Say, that's a good looking Ford Fusion out that window.

This screenshot comes from a Ford commercial running in the Atlanta area for about the past month. But the car isn't the reason I'm showing it to you.

This shot was taken in my favorite restaurant, Sprayberry's Restaurant. The Ford out the window is parked in the space usually reserved for the Sprayberry's International Scout. I don't think that Scout ran when I worked there in 1992. You can see it in the picture of the "229 Jackson Street" location here'.

I don't know if the commercial sold any car, but it certainly has me warning some Brunswick stew.

UPDATE: I found a video of the commercial:

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If there's one thing everyone agrees Superman is good at, it's selling cars.

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Remember the Super Bowl? Remember Coca-Cola's #MakeItHappy ad? I distinctly recall thinking, "that's a terrible idea" after just one viewing. It took Coca-Cola slightly longer. They found out earlier this week.

Gawker, an internet site dedicated mostly to celebrity gossip, discovered that Coca-Cola was using a bot to turn the hashtagged tweets into ASCII art and decided to create its own bot to send large chunks of Mein Kampf Coca-Cola's way. It took a while for Coke to catch on that they were mindlessly turning Adolph Hitler's autobiography into art, but when they did, they terminated the campaign. Because the one thing that doesn't go better with Coke is Adolph Hitler.

Said Coke to Adweek:

"It's unfortunate that Gawker is trying to turn this campaign into something that it isn't. Building a bot that attempts to spread hate through #MakeItHappy is a perfect example of the pervasive online negativity Coca-Cola wanted to address with this campaign."

So when confronted by the very negativity that they solicited, Coca-Cola canceled the campaign. What, exactly, did you think was going to happen, Coke?

A fun thought exercise on this is to try and figure where to lay the blame. Maybe a global company using robots to engender mindless brand-loyalty needed exposing, but was that the right way to do it? Should Coke receive any credit for trying to be positive, even if it was only a crass marketing ploy? Would any of this have happened if not for the pervasiveness of Internet trolls dominating social media? And who programs bots to read Mein Kampf, anyway?

Welcome to the Wild, Wild Web of 2015, where everybody loses.

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I watch a lot of movies. Those movies have a lot of bad actors. But none of those actors are as bad as Kate Upton is in these Game of War: Fire Age commercials.

Upton is a pretty girl, but it's hard to believe that someone who modeled her way onto multiple covers of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue could be that unaware of how she looks in front of a camera. Dead eyes, poor inflection, stiff mannerisms.... It's not sexy if I can't bear to watch.

The ridiculous ad copy isn't doing her any favors, either. It would be hard to take anyone saying "other than what's about to come out of those trees" seriously. Maybe Sam Jackson. Come to think of it, he'd find a way to make that dress work, too.

Game of War must think that some eye-candy is going to translate directly into sales. Sorry, guys, but I don't make those sorts of choices with my dick. No matter how hard I try, it's simply no good at manipulating a touchscreen.

Maybe I'm not the only one resistant to such blatant sex in advertising. Game of War: Fire Age took a huge hit in subscribers in the weeks after the campaign launched. It's still the second highest grossing app on the iPhone (to the tune of over a million dollars a day) but it's not downloaded nearly as often as it once was. Did it reach total market saturation, or was it a mistake to spend $40 million on ads featuring a bikini model moonlighting as an actress? The world may never know.

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Have you seen this commercial, released in time for NFL play-off season? I think it's great, but it fails to answer the most important question it raises.

What, exactly, does McDonald's have to do with love? A Big Mac sure doesn't look like love. Neither does a globe-spanning for-profit organization that steadfastly refuses to pay employees a living wage.

Cute commercial, though.

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Samsung has something they think you should see: an "Ultra High Definition" curved television. And their new commercial ("The Curve Changes Everything") has a boat-load of celebrities selling the pitch.

View on Vimeo

Maybe Samsung thinks most of us haven't seen all those movies — some of them are more than 10 years old! — but I don't think that those clips mean what Samsung thinks they mean. Here, I'll explain the clips in the order they appear:

1. Clueless: The two characters are excited to see their scheme to romantically couple their teachers working, a scheme intended to improve their grades. Samsung, it's probably a bad idea to remind viewers that you are trying to manipulate us right out of the gate.
2. Jurassic Park: Sam Neil is taking off his glasses because he cannot believe what he is seeing. What he is seeing is a dinosaur. Is this new television is just more of the same old thing?
3. The Island: The scientist is discussing a clone's ability to grow. This would be a good message if that was what the scientists wanted. Samsung is saying, "This TV is not going to do what you want it to do!" (Disclaimer: this is the only clip I didn't recognize on sight. As a rule, I try to avoid Michael Bay movies.)
4. The Fly: The movie opens with these lines, and Jeff Goldblum goes on to use cutting-edge technology to turn himself into a monster. Samsung is saying, "This TV is really not going to do what you want it to do!" (See? I didn't need to waste my time with The Island!)
5. Trouble with the Curve: The movie's title alone should be a reason to avoid this clip, but Amy Adams' dialogue is calling out someone who literally has trouble with a curve.
6. Back to the Future: Doc is shown saying "Do you know what this means?" The very next line is "It means that this damn thing doesn't work at all!" (I can't be the only person in America who has most of this movie memorized.)
7. Tommy Boy: Chris Farley is referencing David Spade's character Richard, a snide jerk who no one likes. Read: only jerks know about Samsung televisions.
8. Cosmos: This isn't from a movie but a television show. Carl Sagan is discussing how Eratosthenes proved the Earth was round — because bigger curves produced bigger shadows. Granted, you don't need to know the history of astronomy to know that a curved television isn't useful to anyone who isn't sitting directly in front of it.
9. Dumb and Dumber: Finally, an appropriate clip! Jim Carrey's character is talking about falling in love. Beautiful, unrequited love. It might be more convincing if his character wasn't an idiot.
10. Jaws: First, Sam Neil sees a dinosaur. Now Roy Scheider witnesses a shark attack. Is this television dangerous?
11. Turbo: Another appropriate clip! "Juicy" may not be the best adjective for an electronic appliance, but the sentiment is right.
12. Lebron James: "Unbelievable!" says Marv Albert in this, the most fitting clip in the entire commercial. (I would not be surprised if the Heat went on to lose this game.)
13. Gravity: Next George Clooney asks what Sandra Bullock likes, and she says "the silence." Not a good endorsement for the television's sound system.
14. Screaming Goat: Internet videos? Because you need a $40K television to watch YouTube videos?
15. Godzilla: In theaters now! Another case of a monster created by technology. This is the fourth cautionary "technology will kill us all" clip in this commercial for an advanced technology. What, couldn't they find any soundbites to use from Terminator or Colossus: The Forbin Project?
16. Zoolander: Beware, Will Ferrell's Mustafa is a man who thinks trash is beautiful.
17. Field of Dreams: Sure, it's a great line, but it's a reference to nostalgia for an era that predated television. The line is weirdly out of place in a promotion for the future of televisions.

There's a 30-second cut of the same commercial, and it's much worse, eliminating all of the appropriate clips and keeping the ones they think people will recognize. Yeah, maybe I watch too many movies. But after seeing those commercials, I don't think that Samsung is really trying to reach people who watch movies.

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Most weekdays, I watch the evening news and Jeopardy!. The largest audience for these shows must be senile old people because all the demeaning advertisements are for high-cholesterol medicine or diabetes. Personally, I had no idea that diseases were "a big deal" until a television spokesmodel shared her fake life experiences with me.

What I realized this week was that these ads are like porn for old people. Not because of the pharmaceuticals they shamelessly promote, but because of their set design. These short fantasy films invariably showcase some pristine environment, either a deserted, snow-filed forest or a living room designed by Frank Gehry. Every new drug commercial is like a trip to a brave new world. They might as well get Rick Steves to narrate them.

Television is a visual medium, and advertisers know that most of their audience aren't going to pay attention to a laundry list of side-effects. However, those same viewers will get excited by clean white walls and furniture you can only buy in the MoMA gift shop. Their message: It's hard to clean your house, but take our drugs and it will always look clean to you! Who wouldn't get excited about that offer?

Hey, if taking Lyrica® will turn my life into an episode of Miami Vice meets The Golden Girls, sign me up. In the meantime, I'm going to get my jollies the old-fashioned way: by flipping through Ikea catalogs.

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Eight million dollars is a ridiculous price to pay for a televised commercial spot on any network at any time. But if the commercial keeps people talking for days afterwords, it just might be worth it. Obviously, I'm talking about Coca-Cola's "It's Beautiful" advertisement, featuring the song America the Beautiful sung in many languages. That seems to be anathema to a lot of people.

In 2014, where it is fashionable in certain circles to talk openly about what a bigot you are, the response to this ad was completely predictable. Coke was counting on it. The only way to justify such an advertising expense is to make it controversial. Some companies use sex or filth to stir the pot. Coca-Cola managed to elicit the same response just by having a bunch of people sing the praises of America in languages that most of the world can understand. How... decadent?

So far as I can tell, those who have complained about the ad seem to think that it is okay for "foreigners" to put Coke in their mouths but not the words to cherished American songs. Maybe they'd be okay with it if the singers had to pay for the opportunity. I wonder they'd consider eight million dollars to be a fair price?

You might think that those who were offended would be happy to have Coke focusing their marketing on those who embrace opposing viewpoints. Just last month, Consumer Reports reported that common caramel coloring, literally the third ingredient on a Coca-Cola label, has been found to contain illegally high concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals. Drinking Coke these days might kill you. Of course, you'd have to believe in science to trust that news. (And you probably need to be able to read to have seen it.)

I don't think this one advertisement is going to have any direct influence over how much Coca-Cola someone buys. However, if it makes someone who can hate someone else for singing about America in a language other than English not drink my favorite beverage, I can live with that.

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This year marks the 75th birthday of the Man of Steel, and we'll be celebrating his Diamond Jubilee all month with the 7th Annual Superman Month here at Wriphe.com!

I know that many of the people who read this blog aren't huge Superman fans. And that's okay. Some people think he's too powerful, and all that power makes him boring. As a child I thought he was too stiff and patronly. It wasn't until I got a little older and discovered how difficult it was to be a Good Person that I realized that Superman's greatest power was probably making being Good seem easy. I think that people who don't like Superman probably don't get that.

Later this month, Warner Brothers will release the 6th live-action Superman movie, Man of Steel. Certainly, I haven't seen it yet, but the trailers paint Superman as a brooding introvert, similar to the character seen in the excretable Superman Returns. Audiences didn't warm to Bryan Singer's overt morose-Christ-as-deadbeat-dad Superman, and unless new director Zack Snyder's sullen-day-laborer Superman learns to carry the weight of the world on his super-size shoulders with a wink and a nod George Reeves-style, I don't think this film will do much better. If Zack Snyder is known for anything, it's his slavish attention to detail, so here's hoping he learned a thing or two from Supermen of the past. I'm sure that Christopher Reeve's good-natured, charming smile played no small part in making Superman the biggest cinema hero of the 1970s.

No doubt, I'll be having more to say about Man of Steel later.

Befitting the natural retrospective that a 75th anniversary begets, Pop Matters has posted Kit MacFarlane's thoughtful essay "Superman and the War Against Anachronism," making the argument why the character of Superman is as relevant in 2013 as he was in 1938. I found it to be an enjoyable read. But then, I like Superman.

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Pay careful attention to what this fellow says motivated him to start taking Centrum Silver.

Not very enlightening, is it? Makes me wonder what else peer pressure makes that guy do. Drugs? BASE jumping? Facebook?

While the commercial didn't make me want to take Centrum "because everybody's doing it," it did make me curious about the study he mentions. For more information I turned to my old friend Google.

It looks like he is referencing a study published in November in the The Journal of the American Medical Association called "Multivitamins in the Prevention of Cancer in Men: The Physicians' Health Study II Randomized Controlled Trial." (Snappy title, no?) Forbes reviewed the study and included the following summary:

At this point about the only thing we can say with a high degree of confidence is that there is no large risk or benefit from taking a multivitamin. There may be a small benefit, no benefit, or even a small harm.

I suspect that is exactly what Centrum was trying to avoid saying in their advertisement. Mission accomplished!

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