Category — annals of awful advertising

Allahu Akbar!

But every so often she catches our ears by spouting some crazed nonsense that’s even more bizarre and paranoid than the usual rantings of the right-wing water-carriers.

When we look at this ad for Dunkin’ Donuts, we only wonder why the fuck Rachael Ray is wearing a warm scarf with a short-sleeved blouse. Thank god Ms. Malkin is here to inform us what’s really going on: Ray is sending coded messages of support to Palestine through her ugly accessories. No, really.

…Dunkin Donuts’ spokeswoman Rachel Ray’s clueless sporting of a jihadi chic keffiyeh in a recent DD ad campaign. I’m hoping her hate couture choice was spurred more by ignorance than ideology.

Michelle honey, it’s just a damn scarf. Wipe the rabid foam from your chin and relax with a cool cup of DD iced coffee. We recommend decaf.

Via Sadly, No!

I don’t know about you, but all of us shame-cave owners rocked Lisa Frank  back in the day. We had motherfuckin’ folders with simley dolphins, lime green neon unicorn earsers, back packs with purple kitty cats. Lisa Frank cut across all social classes and races and united every one by offering a hopeful vision of a fluffy future sprinkled with happy penguins and exploding rainbows. There is only ONE candidate who offers that same vision:

artist Lucas Ketner

Absolutly Inaccurate

I would like to take issue with your recent “in an absolut world” advertisement.

The zany and edgy concept of a ruler composed entirely of eights inspired me to turn my apartment into “an absolut world” by purchasing a bottle of your vodka and altering a ruler with a permanent marker.

Feeling particulary accomplished and a bit peckish, I put up an ad for a female companion on craigslist. FoxyGirl13, who claimed that she had just turned 21, was 5′9″ tall, weighed 115 lbs, and measured 36-24-34D, replied to the ad.

When she arrived at my apartment, FoxyGirl13 was in fact 57 years old, 4′7″ tall, weighed 240lbs and measured 63-42-43. She had altered several measuring tapes, a calendar, a scale, and a book containing the rules about lying on the internet.

In an absolut world, FoxyGirl13 would have been a smokin’ hot swedish coed and my junk would have been more than enough to satisfy her. A modified ruler is not an absolut world, because I’m writing this from the hospital with three broken ribs, a crushed pelvis and cauliflower ear.

Fortunately, my recovery is projected to be complete, and I will be married to FoxyGirl13 as soon as I can walk again.

Thank you for your time, and for paying for my medical care and wedding, the Bills for which are enclosed.

All The Best,

–Matty

PS — Stolichnaya is better.

Disney spokeswoman Patti McTeague told the New York Times that the Vanity Fair shoot featuring a tussled and tarted up Miley Cyrus “was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines.”

Shame Shame Vanity Fair.

You should have tried to replicate the demure age-appropriate classiness that Disney displays in their pre-teen underwear ads that plaster billboards in China.

A pasty, pig-tailed, pre-menstrual tween, reclining in snug fitting white panties and what appears to be an underwire bra. Notice just the slightest hint of cleavage? I’m not sure what’s creepier: her tiny fists hidden behind the maniacal smile of the Disney mouse puppets? Or her dead eyes that look to a future of a first round dismal on VH1 CelebReality dating show?

Before Disney continues to trot out their little teen star to apologize some more, maybe they should get in their own house in order? But then again, maybe we should all just relax Disney, you see, knows a lot about good role models.

via Slate

I personally could give a fuck-less about the recycling.

Or a weepy-eyed Leonard DiCaprio adrift on some melting iceberg shaming me into a rubber bracelet for some useless non-profit.

Or Newspapers.

But what outrages me is when advertisers use a perfectly decent pair of tits to transmit an “Important Message” . Ugh. Keep your whinny pleas for me to turn off my air conditioner when I’m not home (NEVER) away from my daily dose of TV boobage.

While you watch please notice the firm grip the boy has around the shaft of the bottle neck, as he repeatively plunges various phallic objects into a “bin” (read: large yawning vagina that houses refuse and the dreams of a “green” generation”)Though we have to agree that with snarky, bespectacled, internet-employed, crush Alex Blagg over on bestweekever is that this is way better than hearing Gore’s whole “Global warming’s bad, f*ck the sun, long live wind energy, blah blah blah” rant.

Take a picture to remember this face Ginny, because you ain’t gonna be able to make it again for a long time: Virginia Madsen to be new “face” of Botox. It was just 4 years ago that she made Sideways without wearing any make-up, and now she’s endorsing the facial injection of poison. It’s worked wonders for Nicole Kidman and Priscilla Presley!

This is just one part of Botox’s attempt to rejuvinate (zing!) their product’s image, in light of a recently released study that shows Botox can spread to the brain and lead to breathing difficulties and death. The more wrinkled your brain is, the better it works. Well, who needs to think when your face is a perfect shiny rictus? Thinking just gives you more wrinkles! It’s a vicious cycle!

Another part of Botox’s makeover is their new slogan, “It’s all about freedom of expression!”, proving that irony is a foreign concept to the company: the complaints that Botox is ruining movies by turning the faces of actors into frozen masks incapable of registering emotion have been getting louder and more frequent of late.

is my chin still there? i can’t feel it

This is the picture Botox is using on their website to “prove” that one can still make facial expressions after being injected with their toxic sludge. This is the best photo that an expensive marketing campaign that presumably had hundreds of photos to choose from could come up with. This woman can barely open her mouth!

Could this ad be anymore ABSURD? Has some devious Obama operator infiltrated Hillary’s campaign communications to destroy her from within? What the hell is behind this colossal political miscalculation? Two answers:

1. This bitch is broke
2. Her unionbusting, crusty campaign strategist Mark Penn is a sad sack-of-incompetence.

see the ad after the jump

[Read more →]

Well they know now! When your advertising could lead to an increase in the behavior you’re trying to curb, you’ve taken the wrong tack.

Nice try, though! Great addition to the long and successful history of sensationalist anti-drug advertisements. Next time, go for funny or ineffective instead of totally counterproductive.

Trying to influence parents to talk to their kids about drugs is one thing, but referring to “Grandma’s Stash” makes it sound like a cool secret that they’ve got to try. [Read more →]

The gratuitous use of Huge Funbags to sell things is hardly a new concept in advertising, but usually the thing being sold has at least some kind of tangential relation to sex or sex appeal (diamonds, perfume, booze). But can you think of anything less erotic than canned mushrooms? [Read more →]

Right. And I’m Jay-Z, you cooze.

Way to jump on a trend 5 years after it started NY Times: photographed celebs throw on a T-shirt, appear fresh faced with a look of poignancy and smug self-satisfaction, urging you to buy a t-shirt to support whatever useless non-profit they donated to.

I have no tolerance or respect for millionaires who throw on a T-shirt and call it activism. Throwing on a T-shirt? I do that shit everyday. Sometimes I even put on a pair of pants. Every couple of days I brush my teeth. I go out there and I do my job which is to organize non union workers, fight the boss, lose sleep, eat shit and then I’m supposed to have Christy Turlington shame me into a buying a pink rubber bracelet?

Ugh you can your donate your mouth to my nuts, Christy. Ya’ll have seen hundreds of the ads I’m talking about. But really none compare to one particular AIDS campaign that made we want to have unprotected sex with multiple partners, roll around in used needles, and blow some Baltimore vagrants rather than donate to their campaign. I present it to thee:

Now I would like to show you some good ads. Creative and terrifying. They deliver their message clearly with the right balance of cheekiness AND gravity. The brill yet NSFW ads after the jump [Read more →]

OMG! So true! The District is totally like a utopian garden! Filled with adorable couples walking their hypoallergenic sweatered rats down the street, on their way to the Cheese and Quiche shop, right before they meet up with their old buddies to relive the glory days of the Howard Dean campaign. Ugh. They are assholes. And they are raising your rent.

I like the print copy. “Unique split-level loft” that’s how I’m going to refer to my vagina from now on.

thanks to copyranter, my personal advertising sage and fellow loather of capri pants.

Via Jezebel comes this infuriating commercial for a new bra made by Bali and sporting something called “concealers”: flower-shaped (of course it would have to be shaped like a fucking flower) depressions right smack where your nipples would be. We’re told this is to conceal “flaws”.Excuse me, when did my nipples–a perfectly natural feature of any normal human female body; one, I might add, that serves an actual biological purpose, unlike stupid useless man nipples–become “flaws”?

Newsflash: Women don’t actually resemble Barbie. Our feet aren’t permanently arched into a high heel-ready position, most of us have hair somewhere on our bodies, and we have nipples.

Hey, here’s a radical thought: If you’re somehow offended by the suggestion that I have nipples, then don’t stare at my fucking tits.