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.