Today (Wednesday), we bore witness to one of the more incredible – or incredibly ridiculous – events in advertising. Adult Swim‚Ķ shut down Boston. That’s right. “Suspicious packages” were spotted all over town, triggering a panic, an investigation, and the closing of roads, a bridge, and the interstate. These were, essentially, light-brite-esque renditions of characters from Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force, which airs a few times a week on Adult Swim. The character is a Mooninite named Igniknot, and he is flipping off Boston as hard as he can.

The best quotes come from FOX News.com:

“They have been in place for two to three weeks in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.”

“Whoever did this – whether it be kids or adults – if they think it’s funny, I think they’ll soon learn it’s not that much of a humorous situation.”

I disagree. I find this the most awesome situation to derive itself from viral marketing ever. Zombie Redenbacher has nothing on these guys. This is so street cred for Adult Swim. It is the most Mooninite thing to do, ever, to shut down a whole city just to flip them off (enacting a terror alert was not a part of the plan, that happened by accident). There is nothing better for that programming block and their audience than the street cred they will recieve for this. I award a gold star for balls. There are going to be a lot of people who don’t get this, but for the people who do, it is incredible.

I would like to say “sorry” about saying “I told you so,” but I was right about the death of advertising. Behold the soul-devouring lifeless corpse of Orville Redenbacher re-computer-animated to hock popcorn. Crispin + Porter proves once again that working at a successful agency does not magically turn phenomenally bad ideas good. This was the single most disgusting thing I have ever witnessed on television. The YouTube video may hide some of the evil with its low-resolution, but if you should encounter the evil, soul-eating, reanimated Redenbacher-corpse on an HDTV, look away, lest the death take you down with it.

Fallout here, here, here, here, and here.

After watching a dozen or so iterations of the Esurance super-spy cartoon-hottie “Erin” (oh that’s right she has a name. You’d best find yourself over at Erin’s World and upload some fanart, jerk) save the world and sell insurance over the past year, I am confronted with an atrocity.

I’m starting to really like these ads. There’s no real reason for it. I should hate them. They are flimsy, they have nothing at all to do with the products and services of their client, they are aimed squarely at an audience that doesn’t buy insurance (teens and early-college), and they’re just plain dumb. But they look cool. For cool’s sake. There’s pent-up, nagging romance between the heroine and that random guy (the “mysterious stranger,” apparently not cool enough to garner his own name) that occurs between episodes‚Ķ did I say episodes? Oh shoot, I did. Here’s the thing: Television spots are dead. Let me say again big and bold so it sinks in.

TELEVISION SPOTS ARE DEAD.

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Hot on the heels of Sony’s disastrously fake blog, All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP, produced by a couple of interns and/or monkeys at Zipatoni, the FTC has decided that viral marketing has gotten less viral and more straight-up dishonest as of late. And they’re doing something about it.

Back in the day I was swept up by Microsoft’s I Love Bees viral campaign for Halo2, but I was dislodged when it became increasingly impossible to follow. That was a fun little game, or last season’s guy-in-car-with-Starbucks-glued-to-roof was almost heartwarming. But paying people to talk to their friends, or start MySpace pages under completely false pretenses, all to hock product is just disgusting. Fake blogs are the devil.

We all know the Clich√©s that are ever present with stock photography. It’s bad, but it can be forgiven. The same can be said about stock photography advertisements in design publications. They are inevitable, and we don’t really expect them to be particularly creative. The only thing the stock company has to do is combine one of their photos with a mildly interesting headline and the ad will have served its purpose. If it is lucky, the next time I am forced to use a stock photo I will remember their name. It is really pretty simple, which makes the following ad all the more awe inspiring. When I saw this ad, my jaw dropped in absolute astonishment that something this bad could be created at all, let alone be published in a publication targeted towards creative people. Have a look for yourself, but I am warning you, this is bad…

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