Adiocracy

We love it when mags are unwittingly turned into boxing rings. In this month’s Martha Stewart Living, Kashi throws a few punches at high fructose corn syrup. Why not? Everyone else is. In its ad, Kashi refers to the sweetening goop as ‘fake stuff’ which will never be an ingredient in its granola bars.

In our imaginations, the Corn Refiners’ secret media spies keep them informed of such attacks. After all, this is high stakes agri-business. So, to pre-empt the Kashi kidney punches on page 157, they strategically placed an ad from their 3/4 talking heads campaign on page 80.

The Corn Refiners, of course, call their slop sweetener ‘natural, nutritionallly the same as table sugar’, though they admit that high fructose corn syrup ‘should be enjoyed in moderation’. But the precise point nutritionists make about the goop is that, given its proliferation, it’s damn near impossible to consume in moderation. 

We see this kind of ad idiocy most around Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day and Christmas. Here, Werther’s promises that their candy can do comforting hugs as well as a mom can. So, like, if you and your mom are no longer speaking, or if she’s passed into the great beyond, you can just eat a candy and get that great mom-hug feeling?

We know why Werther’s would approve this sort of sweet senseless pablum. But what agency would suggest mindless nonsense like this? We’re going to save everyone the embarassment and not bother with the research on this one.

According to this ad by CLM, BBDO France, the quality of HP printing is so lifelike, it’s almost like having your actual baby pinned to the wall of your cubicle. Even if you have to ignore it because you’ve got work to do. Leave it to the French to give us a humorous take on child abuse to illustrate the generic promise. You can see other ads in the campaign at scaryideas.com. 

We think that dispensing anything, even toilet paper, out a butthole is creepy. Call us old fashioned, but we have no idea why the folks at By Far in Denmark thought this’d be a winning way to draw attention to Silk Soft’s recycled tp. We don’t think we’d be able to keep our eyes on the hole long enough to register the product name. Granted, there are some who… 

You can’t help but spend some time with these simple ads placed at the bottom of shopping bags and in restaurant bill wallets. Created to look like receipts, they shock, and make complete contextual sense. Thanks to our friends at scaryideas for bringing this campaign (done in November ’08) to our attention. Agency Martin/Williams in Minneapolis. Art Director Toby Balai and writer Chris Gault.

Whether you’ve gotta a thing for horror clowns or not, you’ll be mesmerized by this surreal short film to promote the arrival of Philips Cinema 21:9 aspect ratio TV and its website www.philips.co.uk/cinema. The site hosts the video, called ‘Carousel’ which is not so much a film as it is as a moving pastiche of clown terrorists taking over a hospital, with a bit of interactive commentary on the film and TV along the way.

Directed by Adam Berg for Tribal DDB Amsterdam, the video consumed our attention even though we weren’t clear what it was for, which didn’t matter because we couldn’t stop watching the devastation coming around every corner. Great horror soundtrack by Michael Fakesch.

We bet this’ll have a bigger opening weekend than ‘State of Play’. 

Because of all the hullaballoo, we figured we’d weigh in on this Texican Whopper spot. It’s not only an unbelievably, pun-ish stinker, its awfulness is surprising, considering it comes from CP+B.

First things first. Like most advertising built around a pun, it’s barely an idea. To put this in perspective, the rag-tag team of C-list celebs on Celebrity Apprentice used the same ‘little’ pun to sell a small bottle of All detergent. And they came up with it in an hour.

Sure, people may be offended by ‘a little spicy Mexican’, or the way the ad relegates Mexico’s pro wrestling heritage to a gimmick. But, hey, there will always be folks with zero tolerance, ready and waiting to protest what they perceive are even the slightest of slights (look at the current commotion over Popeye’s bland ‘Annie the Chicken Queen’). We love when pop culture, advertising included, pokes fun at this distinctly American over-sensitivity. But as our most pop of pop cultures, if advertising chooses to take this on, it’d better do it with fabulous self-awareness. But none of that is in evidence here.

So no redeeming value. This one stinks up the joint like an open bag of yesterday’s offal sitting on a hot curb.

That’s our take. What’s yours?

As if her sagging ice caps weren’t bad enough for her downwardly spiraling self-image, Mother Nature has also been geting poked from the ad side as well. Tampax Pearl’s campaign, which has been running for a few months, actually encourages us to ‘Outsmart Mother Nature’. As if we aren’t already dealing with the disastrous consequences of believing we could.

The Tampax campaign (by Burnett out of Chicago, we think) has elected to portray Mother Nature as a brash, instrusive, trumpet playing Rita Rudner-type buffoon. Getting your period is intrusive, so we get the joke, but, hey, it ain’t her fault. Couldn’t the agency have made her intrusive, but in a funny way? Here she just comes off as cloying.

And now Vitamin Water claims it  has ‘one-upped Mother Nature’ with its new 10 calorie naturally  sweetened water. Why anyone still thinks trying to one-up nature is a good thing, we don’t know. Dow chemical and Dupont have been making this promise for years and where has that gotten us?

In this spot (agency Berlin Cameron), Mom Nature is portrayed as a hard-driven exec trying to regain her brand’s edge. She’s so focused she doesn’t even notice when one of her staff devours another member right under her nose. 

Not that we were in love with the regal queen version of Mother Nature. We just think that she’s got enough troubles these days without our biz dragging her through the mud too.

In this General Mills ad for Caribou Coffee Bars (we assume they’ve licensed the name from Caribou Coffee), a woman dressed in office attire complete with pearls enjoys a coffee candy bar while relaxing among a herd of caribou. Eyes closed, she pets one as if it were a Shetland pony.

Yes, Caribou is the name of the product. But of all the relaxing animal images that come to mind — a fluffy yellow lab, a lazy Persian cat, even a sleeping furry Sheep — a herd of roaming wild caribou does not.

Maybe she somehow found a herd of tamed and slightly drugged caribou, or maybe she’s a caribou-obsessed crazy who snuck her way into a diorama of stuffed animals at the natural history museum.

There are lots of ways to execute a brand’s name in print, and certainly caribou offer an interesting opportunity, but this one makes no sense to us.

How bout you?

These ads for Monopoly by JWT Frankfurt visualize the vibe of owning property on the board. The glossy interior re-design does a nice job updating the brand’s 1950′s top hat n’ tux wearing Mr. Monopoly tycoon image: