Better off watching on Hulu, in bed with my cat

I'd seen the promos for Better Off Ted, but was planning to resist watching because THERE'S TOO MUCH GOOD TELEVISION ON THESE DAYS, GODDAMNIT and I don't need another must-see show. Terminator, Lost, Chuck, 30 Rock, Fringe, ... thank god for Hulu.

Better off Ted is a satirical comedy about a company called Veridian Dynamics that manufactures everything from office chairs to "that thing, with all the gears," and, by the way, how much do I love that they created a fictitious corporate website for the company? Oh yeah, that much! They had me at the opening credits, which are designed to look and feel like a corporate advertisement.

The main character, Ted, talks directly to the camera. I haven't seen that gimmick since Moonlighting, and I still miss it. I'm not ashamed to admit, I love shows with a gimmick, and Better Off Ted has several. When he goes home from the office, Ted gets advice from his five year old daughter. She's the voice of reason among a sea of crazies.

Portia de Rossi is terrific. What an inspired bit of casting. She plays the emotionless Veronica Parker, who regularly enters Ted's office with orders from above. That is from the company, which she refers to as They. As in, "They want a mouse that can survive temperatures of 120 degrees."

The show has great writers. Here's just a sample of memorable lines from the pilot:

"We want to weaponize a pumpkin."

"Can a company be bitchy?"

"Making toast is fine, you do it well, but you need more."

"I used up my office affair. You only get one."

"And so, they froze Phil."

Angelina Jolie is making me rethink my tattoo

The Super Bowl is all about the advertising, with a football game going on in the background. The Oscars are all about the dresses, and something about movies. This year, when I watched the Super Bowl I found myself learning some of the rules of football. Tonight, I learned some of the rules of Oscar. Allow me to share.

If you are the unknown escort of a Hollywood hunk, wear the ugliest dress you can find. Work hard at it, because everyone hates you anyway.


If you're a foreigner, go for the respect me or I might kill you look.


When no one knows your name, try to make the worst dressed list, because there's no such thing as bad publicity.


When you've reached the A list, you can get away with wearing anything.


If you're just coming off a stint in anorexia rehab, flaunt it.


Play to your strengths, even if you left them in the 80s.


Models have a different set of rules. Something to do with wearing a dress that looked better on the hanger, and should have been left there.


If you wait long enough, you get a pass.


Don't wear a dress that might poke you in the eye during the ride to the show. It'll make your face look like this.


Let the professionals clean the fish.


Unwrap the box the dress came in.


And finally, no matter how weirdly creepily beautiful you are, remember to wash off the stamps from last night's clubbing before dressing up.

All the World's A Stage, and Joaquin Phoenix is a Player

I assume by now you've all seen the Joaquin Phoenix interview on Letterman. I won't bother to link to it on YouTube, because CBS keeps pulling it down (as rightly they should). Besides, if you're reading this, you're savvy enough to find it for yourself.

The chatter in the blogosphere is waxing that Phoenix must have been on drugs, or otherwise lamed out. It was, as you saw, a ridiculously lame performance. He mumbled. He gave one word answers. He seemed baffled by Letterman's questions.

Until Letterman started mocking him, that is. Until, like Harvey Korman on the Carol Burnett show, who occasionally succumbed to a smirk, if not outright losing it, in response to Tim Conway — Phoenix lost his composure. Just for a nanosecond; if you weren't paying close attention, you probably missed it.

So go watch the video again, and look for it. There, see?

I have a confession to make: I'm extremely gullible. My good friends know this. I will believe just about anything, if someone I trust tells it to me. And when they're pulling my leg, it takes me longer than the average bear to get it.

But I got Joaquin Phoenix on Letterman. I got that it was a performance. To what end, I don't know, but I'm sure we'll eventually find out. There's no way that was an accident, or a PR misstep. There's just no way.

No Hollywood celebrity goes on a talk show unprepared, uncoached, un-made up, or un-styled. They all have people — publicists, stylists, hair dressers and makeup people. Advisors.

(Well, maybe all but Michael Jackson. But I digress.)

I think Rolling Stone got it right: it was an act. It was like Borat. If you saw that movie, didn't you wonder how the people he was with could have been fooled into believing he was playing it straight?

Same thing. Joaquin Phoenix is up to something. I hope, when we find out what it is, it's one quarter as good as Borat was.

I love David Letterman, though. (My good friends also know that about me.) And at the end of the interview with Joaquin Phoenix, Letterman had the greatest last words: "We owe Farrah Fawcett an apology!"

(I don't think that one was an act.)

My Covert Mission to Undermine Unethical Facebook Ads and Save the World From Communism

Here's the objection I have to ads on Facebook like the ones you see here: They're unethical.

Because they're unethical, it is my opinion that Facebook should not allow them. Someone at Facebook screens all ads before giving the go-ahead to allow them to be posted, but they don't seem to consider these ads impermissible. I do, and so should you.

Why are they unethical? Because the advertiser has not licensed — that is, paid for the right to use — Julia Roberts's image. Or Jennifer Aniston's. Or Sandra Bullock's. Or Kelly Ripa's. You might be thinking, oh, who cares, they're big celebrities, they have lots of money, so it's OK for a small business to steal their image and use it for their own purposes.

You are wrong. Here's why.

To any professional who knows anything about business, marketing, or advertising, these ads positively scream amateur! Because professionals know that you can't just appropriate the image of Mickey Mouse or Homer Simpson for use in your promotional materials. You have to negotiate, and pay for it. Jennifer Aniston's people may not be patrolling the Internet for the unauthorized use of her image, but I dare you to try using a Disney character without permission. (Go ahead, try it. You'll be shocked at how quickly the Disney people will come down on you.)

The advertisers that post these unethical, amateur-style Facebook ads are using a technique called manufactured credibility, which is something professional marketers do when they don't have any real credibility. If you can't get a doctor to be an official spokesperson for your vitamin supplement, hire an actor and dress him in a white coat. Manufacture credibility. There's nothing unethical about this technique, so long as the actor doesn't actually say, "I am a doctor." You can't outright lie in advertising, but you can mislead like hell.

The snake-oil salesmen behind these Facebook ads are attempting to mislead you into believing that these celebrities use their products. If you believe that, even a little bit, then you are a moron.

Finally, consider this: Philosophically speaking, the idea that any artist's images, or words, or art, should be free for all to use for any commercial purpose is, essentially, communistic. This is America. Is that really how you want to roll?

So, what is my covert mission? Every time I see one of these ads on my Facebook page, I click on it ten times. The advertiser pays per click, which means every time I click on it, it's costing them money, and they're getting nothing for it because I'm not following through to purchase their miracle diet products or wrinkle cream.

I encourage you to join me in my mission.

Advertising & the End of the World

"Advertising does not stress the value of a long range collective future...the prevailing values of the commercial system provide no incentive to develop bonds with future generations...

"We don't care about the future.

"To the extent that it does all these things, advertising becomes one of the major obstacles to our survival as a species."

So narrates Sut Jhally, author of several books on the intersection of advertising and culture, catastrophe, and fetishism, in a documentary film titled "Advertising & The End Of The World."

Judging by the five minute preview available on the publisher's website, this film looks almost as scary as An Inconvenient Truth.

I'm working on getting it for my classes.

Truth In Advertising

Apparently that was the original title of the new show that started airing this week, Trust Me. Not to be confused with the video called Truth in Advertising, that was made back in 2000 for a Canadian advertising awards show (and features Colin Mochrie).

Canadians are everywhere it seems: both Eric McCormack and Tom Cavanagh, the stars of Trust Me, are Canadian. McCormack named his son after Casey & Finnegan from Mr Dressup; and Cavanagh used to do commercials for Labatt Blue. (He was the guy standing on the dock on a lake up north, who looks at his Blue with love, then at the lake with scorn and says, "If I'd wanted water, I would have ordered water." Remember? Yeah, that guy.)

But I digress.

The best scene in the pilot comes early, just before Stu, the Group Creative Director, drops dead of a heart attack. He delivers a long, ranting speech that ends with, "Clients are idiots!"

(At that moment, everyone watching the show who has ever worked in an agency stood up and cheered.)

I wish I could find the clip on TNT's website, or on YouTube, but I can't. So you'll just have to bittorrent it.

If you did watch the pilot, didn't you just cringe with embarrassment when the weasely creative director, Simon, was pitching his lame idea for Arc Mobile to the client? Pointing at stock photos of people skateboarding and whatnot, while the lamest George Michael song in the world played in the background?

I know, "lamest George Michael song" is something of an oxymoron. Or something. Gak; now I'm going to have that execrable song stuck in my head for a week. Really, it's worse than Hotel California.

But I digress.

Trust Me is a must-watch for anyone interested in advertising. Are you listening, my students? I'm adding it to my appointment TV list, because it's not available on Hulu and, well, it's just too good to miss.

(Personally, I thought Spartexticus was a clever idea. Which is probably why I'm not a Creative Director.)

More Delicious than Delicio.us

Delicious, Reddit, Digg — they're all so 2007. Besides, they have nothing to do with advertising.

This site does: Adverlicio.us. It's an online archive of online ads. Like this terrific interactive banner ad for Volkswagen, which encourages you to drag and drop the features of the car onto the car, right in the ad. (Click on the image below to see the live ad.)


Aspiring creatives, take note: If you have the skills and talent to create ads like this one, you'll get hired, even during a recession.

Boom Boom in the Routan Room

If you've seen the TV commercials for the Volkswagen Routan, the ones featuring a perfectly cast, perfectly straight-faced Brooke Shields lamenting the growing social problem of women having babies just for German engineering, then you know that it's a beautifully executed satire. You know that she's not suggesting that women are really doing this, any more than Jonathan Swift was really suggesting that the Irish should eat their own babies.

I swear, though, the more I see this ad (and the longer, documentary-style video on the Volkswagen website), the more I start thinking, well, gee, maybe I should...

Good grief!

I shake my head and remind myself that I've always owned a Volkswagen. I grew up with German engineering. Heck, even my toaster is German! I do not need to have a baby with a strange man I barely know!

But my reaction speaks to the brilliance of Crispin Porter + Bogusky. How they hit exactly the right nerve in the target market. How their impeccable casting of Shields nails audience resonance as it was meant to be in a perfect advertising world.

Obama Love Love Me Do

I get what McCain's advertising gurus are trying to do. I get it, really. And they're succeeding in much the same way as my grade three crush, Rodney Sanford, succeeded in his objectives, when he used to cross town to play on my street.

So he could pull my pigtails, of course.

The Bale of his existence

It's taken twenty years, but my friend Harrison Cheung finally got some payback for his tireless efforts promoting an unknown actor named Christian Bale. Here's his story in England's Daily Mail.