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Has ‘stuffed crust’ finally gone too far?

Normally I wouldn’t just post an advertisement without having some kind of ostensibly insightful opinion to offer about it, but this new Pizza Hut Middle East offering frankly has me speechless.

For your delectation:  The Crown Crust Pizza.

 

When are we going to stop having to talk about this?

So this week, Kraft Foods and ad agency Cheil Worldwide had to do some damage control when this ad, for “milk’s favourite cookie”, went viral:

The Mommyblogosphere lit up with rumours that this was a print ad designed for the Korean marketplace, but Kraft and Cheil quickly announced that this wasn’t a real ad, only some kind of ‘spec’ ad they created for use at an advertising forum.  (To be fair, having worked in agencies, I can totally see how an ad like this would have been trotted out in a limited forum as an example of Creative Thinking.  And the Photoshop job on the hand holding the cookie is so amateurish that I can’t imagine that it was ever intended for widespread use.)

Now, I’m no Mayim Bialik when it comes to breastfeeding – I think it’s great if you can do it, but I’m not in the ‘breastfeeding until the kid is 5 years old is your bounden duty as a mother’ camp – but I have to say that what really bugged me about this particular tempest in a teacup is how many websites covered up the ‘nipple’ in the shot, like this:

or even this:

Are we really still implying that a glimpse of some breast and a nipple in a breastfeeding context is somehow controversial?

We’ve seen this nonsense before

In 1992 I spent a month in England, and the big advertising story at the time – which I can’t find online, unfortunately – was a big debate over whether commercials for feminine hygiene products should be shown on ‘family’ channels before the watershed hour (9pm, I think it was).  The implication being that 8-year-olds shouldn’t be traumatised (scandalized? confused? freaked out?) by having to recognize that women get their periods.

Just what we need:  To raise girls who think that their periods are somehow shameful, and boys who remain clueless about it, as though it’s never anything to do with them.  

(It’s bad enough that I was almost 20 years old before I understood that laxatives were to help with bowel movements.  All those soft-focus Correctol ads with shots of droplets of water made me think that it was somehow supposed to make you pee more.)

I really think that the sooner we can get over the notion that there’s anything scandalous about breastfeeding (or menstruation, or constipation), the better off we’ll all be.

 

BONUS OPINION:  It’s Oreo’s 100th anniversary this year, and it would not surprise me in the least to discover that this ad had been ‘leaked’ entirely on purpose.  It’s given Oreo a huge amount of publicity, and the mommybloggers have been mostly in favour of it – and if you don’t know how powerful mommybloggers are these days, you haven’t been paying attention.

…or am I just getting old?

 

The other day, my friend and former ad agency comrade Alanis and I were talking – via Twitter, of course – about the dismal state of television ads for yogurt, with specific reference to that terrible ‘Find Your Source’ series.  

Alanis was referring to a fresh new disaster in this line, featuring a bizarre fruit-surrounded woman DJing her way to yogurt happiness, but I can’t find it online.  No matter, because the one I could find is just as representative of the genre:

However, the yogurt commercial that’s been driving me nuts lately is the one for Yoptimal yogurt, which uses what must be the oldest trope in the commercial business:  The star of the spot keeps ‘ruining’ each take because she’s enjoying the product so much that she can’t stop eating it.

Unfortunately, everyone involved with this spot is apparently so embarrassed by it that the best I can offer you is the thumbnail above – even the production company (Spy Films) doesn’t have it on their website, and the ad agency (Bos) doesn’t have it in their portfolio.

Why did this one stick in my mind?  Because I remember this actress – Natalie Brown – starring in one of the most ‘iconic’ tv commercials of my youth:

^{(I do give her credit for looking almost exactly the same as she did 20 years ago.  I don’t know what she’s doing, but it’s clearly working.)}

Those of you who are a certain age will no doubt remember this Heinz commercial.  Slightly cheesy, but with a little story and a nice idea and decent casting.

But that’s the thing:  20 years later, we can still remember this spot.  When I went looking for her current yogurt commercial, it took me ages to figure out it was for Yoptimal – I finally had to find a list of Canadian yogurt brands and search each one of them until I got a hit. When people can’t remember the product, and can’t find the spot even when they’re looking, your commercial has failed. 

I know that television advertising has had to change in the past 15 years:  When I first started working in ad agencies, 15 years ago, clients didn’t blink at forking over $350,000 for a commercial or two, because everyone was watching tv and that’s how you reached them. And everyone knew that, between ad agency fees, ACTRA contracts, and studio time, the costs just mounted up.  

These days, everyone has a high-quality digital camera and iMovie on their computer, they’re watching tv shows online where they can avoid commercials – so what company is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a tv commercial when they can crowdsource something for $1000?  But while ‘crowdsourcing’ your commercial sounds like a fantastic idea when you’re in the boardroom trying to impress everyone with just how iHipster you are, it very rarely translates into an iconic ad in the end.

Don’t worry – I haven’t turned into a curmudgeon here.  There are plenty of interesting commercials happening – they just aren’t making it on to television.  They’re living on the internet:

But it’s kind of a shame, because it’s making television even more annoying to watch than it already is.

 

Beautiful.  Also, somehow, inexpressibly sad.

I’ve been looking at this photo for a couple of weeks now – it is the image featured on a postcard announcing Jonathan Hobin’s new exhibit at the City Hall Art Gallery in Ottawa (March 16-April 29).

It’s a disturbing image…more disturbing for me, maybe, since this is a photo of Jon’s late grandfather, Bill Merrill, who I knew all my life.  In the 1960s, my grandfather and Bill Merrill built cottages next to each other on the Ottawa River, and I tend to think of Jon as my cousin.

You may remember Jon’s work from his ‘In the Playroom’ series which made headlines a couple of years ago because of the way it placed children in controversial ‘reenactments’ of tragic news events, like this one about the death of Jon-Benet Ramsay:

I’ve always been a big fan of Jon’s work – and of course now that he’s being famous all over the place I feel quite happy that I have some of my very own Jonathan Hobin Originals around here.  One day I’ll be a little old lady on Antiques Roadshow, showing off the photos Jonathan took of me when I was young, and I’ll look like I had a far more interesting past than I really do.