Juli 2011

My Favorite Comment

I am on vacation and may not be posting for a while.

My post on Monday (called I Am Offended) about web bullying and free speech received a lot of interesting comments. In addition to the "official" comments posted on the blog, I also received several emails about it. My favorite was one I received this morning:
I'm 87 years old. I used to be art director for some small agencies, but became

I Am Offended

Last week I wrote a post entitled Invasion of the Talking Vaginas. It was about a campaign for Summer's Eve (what an awful name) in which human hands represented talking vaginas.

I ended the post with this comment: I don't hate this campaign because it's offensive. I hate it because it's done so witlessly.

That same day, an article appeared in The New York Times about the California Milk

Invasion Of The Talking Vaginas

There is an alarmingly awful series of commercial videos currently on YouTube for Summer's Eve.

For reasons of propriety I am not going to embed them in this post, but here are some links: Link #1, Link #2, Link #3.

The premise of this campaign is that your vagina (portrayed by a hand) is talking to you. Not being the proud owner of a vagina, it's hard for me to comment on the effect this

You And Me And Monkeys Throwing Darts

Here at Ad Contrarian World Headquarters, there are a few principles that guide us.

First, we never make predictions. The reason for this is that people who make
predictions are almost always wrong. It's way more entertaining to make fun of other people's stupid predictions than to have them make fun of yours.

Another is that we never trust experts. Again, their pontifications almost always

Life Imitates Blogging

Several months ago, here at The Ad Contrarian, we wrote a satirical memo from a fictitious agency CEO which included this paragraph:

"We must realize that in today’s inter-globally connected world, inter-connectivity is globular. And maybe not just globular, but inter-globular! Our clients expect that our inter-globularity will exceed their expectations and create the opportunity

Pepsi: There's Madness To The Madness

Here at Ad Contrarian World Headquarters we've had a great deal of fun over the years poking fun at Pepsi. I'm happy to say that it looks like we will have many more years of hilarity ahead of us.

Just to "refresh" your memory, Pepsi had a pretty bad year last year. They started 2010 with a great deal of hoo-haa about "exploring how a brand can be integrated into the digital space" and lots of

Some People Have A Knack

Some people have a knack.

I'm not sure what a knack is, but I know it when I see it. It's the ability to recognize what others can't recognize. It's the ability to know what's coming, when there's no way to know.

During my career, I've come across several business people who are extraordinarily successful for no discernible reason. They're not smarter than us. They don't work any harder than us

Social Media And The Utopian Instinct

Last week I wrote a silly post called Social Media Madness Goes Global which poked fun at a ridiculous piece of utopian nonsense called A Perpetual State Of Beta...
"We are now living our lives in a perpetual state of beta through social media. It’s a new social frontier, or ‘third place’ which is filled with opportunity, where personal and professional participation culminate in a ‘

Art Director Disease

There is a terrible ailment afflicting the ad business. I call it art director disease. It is the inability to say something once.

Every presentation I attend seems to be a festival of repetition. Nobody seems satisfied to say something just one time and move on.

If we're lucky, the presenter will simply find a synonym for the key word in his/her sentence and repeat the sentence with the

Order And Chaos In Advertising

We exist in a world of delusions.

Our delusions live inside us and color everything we do. They infect our opinions of who we are. They distort our place in the world, twist our behaviors, and warp our sense of reality.

Like the proverbial fish in the ocean, we are so immersed in delusions we can't even sense they are there.

An article in last week's New York Times reminds us that we are very

Just The Facts

The Mile High City
According to The Daily, there are now more "medical" marijuana dispensaries in the city of Denver than there are Starbucks.

The Web Is Shrinking, Kinda
According to the website All Things D, when you remove Facebook from the rest of the Web, minutes of use of the web shrank by nearly nine percent between March 2010 and March 2011.

Unclear On The Concept
Last week, a

Social Media Madness Goes Global

Just when you think that utopian social media claptrap has about run its course, along comes something that renews your faith in the ability of web-addled maniacs to create infinite permutations of infantile nonsense.

And lest you think that America has a monopoly on social media madness, this thing comes our way via a recent article in B&T in Australia. According to the piece...
"We are now

The Absurdist Movement In Modern Marketing

It is hard to exaggerate the lengths to which contemporary "experts" have gone to complicate the shit out of marketing.

You have only to go to a marketing conference to find yourself face to face with some kind of cockamamie diagram loaded with lines and arrows and buckets and silos that purports to visually demonstrate something terribly insightful about marketing.

Last week I came upon a

The Ad Contrarian's Fourth Anniversary

It's the fourth anniversary of this thing.

Ten days into it I thought I had run out of things to say. Fortunately, advertising is a very long-running comedy series. There always seems to be new material.

I have to be honest and say that the 4 years I have spent writing this blog have probably given me as much personal satisfaction as the more than 35 years I've spent in the ad business. I know