Adiocracy

Perhaps one of the most horribly hilarious direct TV ads EVER! Welltabs will make millions. We just hope this ad doesn’t scam too many of the desperate before it gets pulled by the FTC and indictments are handed out. Watch it now because my good guess is the Youtube link will not be available in a few months.

Could there be a more perfect sounding SNL parody name than Welltabs with ‘positive mood technology’?!  Brilliant! Welltabs work well whether you’re a paranoid schizophrenic or just feeling down because you were fired and your spouse left you. If you worry about money, health, if you don’t sleep well, if you’re scared, exhausted, or if life has simply turned against you, these little puppies are game changers. Take a bunch and you’ll feel more confident, more relaxed, stronger, healthier and happier. They’ll even help you look better.

The Welltabs miracle has trumped the entire pharma industry! (Not that we put much faith in them either — look what’s going on with cancer drugs shortage these days). The first time I saw this, I waited and waited  for the punchline, as it teased cliche after cliche like a disciplined comedian. This is an absolutely brilliantly, cringingly, awful gem. I’ll spare whoever was responsible by not drudging up credits (or should I say,  police lineup):

First of all, “What The F*ck?!” is this print campaign for Stedfast paper shredders, out of DDB Mudra, India. The fever-dream visuals are accompanied by a single line: “They’ll never put the story back together.”

Who is ‘they’? And what’s it supposed to mean? That if you shred this image you’ll never be able to explain it? If that’s it, they could have gotten the point across in a much more intriguing way by using a very simple amusing or odd visual that defies your ability to describe it — the thousand word thing. Cudos, however, to photographer Amol Jadhav for the wildly ambitious shoots. Reminds me of a Mad magazine interp of photographer Gregory Crewdson.

Curated via adsoftheworld

We came across this wonderful nugget of inanity for Post Trail Mix Crunch. The big position is that it’s the ‘sensation of trail mix for breakfast’. Not the real trail mix mind you, just the sensation. Okay, we’ll give them a pass for trying. But it’s the last line of copy that slays us:

‘Enjoy everything you love about trail mix in a cereal that satisfies your spirit of adventure!’ You like base jumping or free climbing? Now you can satisfy that adrenalin rush right at the breakfast table. Wanna get totally insane? For just this one crazy adventurous morning, substitute 2% for the fat free!

We actually liked the cereal. It’s the mindless garble on the package that’s so absurdly difficult to digest.

We found this Super Bowl ad by the bloated Charles Barkley to be a pretty ridiculous choice for Taco Bell. Of all the aging players they could have picked, why choose a guy who’s practically flaunted his overweight-ness to sell their super high fat, super high cal meal deal. Watch him shimmy his girth through the phone booth while he raps a la Dr. Seuss.

There are a thousand spokesguys Taco Bell could have chosen that would not have pointed their bellies directly at the unhealthy qualities of its menu. BTW, we saw David Robinson at MJ’s Hall of Fame induction. He’s still looking lean and mean. We think CB is a bad brand choice for TB, made even more apparent, we think, by the Lamar Odom cameo.

If you want to cringe, and we mean curl-your-toes cringe, watch this ad for ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’ by Mindshare media’s Mindshare Entertainment, if you haven’t already seen it. This is jaw-droppingly awful. It actually makes Brett Ratner’s recent spot for Atlantis resort seem sophisticated.

Somehow the agency and client approved this horrific thing, then convinced Mullally’s agent that her career could handle singing the butter substitute’s strategy to ‘Turn The Beat Around’. These are some of the actual lyrics (seriously):

Fresh butter taste (…something garbled that rhymes with ‘no transfats here’),
No hydrogentated oils, so there’s not transfats here,
Turn the tub around, talkin’ ’bout nutrition,
Turn come see what we found, it’s what you’ve been wishin’!

Somewhere right now, Megan is probably burying her head under a pillow. We certainly hope that she used some of this ‘dance with the devil’ money to do something nice for the world.

Watch for yourself. But we warn you, this is not for the sqeamish…

Is it a large mashed potato ball? Or humans in sheep costumes velcroed together and hung from a crane? Nowhere on the page does the ad bother to tip its hand. Not even a little. The copy only offers a vague promise that the car ‘considers your environment too’. This ad — part of a campaign that features other people in costumes — has us perplexed. What’s your interpretation?

Right smack in the midst of the latest Rodriguez, Ortiz, Ramirez, juicing scandals, Beck’s has created this remarkably mindless ad celebrating technological advances in baseball performance. As the game suffers body blow after body blow with every new revelation of performance enhancing abuse, it’s hard to imagine why Beck’s would throw its hat into the ruckus with this cagey endorsement of ‘the game that said no to old school’ and ‘throws a curveball at yesterday’ (we’ll say!) by taking ‘a technological leap into the future.’

What technological leap could they possibly be referring to? The bats aren’t better — they’re snapping like matches. New batting glove synthetics? No, it’s the raw power and roid rage cooked into the game by Anabol and Deca. Just look at the guy’s thigh sized forearms!

Incidentally, what makes this ad even more inane is that Beck’s is, for some reason, attempting to hitch itself to America’s favorite pastime. Which is why its concluding line of copy —  the “#1 selling beer in Germany” —  really left us giggling. The steroid thing got our attention, but this ad delivers idiocy and bad judgement in so many fabulous ways!

There’s a lot that’s deliciously nonsensical about this Hellman’s campaign. Most obvious of course is Bobby Flay. The man made his name on southwestern grilling, not sandwich-making. His latest book is about burgers and fries. Mayo has a total of two mentions in the index.

Then there’s the awkward photo of the chef, arms extended toward his masterpiece, pretending to be candidly caught deep in the midst of his sandwich-making craft.

Which brings us to our last ‘pushing it’ point. Let’s be honest about where sandwich-making falls in the spectrum of cuisine preparation. Does sandwich making really require top chef advice? It’s not like you’ve got a monkfish on the counter and you’re trying to figure out how to turn it into a gourmet dinner for four.

Granted, sandwiches are Hellman’s bread n’ butter, but this campaign feels inappropriately self-important. Like that person at the party who thinks everyone finds the details of their golf game as fascinating as they do.

That’s our take. What’s yours?

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.

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?