hiatus

hello there loyal reader!
I've decided to take a blogging holiday - though the ad industry doesn't deserve it - but I'll be back for a Christmas Special, sometime around mid-December.
Thanks for all your support and upstaging! The comments sections have been much wittier and more insightful than the posts. Please let me know if you have your own blogs - the world will be a brighter place with them.
In the meantime, is it just me or is there heaps of good street art around at the moment?
Love
JEM

comms experts

No social commentary this time; just a piece of pure, unadulterated pedantry (my favourite kind). Spot the visual mistake:


So the X marks the spot where you "cut out" your home phone... to reveal the home phone cord?

Shouldn't that have disappeared with the rest of the phone?
Whooo, with that last grainy pic I feel like a UFO spotter. It's there! Really it is! A redundant anachronism!

don't fall for it

One question for this billboard: Why?


Why does it take a strong character to wear purple everyday? Why is purple is not yet the new black? (Indigo's close enough surely?)
"Ha ha!" growls the billboard in munterish, deep Hauraki FM dj tones, "people might think you're a poofter, mate."
Classic. Makes me wanna buy your product.
This is guy-to-guy talk, given that purple is an acceptable colour to wear if you're female. So the coffee is male, apparently, and so are you, the billboard viewer. And yet....

That last one says "squeeze me and I'll blow you a kiss!"
Uh, I think I'll pass...
Ps: mauvember not movember! (such glowing ashes would be quite pretty wouldn't they?)

you saw a banana?! split!

This is not technically a billboard, but it was on the back of my bus ticket, so it *is* an image I saw on my way home: Ew, what bad taste fruit! (geddit?) As running away screaming "don't get fresh with us!" (geddit?) doesn't really shout "attitude", I take it the tag line is referring to Mr Banana.
So they want us to buy their products because they're made with dirty old man bananas?
Funnily enough, I have no appetite no more.
Though I guess it is a *flasher* banana (geddit?).

masterpiece

This is soooo bad that I'm in a fluster of angry delight!
A fourth form (year 10) creative writing class has taken over the marketing department of our National Museum:

"OMG" the class clowns said to each other (or whatever it is the kids say these days to express wide-eyed wonderment) "the wikipedia page on Picasso reckons people had sex before 1990! Well, it reckons he did, at least. That must be why he's so famous. This is newsworthy - let's mangle a few synonyms together into a really long sentence."
And so they looked up Roget’s thesaurus google and found that 'many', 'several' and 'prolific' were sort of related, as were 'interesting', 'revolutionary' and 'sensation'; also 'art' and 'work'.
Uh, kids:
1. Picasso was prolific; not his art nor his relationships.
2. How many works of art does a relationship need to equal, for Picasso to have been as prolific a relationship producer as he was an artist? 50 paintings for every lover? A painting a kiss? Are we counting sketches here? What about one night stands?
3. The first half of the sentence is only grammatical as a reversal of the phrase "His relationships with his many lovers and several wives were as interesting...". What you actually meant, I expect, was something different: "As he had many lovers and several wives, his relationships were as interesting..."
4. Why, if his relationships were as interesting as his art, was it the art that created the real sensation?
5. How can something non-revolutionary be as interesting as something revolutionary AND real-sensation-creating?
6. Does a New Zealand audience really need a generalised gloss reminding us that this guy was a real arsehole of a ladies man before they'll go see a picture by Picasso?

abuse of seuss

Argh! The bank robots have kidnapped the good doctor and are using his recipes for our favourite childhood candy to lure us into their clutches:

They cannot completely hide their nefarious doings. The backdrop looks like the distopia left behind by rampant capitalist Lorax - who also controls the bank robots!
Dr Seuss once wrote a verse that went: “Mrs Van Bleck of the Newport Van Blecks/is so goddam rich she has gold-plated sex”.
I dare you to go and ask for one loan "for GPS please".
Well, they are wanting to take you places.

morning glory

I once got kicked out of a flat for being too happy in the mornings. How insufferable I was in my salad days!
Now, of course, part of the problem of forgetting (gasp!) to put up this post last night is that it's morning-cotton-wool-head gal writing to you, not night-owl gal.
Coincidentally, this ad is all about mornings:

As with employment law, the devil writes the fine print:

Insufferable milk!? That clash and the doors slamming was Anchor getting kicked out of our flat.