Carbs

I wish Dr. Atkins were still alive.

I'm not trying to be crass. I mean it.

Were Atkins still with us, people would still laugh at his silly diet and I would not be tortured by a torrent of anti-carb marketing. Unfortunately, as has always been the case in history, his passing has coincided with his vindication.

Everywhere I go, from the supermarket to the bookstore, I hear nothing but prattle about the merits of no-carb/low-carb dieting. Carbohydrates, the energy-storing molecules found in breads and pastas and such, are taking a harder beating than anything brought down in an Iraqi prison.

How I hate fad diets.

Here's a completely incomplete list of vendors offering Atkins-friendly crap. Their marketing has recently harassed me.

• Subway


• Coca-Cola


• Kellogg's (Special Krap)


• Miller Brewing


• TGI Fridays


• KFC

And then there's the wholly obnoxious Atkins-branded snacks and foods and crap, with their stupid, pretentious little logo. That slag is all over stores now but is mostly concentrated in one place, so I can ignore it. Now, though, there's an Atkins-brand diet TV ad. I'm always too blinded by rage to really note whatever it is it says.

I am very much looking forward to the day when the Atkins diet is revealed to cause infertility, psychosis, and constipation.

Ashley Furniture

I saw something astonishing today.

Not astonishing by merit of its overall poor quality or ability to annoy. It was a pretty innocuous ad.

No, it was astonishing because it was by far the most ineffective (and probably costly) waste of advertising time and development I'd ever seen.

Ashley Furniture is trying to sell their wares... using Garfield. Why in the name of all that is decent would you use Garfield as a tie-in for furniture?

I... it boggles the mind. I don't even know what to say.

Why?

Why?!

Why would you spend so much money to use Garfield? How does the Garfield movie possibly relate to furniture?

More than that, they did it with such a lack of flair that...

Listen, I apologize for the liberal use of elipses. I'm simply speechless.

Siemens

Few ads make me angry. When I say angry, I don't mean irritated. I don't mean bothered.

I don't mean violently homocidal, either.

I mean a cool, completely controlled hunger for murder.

Siemens makes some of these deplorable abortions of marketing.

First, they've got a bit of a schizophrenia happening. They're depicting doctors and other professionals and ostensibly pitching to business people. Their ads run alongside those for mutual funds, brokerage houses, and retirement investors. Yet every single Siemens ad is saturated with this pseudo-hip hop caterwauling. Something about spinning the room. What spinning the room has to do with Siemens I've yet to determine.

The collection of crap that comprises the action in Siemens ads is wide and varied, so I'll pick just one little gem to discuss for you all.

There's... a movie, or something in production. There's one fellow stuck in one locale and another stuck elsewhere. I guess a wardrobe designer needs approval on something. A Siemens PDA with a full-motion video camera is used to send images of a particularly offensive dress from one place to another. In realtime. Wirelessly.

Let's take this apart.

There is not a single PDA in existence that can take high-resolution, full-screen, full-motion video wirelessly in realtime. That takes a computer with 15 times the processing power and five times the RAM. It is about as impossible as cramming a 1985 cellular brick into a 2004 tiny-ass clamshell.

Moreover, there's not a single Siemens device that even closely resembles that profile.

And the music.

Isn't this wholly deceptive? This is equivalent to AT&T making an ad that describes telepathy as a major benefit of its long distance service.

Siemens can get bent. They're trapped in a drug-imposed delusion if they think anyone will ever take them seriously with a name like that.

web-ex

I just spoke with one of my mafia connections this evening.

Lily Tomlin won't be giving us any more trouble.

'nough said.

EZ Link

I saw something pathetic on TV today. It was Batman's Adam West, selling out not to a car company, not to a softdrink or fast food restaurant, and not even to Radio Shack.

Mr. West sold out to... a public Internet kiosk. Amid a a few lame references to Batman was a pitch to lazy entrepreneurs about a handy little kiosk that, when placed in the right public venue, will almost certainly produce instant wealth and financial security. Adam told us to call their toll free number to get more information.

The really exciting thing was that, according to Adam West, I "don't have to be a super hero to be super successful."

That's very reassuring.

Brief Programming Note

We've been doing Ad hominem since March. As of today we've logged our 100th hit. Which, for blog that's been running for over a month and a half, really sucks.

I believe my hundredth visitor was dear friend Adam Stanford. Who, incidentally, was also the fourth, the 13th, and plenty of others. (And don't worry, Adam. I'll get around to calling you eventually.)

So, if you read and enjoy Ad hominem, share it with your friends and colleagues. Pass it to other blog operators. It's like PBS, except without the dramatic liberal slant, the obnoxious pledge drives, or the lack of advertisements.

Microsoft

Microsoft is an evil, heartless, dispicable corporate enterprise. The world accepts this. Each month a new worm tromps across the grounds of the Internet because Microsoft, custodians of 90% of Net constituents' gardens, fail to keep the gates closed (no pun intended).

It's an incontravertible matter of record that Microsoft has acted to destroy the businesses of countless software concerns. Recent bulk licensing schemes for corporate clients exist mainly to extort disgusting sums out of fat companies.

Microsoft even filed a lawsuit against some poor kid.

Now, I'm not some kind of nut or zealot or anything. I own an Xbox. I'm proficient with Office. I use NT at work. Just, let's call a spade a spade, eh?

So now Microsoft is running a smattering of ads which revolve around children. Little fanciful animated pen strokes superimpose themselves on the screen and illustrate scenes from the ad childrens' futures. It's all about how Microsoft is building... something to make our childrens' lives brighter.

Bullshit.

Unless they're building a nuclear device capable of wiping Redmond, Washington off the face of the earth...

I'm kidding, of course.

I think.

No, I am.

But really. As a child of the eighties, along with Microsoft, what has the company done for me, thus far, except given me networks riddled with holes and patches and really bad software? Even in the face of Mr. Ballmer's cheerleader-inspired dance routines, I'm a little skeptical.

Hey. What if Microsoft got a cheerleading team together?

No. That's more of a Google thing.

Anyway. Stop trying to rebrand yourselves, Microsoft. The world knows you to be contemptible scumbags. Don't worry, we'll still buy your binary swill. But really. No matter how much gold spraypaint I use on a cow turd, it's still a cow turd.

Post-script: Don't blog when you're tired.

Crestor

This was, initially, yet another product whose ads were unclear about what exactly it does. Later ads indicate it's to help people who can't seem to get their cholesterol in line. Fair enough.

Each ad is framed around a voiceover about Crestor. They're written like a child's poem, with rhyming and assonance and all that stuff. That's a little weird to me. And to others, I'm quite certain.

The kicker is thus: Patrick Stewart reads the poems.

I think that the only way you could ever hope to make this sort of idea work would be to get Patrick Stewart. His voice, a warm yet distinguished English accent tinting every word, is uniquely suited to reading the sort of rhymes we hear in the Crestor ads. It's a ballsy move, but ultimately, I think it pays off.

Why?

I can't remember any of the visuals in any of the Crestor ads. Not one. Television is a highly visual medium. How many memorable ads are memorable for their narration? From seeing just a handful of ads, I know all about how Crestor will help me with my high cholesterol, should I ever need such assistance.

I can't say these will ever rank among my favorite ads, but a tip of the hat to a very unique execution of a very unique idea.

Tampax Pearl

The whole Feminine Hygiene market is something that I'd venture most men find pretty distasteful.

It's not that we don't sympathize with the needs of women or the products in place to satisfy those needs. (Well, I'm sure plenty of men don't sympathize, but I'm also sure they don't know how to read above third grade level anyway.)

Guys would just prefer not to be pitched to about the latest advance in adhesive-tabbed pantyliners or ultra-comfortable disposable tampons. The women in the commercials get to pouring in that blue fluid and it just gets to be too much. Mostly unwatchable.

Then there's Tampax Pearl.

A young couple is apparently fishing on a rowboat. A leak springs in their boat. As the man postures uselessly, looking for something with which to staunch the flow of water, the woman reaches for a Tampax Pearl tampon and shoves it in the hole. The leak is stopped.

Now, that's pretty clever. P&G is smart, too. Should the sad day come where I may need to procure tampons for my fiancee, I'll be remembering that brand.

It's also a pretty bold statement. That tampon is capable of holding back a lake's worth of fluid. Which I judge to be overkill, but different needs for different people, I s'ppose.

Bravo, Proctor & Gamble. And thank you for not ruining the ad with "DRAMATIZATION" printed in tiny letters at the bottom of the screen.