Block by block, piece by piece, somead agency got way overpaid for this

If an SEC version of this super dumb Big 12 ad ever got made -- which it won't -- the last shot would be of Nick Saban's lifeless body under a giant "S."

Or, as a commenter on the Saturday Down South website excellently said:

Nick Saban is too busy eating the still-beating hearts of children to care about things like commercials. He has no time for your silly human publicity.

Wings to almost die for

I regret that I didn't go to work for big, booming, powerful Channel 9 in Baton Rouge.

If I had, boredom would be something I'd never suffer, being that my people down in Louisiana are not a boring people. Whack, yes. Dull, no.

Blessed is the reporter who gets to report this story:

Authorities said a woman drove to a Baton Rouge restaurant after she was shot at another location Thursday night.

The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office said a woman who was shot on Hyacinth Avenue drove to the Buffalo Wild Wings on Bluebonnet Boulevard.

Deputies were notified around 10:30 p.m.

They said the Baton Rouge Police Department is investigating the shooting.

WELL, they are damned good Buffalo wings. This has ad campaign written all over it -- the woman ought to get free wings for life. However long that might be.

Coming up at 5 and 6 on WAFB 9 News.

This used to be news

This weekend before America's birthday, how about we take a minute to reflect on the way things used to be -- and how far we've come in less than half a century?

This story ran in the Aug. 19, 1963 edition of Broadcasting magazine, recounting a bold advertising move made by Lever Brothers. That bold move? Integrated advertising.

In August 1963, when your 51-year-old correspondent was a 2½-year-old child, it was a risky thing for TV commercial for Wisk detergent to feature an African-American Little Leaguer.

We used to call blacks "Negroes" or "colored" then, and that's when we were being polite. And Lever Brothers, the makers of Wisk and other household products, felt the need to send "letters to its six advertising agencies informing them of its decision to 'take affirmative action' in the representation of minority races on TV."

In 1963, color television was still a big deal, too. In 1963, that Wisk ad absolutely represented being more of "your all-color station" than many areas of these United States had bargained for.

Food for thought. Happy Independence Day.

There's a thin line between love and hate

I think you might call this TV commercial from the Netherlands . . . a Dutch treat. Even though this is the English-language version.


HAT TIP: The Browser.

The difference a half-century makes

This headline in 2012 would be fraught with possibilities of meaning.

Likely, you'd be looking for the words "contraceptives," "sexually transmitted diseases" and "risky behaviors" somewhere in the rest of the advertisement.


But this particular ad, from a June 1962 edition of Broadcasting magazine, just wanted to make the point that young American women had pretty atrocious eating habits. The suggestion was that adults needed to encourage teen girls to eat a healthy diet, exercise . . . and drink their milk.

Whew!

The sponsor? The American Dairy Association.

Living in the past has its merits -- one of them being not contemplating our present.

Don't trust any entrepreneur under 30

It all started when Wall Street created an "unlike" button for Facebook. And it may not end well.

At all.

Damn you, Mark Zuckerberg. Punk.

However, the valuation of Facebook may be moot. Because tech finance expert, Michael Wolff, presents a different doomsday scenario about Faceook in the MIT Technology Review - one where Facebook literally brings down the internet advertising model.

It all starts with the incredible growth necessary to keep Facebook stock price up, just as Aswath Damodoran assumes it must.

Woolf says that this will destabilize the ad market online, with negative results. He suggests . . .

“In its Herculean efforts to maintain its overall growth, Facebook will continue to lower its per-user revenues, which, given its vast inventory, will force the rest of the ad-driven Web to lower its costs. The low-level panic the owners of every mass-traffic website feel about the ever-downward movement of the cost of a thousand ad impressions (or CPM) is turning to dread, as some big sites observed as much as a 25 percent decrease in the last quarter, following Facebook’s own attempt to book more revenue.

You see where this is going. As Facebook gluts an already glutted market, the fallacy of the Web as a profitable ad medium can no longer be overlooked. The crash will come. And Facebook—that putative transformer of worlds, which is, in reality, only an ad-driven site—will fall with everybody else.”

Do the Freddy

Click on photo for higher resolution.
Click here for PDF of magazine.

Continuing on the theme of TV snark . . . behold this 1955 ad in Broadcasting-Telecasting magazine, a sort of birth announcement for my hometown's second television station, WBRZ.

Although, it does kind of tell you much of what you need to know about Channel 2. And Baton Rouge.

First, there is a difference between what you come to expect out of Madison Avenue and what you come to expect out of the Manship family. Second, the Manships never would have hired Don Draper. Third, this ad is enough to make Freddy Rumsen pee his pants.


THERE ARE Mad Men, and then there are madmen.

"Advertise on Channel 2. We'll give your account to the crazed love child of Count Macabre and Orene Muse!"

You don't get this because you had to be there. Trust me.

It's 1929, and everything's Jake. So far.

It's Oct. 16, 1929, in Omaha, Nebr.

The seniors of Benson High School -- some of whom, no doubt, are taking accordion lessons from Hospe's for popularity, pleasure or profit -- would be 100 years old in 2012 . . . if they live an exceedingly fortunate and long life. They're not worried about that right now, not here in the Jazz Age.

They're more concerned about finding a snappy dance band playing somewhere in town come Saturday night. Or perhaps they'll just tune in one on a new Atwater Kent or Freed radio, which I understand are the bee's knees.

The cat's meow. The gnat's whistle.

You can get a new one over at C.O. Hurd's -- that is, if you've got the voot and you haven't spent it all on some dumb Dora.

LET'S JUST HOPE your pop hasn't put every last clam in the stock market. In exactly two weeks, it's gonna crash.

Trust me on this.

Tell him to cash out and buy a new Atwater Kent. And tell him to take real good care of it, keep it well polished, don't sit potted plants on it . . . and then, when he buys a new radio when the Depression eases up in a decade or so, tell him to pack it up very carefully, keep it in a fairly cool, dry place and leave a note for an ancestor to ring me up in 80 years or so.

The Depression? Don't worry about it; I'll explain it to you in a couple of weeks.

Listen, old man, I know my onions. Where I'm from is a lot like this -- except that you're entitled to nookie and folks get in a lather if you say a lot of bushwa about quiffs on the radio.

A word from our sponsor

This intense urge to hop into the DeLorean and head for 1966 is brought to you by Kellogg's -- it's going to be a "Rice" decade!

Now back to The Monkees . . . in living color on NBC.

Little pig, little pig, give us a quote

Bloody brilliant! And bloody well spot on in its portrayal of the present media landscape.

As seen only on colorful Channel 2

There's a reason this Super Bowl ad Will Ferrell did for Old Milwaukee beer ran only on KNOP in North Platte, Neb. And, really, it's the funniest thing.

Let me explain something about Channel 2 -- and, really, this is rich. See, back when I lived in North Platte in the early 1980s, KNOP had this really


UPDATE: The editors at Deadspin are such a bunch of tools. They entice the entire media universe to link to their YouTube video . . . then, after everyone does, they make it private, thereby breaking every embed. Watch fast. We expect them to copyright-flag this YouTube version any second now, concerned as they are about the legal rights of Old Milwaukee.

Stay classy, Gawker Media.

I hate it when that happens

TV flashback -- 1978.

SATURDAY: DICK TRACY LERNS TO SPEL

SATERDAY: DICK TRACY LURNS TO SPEYL

SATURDAY: DIK TRACEY LEANS TO SPELD

SATURDAY: DYCK TRACY LOYNS TO SPAYL

SATURDAY: DICK TRACY SEZ JUST @#$! IT

Season's greetings from 1965

Hmmm . . . and now from 1966.

God, I miss the '60s. That is all.

Apparently, the Germans are decades overdue

G*ddamn Krauts.

A few centuries of religious wars, Karl Marx, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, Adolf Hitler, World War II and the Berlin Wall apparently weren't enough for Everybody's Favorite Troublemakers.

No, that wasn't enough, because they largely left out the dogs. Until now. Until Gunther and Georg decided that multinational conglomerates need to start targeting ads at our pets, not just our kids.

If there's anything I don't need, it's Molly and Scout watching their favorite shows on television, and then pestering me after every Beneful commercial just like I did my parents for Great Shakes, G.I. Joe and a Gilbert American Flyer train set.


But no. It's not enough that me and the missus drag our sorry asses to Hy-Vee every week to get dog food by the sackful for the two simple-minded loafers getting dog hair all over our couch while we're out of the house.

Now we have to have the little bastards reminding us that it's either a sack of Beneful atop the fridge or a puddle of piss on the dining-room floor.


AND WOULDN'T you know that, according to Reuters, the people destined to throw the world into chaos every generation or three, those g*ddamn Krauts, are behind the whole doggone thing:

Nestle, one of the world's biggest makers of pet food, said on Friday it had launched the first television commercial designed especially for dogs, using a high-frequency tone to grab their attention.

"Dogs' hearing is twice as sharp as humans. They can pick up frequencies which are beyond our range and they are better at differentiating sounds," said Georg Sanders, a nutrition expert at Nestle Purina PetCare in Germany.

Nestle asked experts in pet behavior in the United States to research what would appeal to dogs and used the results to create the 23-second commercial for its Beneful dog food brand.

The advert, to be screened on Austrian television this week, features a tone similar to a dog whistle, which humans can barely hear, as well as an audible "squeak" like the sound dogs' toys make and a high-pitched "ping."

"So delicious, so healthy, so happy," ends the commercial in German, which features a dog pricking up his ears.

"The television commercial aims to reach both the pet and the owner, supporting the special one-to-one relationship between them," said Xavier Perez, Brand Manager of Beneful for Europe.

NO, IT'S NOT enough that Molly yaps and yaps and yaps at me when it gets within two hours of meal time, and that the elderly Scout attaches his creaky little body to my leg like a furry tumor. Now it's going to start in the middle of Rin Tin Tin reruns whenever the Beneful commercial comes on.

"DAD! DAD! DAD! Beneful! Now! Get Beneful! Food! Food! Get Beneful! Now! We'll pee!"

Just. F***ing. Great.

G*ddamn Krauts.

Wir fahrn, fahrn, fahrn auf der Superbahn

What this country needs is a good, old-fashioned socialist revolution that's not on behalf of investment banks, multinational corporations or professional sports franchises.

We've had enough of the other socialist revolution -- the one that brought us accountability-free Wall Street bailouts, the military-industrial complex and states fighting over corporations like whores fighting over a john with a big . . . wallet. The one that ushered in the members-only welfare state. The one that treats corporations like people and people like trash. The one that socializes risk and privatizes reward.

You can have that socialist revolution. No . . . wait. I want that socialist revolution. I'll bet you would enjoy it, too.

But if you promise not to blab it all over, I'd probably settle for something as simple as the American Dream . . . which we all thought well within reach back when we still dared to dream.

OK, here's my bottom line, which still might be a bridge too far in this age of country-club kleptomaniacs and the best government campaign donations can buy: Is it too much to ask that if taxpayers are going to shell out major dollars for giant public-works projects, that government at least maintains the pretense the work was on the public's behalf?

Take sports arenas and stadiums, for example. Remember when you could remember their names?


REMEMBER when you could remember which ballpark was in which city?

Remember when you could remember what the one you helped pay for is being called this week?

In this age of steel-and-concrete commercials for corporate interests, we were down to just a handful of stadiums you could figure out. One was the Louisiana Superdome.

The Superdome opened in 1975, when I was in ninth grade. Building it was a stretch for a poor state like Louisiana, and we still didn't have too much we could hang our civic-pride hats on even after the Dome opened. But, by God, we had that.

And what a "that" we had.

It was a marvel in 1975 -- about the only thing you could say was world-class about the Gret Stet back then, other than the food and the music -- and it's a marvel today. And still, it's about the only thing you can say is world-class about the Gret Stet, other than the food and the music.

And it was the LOUISIANA Superdome. Take that, Mississippi. And did you know you could fit the Houston Astrodome inside the thing?

Take that, Texas.

But the Houston Astrodome is now the vacant and dilapidated Reliant Astrodome.

And the Louisiana Superdome -- the pride of a state, the landmark whose ground was hallowed by great suffering during Katrina and which rose from the muck like a swamp phoenix -- is about to become the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.

Take that, Louisiana. At least you can take small comfort in knowing that German money will be paying billionaire Tom Benson to keep the Saints in New Orleans, and not the cash-strapped state government.

WHAT I WANT to know is this: If a German car company will pay the New Orleans Saints craploads of money to rename the domed stadium built by the people of the Gret Stet of Louisiana, thus keeping the NFL team fat, happy and in town . . . what else could we get the world's corporate titans to pay for?

For instance, New Orleans is a mess. If any city in America needs a bailout, a makeover and a little domestic nation-building, it's New Orleans. Well, Detroit, too . . . but that's not important now.

Trouble is, Louisiana is still a poor state. And one not particularly inclined, or able, to pull off an urban-renewal project of that magnitude -- especially since Katrina trashed the place. So, what if we sold naming rights to it?

I don't know about you, but I think Exxon-Mobil, La., has a certain je ne sais quoi. You think the advertising value is worth, say, $10 billion for 10 years?

C'mon down! And don't forget to visit the Exxon Extra French Quarter and put a tiger in your tank!

Or how about Apple? The hip factor alone should make Crescent City naming rights attractive to the ubercool tech colossus. Apple, La. Short . . . sweet . . . has pizazz.

Wait! Wait! Three words: The Drunken Apple. Now, that's a good 30-percent funner than the Big Apple.

PERHAPS I could get used to this selling-your-soul thing.

Maybe Corporate America even could be persuaded to help out Louisiana with its finances. I think that if we could come up with the perfect naming-rights deal, it just might give the ol' coffers quite the stimulus package.

By jove . . . I think I've got it!

The Trojan Magnum State Capitol

Draper wept

It takes a real douche to come up with an advertising campaign like this.

Pundits have commented on the cultural insensitivity of these Summer's Eve ads but, frankly, I was too focused of the tawdriness of it all to even start thinking about racial and ethnic stereotyping. Sorry, couldn't get past the EWWWW!

And then there's this one. . . .


TRUST ME, if the missus for a second thought the only thing I saw in her was her V, I'd quickly be missing a P. Unfortunately, Western popular culture -- and the advertising subset thereof -- has staked everything on enough consumers, male and female, buying into The Big Sexist Lie for lots of its purveyors to make a tidy profit.

Which they are.


AFTER ALL, before there was "Hail to the V," we had years of "Hail to the D."

And when you take your hailing of the V and add your obsession with the D, what possibly could go wrong for society?

And now a word from our sponsor. . . .

OK, so I've pretty much been addicted to BTN's "Nebraska Days" coverage marking the Huskers' entrance into the Big Ten Conference.

The warm glow of exceptionally pure Husker crack bathes my brain as I nod off in front of the HDTV, and I keep seeing this commercial from Omaha's own food and agribusiness conglomerate, ConAgra. If I've seen it once, I've seen it 20 times.

And I cannot get enough of it. It is my new favorite TV ad.

It just strikes me as pitch-perfect in depicting the life of college students and the parents who love them. Particularly the dad. Dad is awesome.

I ALSO love it when Mom surveys the mass if comatose young-adult humanity crashed before her in the "student residence," then asks "Are they dead?"

"That one's breathing," Dad reports back.

Perfect. Just perfect. More, please.

"That's your son."

"That's our son."

"Don't remind me."

IS IT just me, or is anybody else really craving some Manwich right now?

The Special Man and me

I say, I say, I say . . . I went to see the Special Man. There was a problem.

It is what it is.

Still, I can't get enough of this vintage New Orleans commercial.

Simply '70s: Hadacol to a polka beat

Way back in the day, Louisiana had "Coozan Dud" LeBlanc and his Hadacol cureall.

Decades later and 1,000 miles farther north, Omahans had Joe Zweiback and his miracle-making Gera-Speed, with its "28 essential nutritional factors." And not just in itty-bitty amounts, either.

Down the hatch . . . and now back to today's wrestling match. Er . . . "rassling" match.

There's a difference, you know.

Whither 'K&B purple'?

Don't mind me.

I'm just sittin' here in a nostalgic funk, watchin' K&B drug-store commercials and weeping for my lost youth.


And I don't even have a bottle of K&B vodka to crawl into. Damn you, Father Time! Damn you and your smirking emo apprentice!


And don't forget the Alka-Seltzer and disposable douche. Big night.

(Thud.)