holy buns?

???

I think this ad is showing how the happy woman has a man in her life and isn't worried about being any more perfect than she already is.. sadly she and all the other women and the dude in this ad are rediculously over-weight for people in New York where it is literally a crime to NOT have plastic surgery to improve your self-worth and appearances 3-7 times per month...

Wow.. you truly find some examples of terrible advertising... these all came from the New Yorker?  Guess I now have another reason not to read that periodical.

Provocative sells.  

Yes provocative and controversial sell all too well.
Then again so does boring... it never fails to surprise me how much people are willing to pay for certain adveritisng space.  The superbowl is obviously the epitome of this, but even still, if you were to run an ad in the New Yorker for a couple weeks or a month, you'd probably be surprised how expensive that would be too!

American Apperal though is having a problem with being to provacative and too controversial...  I guess walking in the nude around the office and getting BJ's while being interviewed will eventually catch up with a CEO.

American Apparel (AA) did an interesting cockroach herding like experiment recently. You know the one I'm talking about cockroaches were introduced to robotic cockroaches with added scent/phermones, the robo cocks were able to lure the other roaches into lighter areas of a room to feed b/c of the herding effect as they were unable to resist the urge to imitate their friends. Well, AA Manhattan did the same trick on NY hipsters by engineering a recurring, premediated "non" event in which they had "paid hipsters" hang out on a street bench located in front on NY's most prominent AA store. The area became known as "the bench" or the "antiscene" or the newest/freshest hotpot in NY. So much for youth being resistant to social control..they had to imitate...nice manipulative ploy on AA part.

We're all Lemmings.  Clothes, cars, electronics you name it.

Lemmings being a mindless herd that follows each other over a cliff was a myth started by Walt Disney in the Wild Kingdom series. Disney actually used a spinning contraption to hurl the poor lemmings off the cliff-nice wholesome american entertainment.

For the lemmings the end result is the same:  SPLAT

Get them while they are young!

I saw in a magazine a reprint of a billboard posted in Union Square, NYC of a 7 yr old boy standing with a white t-shirt with the white package label for protein, fat and sugar content that read "you might be surprised who thinks about your child's nutrition as much as you do" I'm lovin' it McDs.

That's AWESOME because it's so wrong!  I'm tempted to make that my next avatar...

It's akin to brain washing.

Good advertising IS brainwashing.. you repeat the same message long enough and the person subconsciously starts thinking the message contained within is true.  Hopefully people are smart enough to be resistant.. and frankly there is simply SOOO much out there that even "good" ads are watered down incredibly, but still, that's the premise behind advertising.. say something enough times until the audience believes it is true.