As you emerge from Advertising Week's five-day celebration of ADHD, you may have missed this major news from Frog World. Convinced that airbrushed photo spreads in magazines, advertisements and
packaging encourage eating disorders in impressionable young women, the French parliament has been presented with a bill that could result in fines of more than $16,000, or as much as 50% of the ad
campaign's cost unless some sort of "retouched" disclaimer accompanies offending shots.
Sacre bleu! No more hiding of les cellulite, feet of the crow, fat of la bebe, scars du la c-section,
tattoos, and up-until-4 a.m.-ridin'-that-train baggage of the eyes??? The sound of celebrities canceling photo shoots is already deafening. What will happen if this truth-in-advertising notion
spreads? OMG!
"The couple you have seen smiling suggestively that appear to have been happily married for 20 years prior to the onset of his ED, in fact, can't stand each other. He snores, farts
under the covers and still after all these years leaves the toilet seat down. And since menopause, the LAST thing she wants from him is an erection. Especially one that can last up to 4 hours."
"Seriously, about that weight loss. You might have noticed in the fine print that we said "part of a balanced diet and regular exercise." What that means is that if you eat this stuff, you can't eat
anything else except persimmon seeds and lemon-flavored water for the rest of the day, and you have to do stairmaster at level 19 for two hours or run a daily 10K in under 40 minutes. Your choice. We
are all about consumer choice."
"Please buy this car. PLEASE! PLEASE! PUL-ESE (we might default on our taxpayer bailout if you don't) PRETTY PLEASE! WITH A $6,500 MANUFACTURER'S REBATE ON
TOP?..."
"If I say this is an 'Extraordinary film!' or even the 'Best Movie You'll See This Year,' it doesn't mean it is worth $10 to see -- or that I even liked it myself. But it does mean I
get flown first class to LA a couple times a year, where an Eva Green wannabe shows up in my penthouse room and shows me the difference between a PG-13 and an R rating."
"Can we just agree that
'transparent' can have a couple of different interpretations, and in our case, translucent is probably a little closer to the truth? If we really were transparent, we'd have no reason to use the word
in our marketing. It would be, well, transparent to begin with. Did you get one of our cool shoulder bags yet?"
"You can drink yourself into a coma with our beer, but there is not a chance in
hell you will ever hook up with the girls we feature in our commercials. Unless you become an Italian exotic auto heir with a family fortune in the trillion lira range and a yacht that is so big that
it can't squeeze through the Panama Canal. Then, you can drink Pabst and it won't matter."
"The previews you have just watched were the sum total of worthwhile scenes from the show we want you
to sample when it premieres. Frankly, we had to pull from six or eight episodes to find enough slapstick to fill the 30-second promo. We don't know what happened. The writers had a good track record.
The premise was a little thin, we confess. But if you are moronic enough to tune into the show in which you saw our promo, you might actually like this other crap. If only for two shows."
"Just
a side note on the illusion that the woman in our commercial felt some deep sense of familial satisfaction in having baked our cake for her kids. How creative are you going to feel just adding water
to some mix? You don't even have to crack an egg or grease a pan. And trust us, when the kids see the cake, at least one of them will turn up his/her nose and complain that it is vanilla and he/she
only likes chocolate. The other one will recite the calorie count for everything from the sugar to the cream cheese frosting and won't eat but a single bite. Goddamned health science classes. "