The notion that out there is a wilderness dripping with pleasures in the raw is incredibly attractive. That's why Willy Wonka's candy forest still lingers in our dreams.
We're also guessing that's what Lowe, Athens had in mind when it invented a world ornamented in jewelry for Vogue (not the magazine). See variation here.
From a distance, the ads look compelling. Up close, they strike us as clumsy and pedestrian. The jewelry seems copy/pasted, and something about the way the models are dressed evokes a poorly-stocked costume rack in some photo studio we hope to never visit.
And come on. The glam forest? Really? Was that the best you could do?
Talk about deception. Here's a campaign that looked like something it wasn't.
Mastercard's Priceless Pep Talks with Peyton Manning gives you two text-entry boxes: a place for your name, and a place to enter something you're bummed about.
But if your name isn't already in a pre-set database, you officially do not exist. And the second box seems to be stuck on one setting: "I drive a minivan."
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Diesel is really good at developing fairly coherent creative ideas and then half-assing them. For its Fuel for Life thing, which we kind of mentioned here, the gritty-chic company takes its "For successful living" slogan and applies it to a perfume (the aforementioned Fuel for Life).
Then it pimps out its homepage with all this busy-as-shit promotional material - most of which Adverblog valiantly tries to cover.
But what really ticks us off is the Italian model who greets us at outset with the burning rhetorical question, "Are you alive?" And he never stops asking. He keeps asking.
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OK, this is just gross. Or maybe not depending upon what sort of food you like. But who wants to walk into the office and have to smell KFC stench wafting about all day long? It seems KFC has affixed it's $2.99 Deal Meal to the mail carts of corporations in Washington, Chicago and Dallas. How can anyone get any work down if all they do is start drooling for KFC? Oh wait, that's exactly what KFC wants! For everyone to drop what their doing, run out and go buy a $2.99 Deal meal. OK, I guess it's brilliant after all.
Yo, dawg. Apparently, Time Warner's All the Best Package let's you get down, virtually, of course with your homies around the world. Us? If we want to swap gang signs with an Indian hottie, we'll just jump on a plane to do it.
MySpace is pushing a promotion for Bravo's series premier of Tim Gunn's Guide to Style, which looks like Tim Gunn's sad attempt to become the fashion world's version of the UK's Brian Sewell, who travels the world to say nasty things about everyone else's ancient oeuvres.
We are not convinced by his "fashion therapy" approach, but maybe it's only because he hasn't got an accent.
If a niche authority were a piece of American real estate, his or her value could increase by at least $2-$4,000 with proper use of an accent alone. Call it the personality variant of flying buttresses or vaulted ceilings.
For shits and giggles, some time ago Harry Woods and Gill Witt put together this would-be ad for a less funded project of Frito Lay's - namely, Funyuns. (We used to eat them. They are completely unnatural and completely amazing.)
The result, Ahmadinejad Loves Funyuns!, is not really super-funny. In fact, it seems like something a little kid playing cut-and-paste-current-affairs would do. And it only gets less funny as it progresses. Maybe you just have to be high.
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Sometimes we wonder if this ongoing effort by brands to throw together CGM contests is actually part of a large-scale game of industry Hot Potato we just don't know about. Like "How Many Cheap Videos Can We Leach Out of Consumers Before We Start Getting More Backlashes than Exhibitionist Pillow-Fights?"
Anyway, Apartments.com is launching a contest called Possession Obsession. If you send them a video of stuff you collect, you could win (drumroll, please) $20,000.
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To prove to us (and possibly itself) that it is indeed "the world's coolest, healthiest market," Whole Foods has launched a YouTube channel called The WTF? Network, a play on Whole Food's initials (if you just ignore that pesky T).
The channel lives up to its acronym, and not in a super-cool way. The featured, very shaky video follows a girl riding a unicycle around the veggie section of the supermarket. We're sure this was funny as hell for her friends, but it really didn't make us salivate for six organic lima beans at $8 a pop.
Or laugh, for that matter. In fact, the grave frowns we wore for the video's :20 run has begun to hurt our faces.
WTF indeed, Whole Foods?
We weren't going to do it. We promise. Nope. We weren't going to fall for the obvious trap but, then again, we are here to serve. Here to provide you with everything your advertising-addled brain desires. So after receiving a few "have you seen this," "dude, you gotta see this," "I can't believe you haven't seen this" emails and links to all manner of publication, we decided to provide our desirous readers what they crave.
So, here it is. Tom Ford's new creation. Gee. Wow. Boobs. An agape "insert here" mouth. Oh, and some Tom Ford for Men Fragrance. OK. Can we move on now?
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