Wow, there's a sentence I never thought I'd say.

I'm talking about that commercial for Pepto-Bismol, the one where the advertising icons come to life and start attacking the city. They're crushing buildings with their feet and generally causing havoc everywhere. And then they get upset stomach and diarrhea. Maybe from all of the people they've been eating or something. Now, this seems like great news for the world. The giants will get sick and stop attacking the world, maybe even die, never hurting the world again. It would at least give the city some time to figure out what to do with the giants, blow them up or drug them or tie them up or something.

So why do they send in a helicopter with a giant bottle of Pepto? Why do they want to help the giants, make them feel better? The giants take the medicine, and the commercial ends with the monsters continuing to attack the city.

???

I guess the prospect of giants having diarrhea all over the city was worse than him stepping on people and crushing buildings.

What is it with cereals and free movie offers? Every time I see a box of cereal that says you can get a free movie, the movies are usually really...how can I put this...lame?

Take the new offer on boxes of Product 19 (a cereal I haven't had in years but decided to eat again). The movies you can get are Dunston Checks In, Cocoon, Lucas, Cheaper By The Dozen (the remake), Nine Months, Thumbelina, The Pick-Up Artist, and Breaking Away. OK, so a few of those movies are actually pretty good, but I'm talking more about the offer itself. Aren't these movies you can probably get in the discount bin at Best Buy for $9.99 or less anyway? How did they come up with these titles?

I mean, seriously: Dunston Checks In??

I was just watching a commercial for Colgate Total, and the woman in the ad is going on and on about how much she likes it, that her doctor recommended that she use it, etc, etc, and then she uses this line:

"It's the only toothpaste I use."

Well, so what? I'm sure the product is fine, but who switches toothpastes regularly? I think most people find a toothpaste that they like and they stick with it forever. They might switch to a different flavor or something, but I would be that very few people completely switch their toothpaste.

Not that they couldn't, of course, because there are approximately 3000 different types of toothpastes now. It takes me about 10 minutes just to find the one that I always use (Crest gel) because it's lost in all the other flavors and styles. Gah. Sometimes I think choice is a really bad thing.

• If you rub some of the ads the Wall Street Journal is planning to run then you'll be able to smell them. The paper promises that the scented ads will be much classier than the fragrance inserts in glossy magazines.
• It's hard to figure out what the actual advertising angle is to this story about the tabloids coverage of Jennifer Aniston's rumored nose and boob job. Seriously - can anyone tell me how this is news?
• If you like to shop in New Jersey (and who doesn't) you're probably looking forward to the 2008 opening of the Xanadu Meadowlands retail complex (read: mall). To finance the construction it's offering $2.5 billion in naming rights to different areas within the mall.

You've seen the commercials: a guy puts on some Axe body spray and/or body wash and he goes from being a nebbish to being mobbed in a way somewhere between the way that the Beatles were mobbed by women in the 60s and a Caligula-era orgy. I was wondering: does this really work? Is there some ingredient in Axe that makes the ladies go crazy?

Short answer: no. Long answer: no.

I used the stuff last week for three days in a row. I used the body wash and also sprayed the stuff on, and in three different situations I was completely ignored by females. Unless you count the clerk at the supermarket asking me "Do you have your Shaw's card?" as foreplay. Same thing at Border's Books and Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Of course, I'm not saying the stuff doesn't work. Maybe I'm using it wrong?

I always get a little bummed out after the holidays. I really love Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's, and it's always sort of a letdown when Jan 2 comes around and we're back to the same old grind and same old "feeling" to the year. I don't mind if there are holiday specials after January 2 or if people have their lights up after New Year's Day.

But I think that January 22 and beyond is a little too much.

There's a new commercial for Special K cereal that shows a mom dressed in red and white, next to her family's Christmas tree, and her daughter calls her "Santa!" She then realizes she's too fat and needs to lose weight so she goes to the cupboard to eat Special K (is that how dieting works, you're overweight so you go to the kitchen to get something to eat?). "Joy to the World" plays in the background, the family is under the tree, and the dad helps the kid with her toys.

Merry Christmas, it's almost Valentine's Day.

• Mediaedge:cia has been picked by Federated Department Stores as their new agency of record. The change came after the complete lack of review and will include national planning and buying for Macy's.
• The drastically reduced print spending by major auto companies is at least one factor - albeit likely a big one - in Time's decision to cut almost 300 staffers. The decreased ad revenue was just too big a hit for the publisher to take.
  
• It should be as no surprise to anyone who's seen the spots that Orville "Deadenbacher" is creeping consumers way the heck out. A reanimated dead guy who wears as iPod while he's microwaving popcorn...yeah...it's creepy.

I'm not sure how else you would explain these ads for Sprite Zero, which use the same "Fold-In" technique that have been a part of Mad Magazine's back page for many, many years. Basically, you fold the paper a certain way so that the image changes and the words scrunch together to form the joke. I guess it works, and if you've never seen it before you probably think it's really funny. If you know Mad artist Al Jaffee had done the gag since 1964, it kind of loses something.

Okay, that's being a bit picky, I'll admit that. Still, the ads don't impress me that much because they seem to use the same tired approach of reaching men by showing women as objects of convenience that should be discarded when not being used for sex. I'm not making a moral judgment about these ads, I'm just saying it's a tired approach.

Advertising Design Goodness posted these ads from Saatchi and Saatchi in New Zealand for the Bose Noise Reduction headphones. The "airplane" ad is okay, and I can accept that the guy in the boat may be unaware he's headed for a waterfall, but I have some issues with this one:

You might have to look at the larger image to see, but the man inside the train window is completely expressionless. Wouldn't he, I don't know, look concerned? Or be screaming? Obviously they just spliced two different images together, which is fine, but the ad isn't supposed to look like you did that. It's a minor thing, but it ruins what could otherwise be a decent ad.

Has there ever been an anti-drug commercial that didn't treat its target audience like they were complete idiots? If there is, I haven't seen it yet. The latest one to go in my "WTF? file" is this spot created for the "Above the Influence" campaign. In it, a new fad called "SLOM" or "Sticking Leeches On Myself" is sweeping a high school. Even though it seems weird, kids are doing it just because everyone else is. Get it? It's just like smoking pot because your friends pressure you into it!

No, stupid, it's not like that at all. Kids smoke pot because pot makes them feel good. Yes, there's an element of peer pressure involved, just like with tobacco and alcohol, but that's only part of it. Kids do things to alter their state of mind because they enjoy the feeling, and to insist that it's the same as applying leeches to your face is both ignorant and insulting. If you want to tell kids there are better things to do than get high, that's fine, but the first thing you need to do is not talk down to them.

• Oh please for the love of all that's good and holy in this world can we stop with the pandering already? First Time names "You" its Person of the Year and now "The Consumer" has been named the Agency of the Year by AdAge. This has to stop no matter how hard you try and justify it.
  
• As a media property, the "American Idol" brand is worth more than $2.5 billion. That comes not only from the TV show that started it all but the multiple spin-offs that it's spawned.
  
• Author Jeff Chester has put out a book that claims the American public has been "brainwashed" into relinquishing its rights to privacy by the marketing industry. Between tracking more of our behavior and pressuring the government to not protect privacy the.....AHHHH my chip just went off....it burns......!!!!

Joel Veitch, animator and lead singer of the British band 7 Seconds of Love may be best known here in the states as the man behind RatherGood.com, and the "sponge monkey" commercials created for Quiznos. He's an odd sort of fellow, which means his sense of humor is right up my alley.

What Veitch is not happy about, however, is a new advert for Coca-Cola currently airing in Argentina. While he initially ignored folks who told him the video was ripping off the video for his song "Ninja," he found it hard to ignore the similarities when he finally watched the commercial.

So what does this mean? Nothing, really. As Veitch points out, his unsigned band doesn't exactly have the deep pockets to go up against a company like Coca-Cola. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola have stood behind Santo, the agency that created the ad.

Below is the video for "Ninja." I couldn't find the offending commercial. If anyone has a link to it, I'll give you mad props.

UPDATE: An earlier draft of this post listed G2 as the agency behind the ad. This was incorrect. Sorry about the error.

Have you noticed this trend? Ads for cars now show the ad flying through the air, usually above some large city. What's up with that?

I've mentioned on this site before that I don't get automobile commercials. They never talk about what the car can actually do for the typical consumer. Instead, they show trucks being tossed by the Loch Ness Monster, a woman buying a guy's dry cleaning, potential employees going to the airport to pick up a company exec, and cars that fly. There are so many of them now, including a new one featuring the Chevy Silverado that doesn't just show one car flying around a city, but a dozen of them, on the back of a big truck.

I don't want you to tell me about flying cars. Tell me about how it handles on the road, what gas mileage I can expect, what the safety rating is, how many it seats, what the inside is like, stuff like that. Please?

Before I even get into the Growing Pains part of my gripe, can someone explain to me what the hell these new spots for McDonald's are supposed to mean? They're hip kids who always buy stuff off of the dollar menu? What group is this supposed to appeal to? Overweight kids who want to be cool? Nope, can't be them, because the ads mention being cool and good-looking. The copy for the ad sounds like they just got a list of hip-sounding phrases ("Menunaires?") from some marketing group. Mickey D's doesn't even remotely know how to do ads anymore. "I'm lovin' it?" Mother of God.

And this new ad features Jeremy Miller. Who's Jeremy Miller? He played Ben on Growing Pains and...well, he played Ben on Growing Pains. I don't really get why former stars want to lower themselves like this. I mean, I can understand wanting to be on television again, but why pick lame commercials (or reality shows)? And Miller is in this ad for approximately 3 seconds, in a very I Love The 80s sort of way, sitting in a chair talking about the product. Some people might not even know who he is, which might be the worst embarrassment of all.