Are you married? Sucker. I mean, congratulations. Sucker. In olden times men and women would agree to be joined in matrimony forever—the men receiving a regular source of sexual congress and a valuable allegiance to powerful land-owning families in nearby regions, and the women receiving a new pot and pan. Today: married people are nearly a minority. So close!!!!
Now that I've started getting Mad Men on Netflix, I plan to catch up with every other ad critic in the past year by cleverly inserting a reference to the show into each advertising-related item that I write. In this way we seduce you with a connection to a piece of pop culture detritus you enjoy, then use that as a catapult into our sales pitch, represented in this case by a plea for you to read the rest of this post, with the implied promise that it will be worth your while. So, remember that Mad Men episode where they're all marveling at the Volkswagen "Lemon" ad? That particular ad was a breakthrough just because of its honest, direct style. It was the opposite of Lucky Strikes' "It's Toasted" campaign—an equivalent would have been something like "Lucky Strikes—you'll die but you like them anyways." VW continued on a streak of spot-on advertising that spanned at least the next two decades. Look at this classic VW TV spot and ask yourself, has advertising advanced past this yet, idea-wise?
Writing in the Pursuits section of the Wall Street Journal's weekend edition today, film critic Joe Morgenstern takes approximately 70 square inches to explain why the "gory, stupid" action movie 300 is a symptom of the empty bigness that Americans now demand from their entertainment. (We'd link to it, but according to the "Notice to Readers" that pops up when you visit WSJ.com, the Journal's entire website is completely down.) 300 is "blood-soaked and utterly bloodless," Morgenstern writes, and its popularity is an indication of our preference for fast and loud hugeness over slow and moving smallness.
