!

Seerrpriiiiiize.

Sexy Pizza

Found this on my doormat. One of the many, miscellaneous, take-away leaflets i receive weekly but the first to feature sexy girls. Ok, so they're not that sexy but they are eating a pizza and somebody, perhaps even a professional, took this photo. Was it shot just for this leaflet? Is it a stock image? Have you seen it elsewhere?

The girls bring to mind those late night ads for Text/Chat/Flirt with Girls Girls Girls near you. They have that look of being scouted in provincial pubs or branches of Primark.

Work.Shit. Die

"Do you dream about doing something worthwhile and creative with your life? Best you forget all about it and stick money in a pension plan which will end up being worth fuck all, further increasing your misery - that's the strategy, what do you think?"

What? Really?

I'm planning to charter a microlight so I can leaflet drop a primary school with photocopies of my genitalia.

Rapey ads

This woman has difficulty talking to her friends about rape. But she has no problem wearing a t-shirt that says 'Wake up to rape' in gold caps, in an advert, on the capital's mass transit system.

This campaign is merely a low-rent version of the breast cancer awareness women in t-shirts meme.

I think you know your headline has misfired, if can be misread by early morning rapists as an encouragement. I suppose you can't argue with the stats: most men have committed two rapes by the time they get to work.

Rape is a thorny issue. Its treatment requires sensitivity. Advertising grabs your attention through a total insentivity to your situation. Advertising and rape have always had an uneasy relationship for this reason. Both are non-consensual. In the 70s you could write a headline that said 'Which of these men would be best at rape' and they'd give you a pencil.

This isn't the only rape-ad on the underground at the moment. There's the 'Please no no oh god no please stop taking illegal minicabs ad', which manages to be both harrowing and smug.



Unless the copywriter was being forcibly sodomised by his creative director until he came up with a line I find it insulting to a) all men b) all rape victims. Much better than TBWA's classic 'If you want to know the true cost of an illegal minicab, ask a rape victim'. Which demanded the question, haven't they suffered enough?

Editor's note: We first heard the adjective 'rapey' used by Canadian stand-up Tony Law in 2004. Since then it has been sucked up by the zeitgeist to such a degree that it was even used in tawdry imbecile comedy The Hangover.

GOLD

In my day job as a miserable, lazy, prick, I catch a fair few hours of mid morning TV. These ads conquer the breaks between chapters of trisha, leaving only a couple of slots for debt consolidation and injury claims solicitors.

I don't own any gold but I quite want to buy some just so I can receive an envelope full of cash in the post.

Data.gov

Launches today. Ideal for all your mortality stats needs.

Is this normal?

Think of the stuff you do when you're on your own. Picking your ear, adjusting your testicles, or, if you're a lady, scratching your Vincent Gallo.

Doing it public is weird. No one wants to see it.

Advertising that is not made by advertising agencies is private. That's why it's so weird.

Advertising agencies make your weird ideas acceptable to the committees they serve. That is their purpose.

This advert which we saw on the back of a bus in Cardiff isn't intensely bad, it's just private.

I really need a handjob

Apologies for the long break. Other fish have been fried.

Check out the Handjob. As you can see, it's a piece of rubberised material branded with the word Handjob! It's no better than any other grippy piece of cloth for opening jam jars. But it's got this stupid advert. And that's interesting because the advert has become the added value. It's a free gag for bloggers.

It's like the Chia Obama.



Buy the product and you can participate in the joke, which is the advert. Be a part of the Chia Obama phenomenon.

This is a very pure form of advertising. Any brief you work on is a less honest version of these ads. This is what we do.

I'm not ashamed of that.