Make Mine Duff’s!

Who knew that Homer Simpson's favorite brewery also made cake mixes?

Posted By: Paul - Sat Jun 27, 2009 - Comments (2)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Food, Cartoons, Alcohol

Follies of the Mad Men #69

[From The Saturday Evening Post for April 29 1950. Two scans, top and bottom.]

This campaign uses what I like to call "the artificial linkage" method. You take something natural and inevitable and try to tie your product to it. In this case, the entire grand eternal season of Spring means nothing more than digging out your paintbrush and ladders and tackling your peeling house.

You gotta love the name of the paint, though: "Barreled Sunlight."

Posted By: Paul - Fri Jun 12, 2009 - Comments (0)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Nature, 1950s

Love Day

As any fan of The Simpsons knows, Springfield once celebrated a totally bogus and greed-stoked holiday known as Love Day.












Utterly oblivious to any satirical implications that make them look like idiots, the famed jeweler Cartier has decided to celebrate Love Day too. I find references to this "holiday" going back to 2007.

Here's their home page.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Jun 10, 2009 - Comments (2)
Category: Business, Advertising, Holidays, Humor, Overpriced Merchandise, Cartoons

Follies of the Mad Men #68

[From Life magazine for September 10 1956. Two scans, top and bottom.]

Yes, yes, this is precisely how we are all living, here in 2009!

Posted By: Paul - Tue Jun 02, 2009 - Comments (3)
Category: Business, Advertising, Domestic, Family, Technology, 1950s, Yesterday’s Tomorrows

Weird Canadian Commercials

In an effort to prove to Nethie that not all Canadian commercials are horrifically realistic scenes of brutal workplace accidents, I am pleased to present some of the weirdest commercials to grace our northern TV screens.

These are all part of the same campaign of ads for Mac's Milk's Frosters drinks. Basically, it's convenience store advertising some new flavours (not flavors) of slush drinks that they had just come out with. At least, I think that's what they were advertising. The whole WTF line of ad more or less just gave us insight into how deanged ad-men really are.



Yeah, I think Hate Crime is a good place to start. It really says nothing about the product in question, but speaks volumes about the sanity (or lack thereof) of those invoved in creating the commercial.

More in extended >>

Posted By: kingmonkey - Thu May 21, 2009 - Comments (2)
Category: Dreams and Nightmares, Food, Advertising, Surrealism, Foreign Customs

Scary PSA

Good Lord! Is this an outtake from a horror film, or a public-service announcement?

Posted By: Paul - Wed May 20, 2009 - Comments (5)
Category: Accidents, Goofs and Screw-ups, Body Modifications, Horror, PSA’s, Advertising

Follies of the Mad Men #67

[From The Saturday Evening Post magazine for November 10 1962.]

Does putting Listerine in a fancy decanter make it taste better? Isn't this like packaging Preparation-H in a golden snuff box?

Posted By: Paul - Mon May 18, 2009 - Comments (3)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Hygiene

Some Food Related Weirdness

Chocolate, you can eat it, drink it, even inhale it, and now you can run a car on it as boffins from the University of Warwick in the UK have designed a "Formula 3" racing car that runs on chocolate oil. As an added bonus, the car's body was made from potatoes (BBC News).

Meanwhile, in Bethlehem PA, Hipolito Junior Vasquez is the main suspect in a string of burglaries where the perpetrator elected to also vandalise his victims' apartments by smearing the walls with paint and chocolate pudding. Police first suspected Vasquez was their man when he was apprehended red brown handed, covered in chocolate sauce (LeHigh Valley Live).

And if that wasn't enough, a current UK advertising campaign for "Mikado" biscuits has raised some eyebrows and quite a few hackles after it depicted a secretary inadvertently taking 'upskirt' photocopies of herself while trying to reach a box of the apparently irresistible snacks, just as her boss walks in on her. The British agency responsible for advertising standards said it had received 141 complaints, but admitted that it was powerless to act as the item adhered to all the guidelines concerning high-fat foods, and was not shown at a time when it might be viewed by minors (The Sun - includes video).

According to Bon Appetit magazine, there are a number of "superfoods" that have been shamefully overlooked by most dieticians, and the top disregarded superfood is... bacon. Their argument is that 45% of bacon's fat is of the monounsaturated type that is supposed to actually lower cholesterol, and moreover half of that is the same type, oleic acid, found in ultra-healthy olive oil. Hence, it is claimed, bacon might really be half as healthy as olives and 100 times as delicious (Bon Appetit).

And bacon is not just good for your heart, your head could benefit as well. According to Dr. Elin Roberts of the "Centre for Life" in Newcastle, England, bacon is just the thing to cure a hangover. Bacon, with the obligatory side of eggs, provides just the cholesterol, amino acids and amines needed to cure the headache, stiffness and nausea brought about by a night of overindulgence, Roberts suggests. Let's hope he hasn't been a bit rasher (News Blaze).

With bacon now well established as the wonderfood of tomorrow, it is perhaps very prescient of three American entrepreneurs to launch the next must have product, "Wake n'Bacon". Simply place a frozen strip of bacon in the Wake n' Bacon the night before, and 10 minutes before the desired waking time, two halogen lights come on to slow cook the bacon to perfection, hence waking you with the delicious smell of bacon. Pure, pure genius (LikeCool.com).

In a late-breaking bacon bonus (cheers Matt), the healthy and healing wonder-meat might also be a future source of planet saving bio-diesel. Husband and wife team Dan and Tracy Kaderabek have formed Bio-Blend Fuels, a company that takes the fat that drips off pre-cooked bacon as it is microwaved and converts it into a carbon-neutral, smoke free fuel. As an added bonus, the exhaust smells like cooking bacon, thereby making the world a happier place (HTR News).

Posted By: Dumbfounded - Tue May 12, 2009 - Comments (8)
Category: Design and Designers, Food, Health, Stupid Criminals, Advertising

Life Imitates Art

Here are two commercials to watch. I believe that you will see a startling similarity emerge that will shake you to the core (or maybe just halfway to the core).



So far, so good. It's your basic ad for cosmetics, showing a heavily airbrushed woman who looks somewhat like an android (gynoid?), poncing around in an empty, black, out-of-focus room, interspersed with product shots against a stark white background. (I'm always a little saddened when the real product doesn't create lines of light in contour around my wife's face.) I don't know to much about the product's specific properties.

What I know for sure is that it bares a startling similarity to a fictional product I have seen before.


More in extended >>

Posted By: kingmonkey - Tue May 05, 2009 - Comments (4)
Category: Armageddon and Apocalypses, Body Modifications, Cannibalism, Cosmetics, Movies, Advertising

Follies of the Mad Men #66

[From Look magazine for July 22 1958. Two scans, top and bottom.]

Sure, you've all heard of one of the most infamous Madison Avenue displays of ignorance ever, the "flesh-colored Band-aid." But how many of us have actually seen the offending ad?

Here is one instance from many in that racist campaign.

Posted By: Paul - Mon May 04, 2009 - Comments (3)
Category: Business, Advertising, Products, Health, Stereotypes and Cliches, Stupidity, 1950s