The Bullshit Observer

Worst Ads of 2009?

BNET has a roundup of the most despicable advertisements of this entire year and here they are:

10. Red House Furniture: "Where White People and Black People buy furniture." Actually pretty funny in a mostly unintended sort of way. How they thought it would sell furniture is beyond me. 

9. Boost Mobile: Mrs. "Claus Screws Frosty the Snowman." Also pretty funny. With most of the nation's politicians, athletes, and Hollywood celebs cheating on their spouses, I fail to see why a claymation version of Mrs. Claus bopping Frosty is all that offensive. At least she does admit that it is wrong. 

8. Volvo: "Vampires drive them. They also drive motorcycles, but don't think about that." Another movie tie-in ad that the business people thought would be a good idea because it seems smart, but that never actually made sense, you know, in REALITY. I actually pity the creatives that had to do this because, well, I pity myself when I have to do it.

7. Jamison Beer. "Ho White and the 7 Dwarves" Pictured here. I actually think it's kinda funny and I appreciate the juvenile humor. The BNET writer didn't like it. But then, I doubt he's in the target demo of immature 15-year-old-at-heart guy guys who never liked the story Snow White in the first place.

6. Miracle Whip. "Don't Be So Mayo. Be hip and trendy like these paid actors doing weird things in a cheeky way."  It's hard to put your finger on what's wrong with this ad that's trying so desperately hard to make their sandwich spread fit right in with their wrongheaded perception of "young people" cultural norms. I don't know what it is, just rubs me the wrong way.

5. Palm Pre: "Tamara Hope Pretends To Reflect on Juggling as a metaphor for multi-tasking." Sometimes so many things irk you about an ad that it's hard to parse out exactly what they all are. Was it the overly sentimental tone that she uses? Is it the fact that I waited all that time to find out that she's employing a hackneyed metaphor? Is it that her eyes are telling me that she has a really good story for me, but her eyes lied? It could be all of these things and the music that just piled on the over-try.

4) General Motors: "We're reinventing ourselves because obviously the old "ourselves" was bloated, inefficient, and lazy. Oh, and unprofitable." So I actually thought this ad was pretty well done. It was obviously inexpensive to make, so that fits with a bankrupt company advertising in the first place. The V/O was nice, the writing was fine, the music worked, and the clips they chose were active and upbeat. 

3) Ralph Lauren: "Filippa Hamilton as deathcamp survivor with rad clothes."A print ad that actually got posted to the site "photoshipdisasters.blogspot.com." She reminds me of someone though. She reminds me of the blond assistant to the evil mastermind in The Incredibles. She also reminds me of licorice rope and eels.

2) World Wildlife Fund: "Let's employ the World Trade Center attacks to get people off their asses to save the animals." Sounds like a bad idea to me. But I wouldn't know since DM9DDB Brasil removed the YouTube video. Bummer. Instead, I give you this nice video of that famous graduation speech set to lounge music.

1) Virgin Mobile: "Case of the disembodied mouth." The woman puts her cell phone down and her mouth gets detached from her face and continues the conversation with her mom. I actually liked this ad. Kinda. It's trippy. But I wonder where the girl went.

The Year the Media Died

Now see all that nostalgia set to "Bye Bye Miss American Pie" in this video. Thanks Richiepear.

Cadbury Eyebrows TV Ad

Cadbury Eyebrows from Nils-Petter Lovgren on Vimeo.

Take a look at the Cadbury video from Fallon London. A really nice, clean, and simple idea. Kids playing a song with their eyebrows (and a bit with a balloon). Great casting choices, simple art direction, and a good choice of song. The page where I got it has nothing but positive comments on it about this spot.

But I'm sorry.

Without even a thin thread of logic tying back to the product, you don't got shit. The creatives for this spot should be in a different industry. This isn't something that will sell the client's product. And if it doesn't sell the client's product, then you're just wasting their money and their time on a personal art project. And that is advertising malpractice. You should be sued.

It's A Great Time To Invest

A Unique Sales Pitch For Palm Devices

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From the creator of The Bullshit Observer...a new blog

Together with some friends, I have a new blog creation called The Conceptualist. The topic will be completely fresh ideas and it will feature the same whimsical analysis that you've come to expect from The Bullshit Observer. The idea of The Conceptualist is not just to notice new things, but to celebrate brave thinkers and to marvel at their creations.

How is this different, you ask?

Well, I think it's probably the only blog I've seen that lives entirely in the world of ideas. It's not just about highlighting bizarre new inventions like Geekology. It's not about displaying new products like bazillions of blogs out there. It's about taking the new ideas and turning them over in our minds and seeing how they got that way and what they could become. It's as much about the why as it is about the what. In short, it's about conceptualism - the act of seeing past what is there to what could be and talking about it.

Incidentally, the header image is my friend's daughter, Sophie swimming underwater.

This means, of course, that The Bullshit Observer will need to take a back seat for the time being. That means that my posts will be more sporatic. To any regular reader out there, I am sorry to interrupt your BSO experience.

Svedka Vodka Gets Into Politics

Svedka Vodka thanks Hillary for an exciting primary season in this full page NYT ad, and offers her free vodka through November 4th. Also redeemable, but inadvisable, by  John and Barak.

The Svedka fembot is on a first name basis with the candidates, apparently.

Putting the party back into party politics is, I think, a very wise and humorous advertising direction for a Swedish Vodka. What better way to thrust your brand into the limelight and draft off of the category five media storm that is the American presidential race? I can't think of one. 

Probably one of the cleanest (distilled 5x) vodkas out there, I wonder if they're going to break out a hate-free, anti-negative political stance later on during the election process. That would be interesting. And smart.

Check out the Svedka Vortex widget with content from The Onion and Perez Hilton.

Dear Jetblue, what is this jetting you speak of?

Trotting down Market Street on my way to Walgreens, an advertisement caught my eye. It said, "Flying. It's why we created Jetting." and it was signed by Jet Blue. To which I have to ask, what's the difference? They do seem to be synonyms. It would be a bit like Coca-Cola saying, "Drinking. It's why we created guzzling." or Hilton Hotels saying, "Relaxing. It's why we created kicking back." And by created, we do mean that we went to our thesaurus and laid claim to our favorite synonym. 

On closer inspection, flying is indeed a more generic term meaning to go through the air untethered to the planet despite the gravitational effect pulling you to the planet. Jetting does imply the more specific form of doing this untethered travel in a jet. A jet is also a little bit sexier sounding than a plane. Maybe it's all those times we heard about so-and-so bazillionaire criss-crossing the world in their new private jet. Oooh fancy fancy. A jet, huh? Or maybe it's the phrase jet setting, that means to travel all the time to interesting locales. It starts to make me think of first class a little. And that's probably why they laid claim to that particular synonym.

So is jetting a fancier way of flying? This Jet Blue ad certainly does imply that.

But is jetting actually different? JetBlue business was built on delivering a better customer experience ... one that is worthy of talking about. So better customer service, in Jet Blue's case equals a more "jetting-like" experience. According to this professional air-travel commentator, they do appear to earn their use of the word jetting. They also apparently have their own customer bill of rights and they've created this neato microstie to explain jetting to people.

Above all else, JetBlue Airways is dedicated to bringing humanity back
to air travel. We strive to make every part of your experience as simple
and as pleasant as possible. Unfortunately, there are times when things
do not go as planned. If you’re inconvenienced as a result, we think it is
important that you know exactly what you can expect from us. That’s
why we created our Customer Bill of Rights. These Rights will always
be subject to the highest level of safety and security for our customers
and crewmembers.

I commend them for all of this and feel like that through their actions, they were able to avoid this being a little cheap linguistic gag and more of a mantra. Other companies try to do this, but they don't put their actions behind it. That said, they can't really think people are going to adopt it. "You know, I was thinking of flying to Denver, but then I said, hell, I think I'll go ahead and jet there instead."

One last thing, I can get jet lag, but I don't think I've ever had fly lag.

Ready...aim....SPLAT!

General Mills has launched a site called The Good Food Fight to promote eating better in America. Kinda funny coming from the company that owns the Pillsbury Dough Boy, Lucky Charms, Haagen-Dazs, and Hamburger Helper. But we give them a little break because they're being clever for once.

You can choose your healthy recipe of destruction (I like Spaghetti and meatballs, but how healthy is that really?), then you choose your opponent (I like the hot dog vendor), and begin.

Your opponent then pops up in the content section of a web page with the healthy recipe on it and taunts you for about 60 seconds while you guys throw food at each other. Sometimes the taunts are educational ("Here's your recommended daily dose of Vitamin E, buddy boy"). The gobs of food he/she throws wind up hitting the other side of your screen - obscuring your view a bit. The one's you throw hit the web page and start to break parts of the design as your opponent scampers out of the way.

It also allows you to "Ambush a Friend" (send a friend technology).

Incidentally, this site was created by Hello Design out of Culver City, CA and was up for a Webby earlier this year. Nice design. Clear IA. Excellent animation. I loved the way the site pretends to break when you hit it with a meatball or something.