Last week in his monologue, late night host Craig Ferguson went on and on and on and, yea, on about youth and advertising and how marketers all got together in the 50's and 60's to "deify" youth, put it up on a pedestal and focus all their advertising on that particular age group.
He goes on to explain how youth became the most important thing, how everyone wants to be young and how stupid that is because, well, the young are inexperience and, therefore, stupid. And how that deification of youth made being young fashionable which, of course, resulted in a bunch of idiots running around doing anything and every thing to be young no matter how old they were.
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Our girl is back. Well, actually she's been back for a while but just this second, her latest commercial for Candie's was released and we really, really like it. Why? It's classic Britney. All pomp and strut.
Of course the full length video is a bit racier but we're talking television here, people. There's only so much bare midriff the television viewing audience can take before someone calls the cause group police.
While everyone's all a Twitter over EA's Act of Lust booth babe stunt, consider this: If the Booth babes were Booth Dudes and the rules were the same, would anyone care?
Of course, encouraging people to "commit acts of lust" and then photograph it in order to get a chance to win "dinner and a sinful night with two hot girls, a limo service, paparazzi and a chest full of booty" isn't going to win any prizes at a church fund raising competition but let's break this one down a bit.
The "booty" referred to in the promotion is not the ass of the "two hot girls." It's a swag bag full of geeky goodness any fanboy would lust over as much as he might lust over a booth babe. The encouraged "act of lust" is most certainly not meant to get people to do anything rude, crude or disrespectful to a woman hired to play the role of booth babe. Anyone who might actually do that is just a loser and in need of castration.
While this promotion can certainly be seen as crossing the ever-moving, hard-to-define line of decency, it's not encouraging rape, prostitution or other unseemly (and illegal) behavior. It's simply using a time-tested - if not tired and lame - marketing strategy to get people to do what a marketer wants.
The "two hot girls" are obviously paid for their participation in this promotion and while we're sure they'd rather spend a night with some hot dude - not to mention their own boyfriends - they knowingly took this job and the money and knew what they'd be getting into.
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Oh this one's near and dear to our hearts. Dumb Dads in Advertising. We love them because, for the most part, they make for amusingly funny ads. We hate them because, for the most part, all they do is mirror the "refrigerator mom" ads of the fifties and sixties. It's like a giant game of tit for tat.
Our fave has always been the Verizon Dumb Dad. The classic, clueless idiot trying to help his daughter like he's never heard of the internet before. MSNBC via AdFreak (which pulled a few of the best ads) has a round up.
