The brands were out in full force during Sunday’s Superbowl, reaching the eyeballs of millions of consumers with millions of dollars. Mountain Dew took a novel tack, attempting to create the most grotesque, unsettling, and plain awful character of all (worse, even, than Norm MacDonald’s Colonel Sanders): PuppyMonkeyBaby.
After running on Time Warner cable this week in New York, this ad for the Nasty Pig clothing line was pulled from the air. The exact reasons are as yet unspecified, but speculating shouldn't be too hard.
The undisputed highlight of this year's miserable American Music Awards (airing now — Iggy Azalea performed and won Favorite Rap/Hip-Hop Album) was this Pine Bros cough drops commercial featuring rapper/ inadvertent (and welcome) homewrecker/Amanda Bynes collaborator/blunt-roller employer/Love & Hip-Hop Atlanta cast member Waka Flocka Flame. Waka rolls a lot of weed-smoking innuendo into his 30 seconds.
Two things you remember from the '80s that now look completely different, "Weird Al" Yankovic and Radio Shack, have joined forces to sell you batteries. The only way you can tell we haven't stumbled through a wormhole to 25 years ago is that they're also trying to sell you flying drones.
British department store chain John Lewis is known for its annual Christmas ads, which feature some sort of aggressively cute concept and a new cover of a popular song that will immediately top the U.K. charts. This year, though, they've been hard at work developing weaponized make-you-cry technology. Hope you like sobbing!
Correct: None.
Arby's, which has been on its game as the new cool brand to watch, is pulling another publicity stunt that only residents of Duluth, Minnesota will get to enjoy. For thirteen hours, starting at 1 p.m. today, the cooked meat shill will air one single commercial on local network My9. The storyline is magical.
No adult is under the illusion that menstrual blood is the tranquil blue color of, say, toilet bowl cleaner or one of the mediocre flavors of Mountain Dew, so why do ads for maxi pads have to sanitize a natural, healthy part of the human experience?
Judging from this commercial, German supermakets are much more fun—or at least more bizarre—than their American counterparts. The commercial—titled "Supergeil"— stars a 58-year-old musician named Friedrich Liechtenstein, who, over the course of the video, pours milk into his bathtub, eats ice cream in a random couple's bed, dances through a EDEKA supermarket, and smokes a hot dog like a cigar. It's well worth your four minutes.
The typical rant about Super Bowl ads goes, "They cost how much? Do those ads even sell anything? Hey, remember those 'Whassssupppp' ads?" First of all, stop saying "Wasssupp." Second of all, the "This is all a huge waste of money" position may be correct.
Tech makes you giddy. Tech makes you fly. Tech makes you sumo wrestle. These are just a few of the things I learned in the whiplash-inducing commercial for the BBC America show Gizmodo: The Gadget Testers, which premieres tonight. (Full disclosure: Gizmodo is owned by Gawker Media and that is 100 percent of the reason why I am reviewing a commercial.) Apparently featuring at least one person (Joel Johnson) that I hear I work within feet of but cannot be sure of because there are too many crappy TV shows to watch and Mariah Carey gifs to make for me to swivel around and survey the Gizmodo area of the Gawker office, Gizmodo: The Gadget Testers none the less seems like it's full of swell, fun-loving people whose gizmos make them say, "Yeah!" "Whoo!" and "Holy crap!" Spoiler alert: It's pretty clear that the gizmos passed their tests. It's pretty clear that the show does, too: The breathlessly frenetic 31 seconds of this ad spot just fly by. It's an exquisitely paced commercial.
During Saturday Night Live this weekend, a 15-second spot advertising the upcoming Daft Punk album aired. If the music debuting in the clip isn't a collaboration with dance-music legend Nile Rogers, who will have some hand in the full-length (the extent to which is as yet unknown), it sure wants to sound like it: It chugs along like Rogers' band Chic with the kind of lite cheese that Daft Punk so expertly sprinkle on some of their work.
On Monday, luxury retailer Burb's Berry Farm released the first ad from its Spring/Summer 2013 campaign.
The day after Thanksgiving is the traditional start to the Christmas season, when celebrants everywhere put up traditional Christmas decorations, sing traditional Christmas carols, and hunker down for the yearly reading of the traditional incest-themed fan fiction based on a two-minute Folger's commercial.
