I played with a lot of Legos when I was a little girl. And, while I certainly liked dolls, that wasn't really what I used Legos for. (And, frankly, going shopping, playing house, and being "just like me" wasn't what I used dolls for. In my experience, games of playing house tend to involve a lot more violent interaction with pirates, Darth Vader, and Nazis than advertising to girls would lead you to suspect. First you put the baby to bed, then you defend her with your mad karate skills, right?) Ads like this old one from 1981 appeal to me a whole lot more than modern girlvertising. I've seen this ad passed around the Internet before. But the contrast with those recent reminders of who advertisers and toymakers think girls are strikes me as particularly timely.
Sociological Images has a nice gallery up called "United We Buy," showcasing the use of war and patriotism in advertising from WWII up to the present day. That's some weird-ass WD-40.
One might be tempted to ask: Can God make a signboard so big that even He can't illuminate it? Spotted in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, otherwise known as the Center of the Universe.
Here's a neat bit of paper ephemera: A brochure of the Soviet pavilion at Expo 58, also known as the Brussels World Fair—which was the first World Fair after World War II. The Soviet pavillion brochure includes period-perfect illustrations, a neat map, and promises of love 'n' leisure in the land of the Reds: "Sputniks and Rockets! Soviet Women!"
Well, I suppose we all have to pay the rent. In the Japanese television commercial embedded above, Jamiroquai's Jay Kay sings an alternate version of the band's '90s funkyraver smash hit "Virtual Insanity" in which the lyrics have been changed to praise the noodly goodness of Cup Noodle instant ramen (known in the USA as "Cup Noodles").
From Arecibo, to the sound of vaginal contractions, to an ad for Doritos—a short history of Earthlings' attempts to communicate with the cosmos. The vaginal sounds recording reached Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti in the late 1990s. New Scientist says, "It is unclear what sort of reply we should expect."
GlaxoSmithKline is financing a documentary about over-eating, in the hopes that it will boost sales of Alli—their over-the-counter drug that blocks your body from absorbing some of the fat you eat. (Fun game: Read the recent Science Question from a Toddler on poop and see if you can guess what the common side-effects are.)
Glaxo says they won't have control over the content of the film and won't even be pushing to make sure Alli gets mentioned. They simply want to educate Americans about the fact that they eat too much.
The partners say they hope to emulate "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's celebrated 2006 documentary on climate change. It cost an estimated $1.5 million to produce and sold $50 million in tickets worldwide. Ms. Ferdinando summarized the film as "the 'Inconvenient Truth' of mindless eating," with the story taking a "behind-closed-doors, fly-on-the-wall" approach that highlights unhealthy relationships people have with food.
Artistically, the problem I see here is that successful documentaries—and really documentaries in general—are usually about challenging popular perception and either making a case for a viewpoint that's counter to "common-sense" or informing people about a situation that's mostly being ignored. The thesis "Fat People Eat Too Much" does not exactly fit into that mold.
Shocker: Advertising health claims are often misleading. In this case, it looks like most of the products that tout near-perfect germ-killing abilities are getting those results in trials that aren't exactly designed to mimic real-world conditions. When a University of Ottawa microbiologist ran a more realistic demonstration for Canadian schoolchildren, he turned up VERY different results.
Three popular sanitizers killed between 46% and 60% of microbes on the students' hands, far short of 99.99%. Bugs that aren't killed by sanitizers aren't necessarily more dangerous than those that are. But the more that remain, the greater the chance of infection, doctors say.
The ad writers also benefit from regulations that allow them to claim 99.9% effectiveness without actually killing 99.9% of all germs, all the time. Instead, representative samples can stand in, and there's room for do-overs in the lab, if the first test doesn't work.
Scanned from an unknown source, a mural near the elevator in a plastic surgeon's office that casts the rider in the role of Adam on the Sistine Chapel.
Sociological Images has a nice gallery up called "United We Buy," showcasing the use of war and patriotism in advertising from WWII up to the present day. That's some weird-ass WD-40.
A U.K. ad agency created these 
Brazil's Moma ad agency created a 
Scanned from an unknown source, a mural near the elevator in a plastic surgeon's office that casts the rider in the role of Adam on the Sistine Chapel.