keeps a magazine honest and pure. We’ve had to turn down several advertisers so far because they pressured us to blog or run print features about them as part of the deal, and will continue to do that as time goes by.
That said, I’d like to dedicate a special blog post (though none of them asked for it) to our four main Issue 01 sponsors: people who decided to place an ad in the first two issues of a magazine that wasn’t yet even published, with a relatively small print run and no proven track record of print success. For a business to give their ad dollars to a such a new publisher, especially in 2008’s economy, was asking a lot. But these guys took the leap, and it’s because of them – as well as all of you, who ordered Issue 01- that we’re able to make Issue 02.
Come on and go surfin’ safari with Mandela… that’s so narb, dude! Print campaign (click here for enlarged ad) for Denmark’s largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten— now internationally famous of course thanks to publishing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. Headline: “Life is easier, if you don’t speak up. Debate.” Ain’t that the truth. Nice baggies, brodad! Chillaxin’ Nelson would be the Kahuna of South Africa, and Naomi would soo totally be his Gidget. And fighting to achieve liquid solidarity would have been wicked more peaceful than fighting apartheid ever was; everyone’s equal in the eyes of Neptune, Nellie. But, uh, Uncle Grey (JP’s ad agency)? That retouching job is gnarmin. (Thanks to Riptionary™ for help with the surf lingo).
Here’s a second execution in this goofy-ass campaign featuring a drunken barbecue chef Gandhi (click here to enlarge). Hey Mahatma, put another piece of cow on the fire for me! Fucker is bogarting the India Pale Ale. With these two ads, the Danish paper has now pissed off a couple billion more people. Who’s left? Richard Gere! Here’s a downhilling Dalai Lama just for you. Like the ads? Hate the ads? Debate.
I love traveling. I hate ironing. Therefore, I do not, and never will, own a stupid travel iron. Yeah, why don’t I also pack a travel toilet brush and some Toilet Duck and clean my hotel room shitter while I’m on vacation? Irons are for sporadic home use only, and even then, with expletive-filled disdain.
However, these sci-fi movie poster ads for eta travel irons are ridiculously cool. I want to steal them for my own portfolio. I want to hang them in my bedroom. I want to see the movies! It’s Mega-eta vs. Mechagodzilla! Tokyo terrorized by clashing steel behemoths! Monstrous Mega-eta steams through the Japanese capital in search of its robot foe, flattening every Gap store (there are several!) along the way. Irony! The wonderful campaign was created by ad agency Kaspen in Prague (I hate you creative bastards). After the jump, view an updated War Of The Worlds, where an alien armada of irons lays waste to the City Of Light, including an inglorious toppling of the Eiffel Tower. (images via BestAdsOnTV. There’s also a Rome version.)
When I was younger, defining oneself to the outside world as edgy, difficult, different was comparatively easy. There was a pretty straightforward list of symbols and codes in which one could participate or not. Soccer shorts and sneakers meant you were a jock, whether or not you were really interested in playing sports of any kind. Black band t-shirts and a wallet chain meant you were a rocker kid, a badass with an interest in bands with guitars and a disdain for authority. Goth, of course, had the most fun symbols and so many ways to play dress-up. Fishnets, long black skirts regardless of gender, black eyeliner and lipstick, anything made of vinyl, all daringly worn to school where, I now reminisce, nothing was really at stake but one’s own vanity.
You know all of this already. Well, one of my favorite pieces of this code was and has always been the bold black and white striped tights, beloved of alternachicks and goth girls ages 12-32 coast to coast. Any plain black dress and boots ensemble could be made “cool” with a pair of these tights. They were like hipness armor at a vulnerable age when I felt I really needed such a thing. I probably still have my first pair somewhere, full of holes, this pair of tights, this very small thing that made me feel somehow protected from the horror of being mistaken for a slave of dreaded mainstream fashion and therefore boring mainstream thought.
It’s easy to make fun of teenagers. They don’t always get that major fashion brands aren’t purveyors of the new, they’re delimiters of the accepted. Their status as such depends on their continued marketing of themselves as edgy but this is marketing only. If it weren’t the money would dry up and disappear like steam. So I suppose the presence of the Coach advertisements currently papering most of New York amuses me just as much as it makes me feel wistful. The ads feature a close-up shot of a foot, shod in a new $300 Coach black leather Mary Jane style pump, the leg lovingly clad in that familiar black and white striped stocking.
Oh buoy. Welcome back Web explorers to the Dr. Moreau School of Digital Art Direction. On the plate today: a tabby croissant. Because “you eat what you touch.” Lifebuoy is just the latest advertiser trying to capitalize on our post-modern germophobia, where washing your hands with simple soap IS NOT ENOUGH. Pet your cat, eat your cat. Take out your garbage, eat your garbage. Wipe your ass, eat your ass. Putting aside my utter distrust of this whole fucking product category, here’s my one sentence review of this campaign: maybe you ad creatives should’ve concentrated on visually dramatizing a believable reason to buy, as opposed to making me think about biology class, and dead cats, and whether or not I have any Pepcid in my Timbuk2 bag (I endorse both of those products). At least the cat-croissant isn’t crawling with worms. Click here for a closer look, and then jump for a second pet experiment featuring a dead hamster muffin.
[Weekly Ad Uncoiling is a guest column by CLIO, ANDY, Mobius, One Show and Bobcat pin (Cub Scouts) award-winning advertising creative director copyranter, who won those pointless awards years ago, and now seriously dislikes the “creative process” and Pinewood derby races.]
A few days ago, there was a heated discussion over at copyranter about some new ads which recycle funny student exam answers of the “They Didn’t Study” variety. Meme-tastic scans of such exam answers (“Find X.” “Here it is.”), immortalized by benevolent teachers in public service to the entire Internet long ago, have floated around the web since the Usenet days. In the copyranter thread, some came down on the ad school for “recycling 8-year-old internet jpegs,” while others maintained that all ads repackage old ideas, and that the ads in question did so well.
Stealing old internet memes, that I can forgive. It’s not worth the effort to get all indignant – not when it can be much worse. How bad can it get? Behold! Compare BBDO Athens’ ad for Dexim at the top of this post to an early photo by Jamie Nelson below.
…really? Really?
First of all: BBDO Athens, this is Photoshop Disasters calling. If you’re going to photoshop a model onto a background, at least make sure you get the shadows right. At least Jamie actually put the model on the that background. If you’re going to copy something, at least improve it. The agency lists the photographer, creative director, art director, art buyer, stylist, hair and makeup artist, and photo producer for this shoot. Clayton Cubitt asks, “it takes that many people to rip-off a young photographer’s little editorial shoot?” Why didn’t they just hire Jamie? This is from the same guys who produced that sexist BMW ad, by the way.
It all comes to a full circle so easily on the web. There’s a whole blog devoted to it. How can people think that they won’t get caught, in this day and age?
Earlier this week, while taking a leisurely stroll along the information superhighway, I came across a peculiar image. Shot by Steven Meisel, it shows some of our best models dressed like something between a tea cozy and a Commie jackass. Paused by this discovery, I realized that it had gone too far. The Motherland was speaking though me, as if to say “Back up the Russia-philia train for just one moment, son”. I am but a messenger.
It is certainly not “wrong” to be inspired by an aesthetic, but when does inspiration breach on clownificated abuse? Example: I love Japan and its many offerings but draw the line at food & fashion inspiration. The second you see me throwing peace signs in photos, wearing a bejeweled eye patch or mixing half-baked Japanese slang into my speech, feel free to shoot on sight. So where do we draw the line when it comes to Russia-worship?
Borat advertising did it, countless graphic designers and industrial bands are guilty of If. The most common offense is replacing characters with similar-looking Cyrillic ones. One perfect example is this Repo! poster. If you were to actually read what film title spells out it would sound like “Yah-eh-roh Mdi”. What could have been a fine piece of art is now a buffoon. Take heed, designer.
