Remember Iron Man?

You know, the little Marvel Studios franchise about a charming-yet-ironic 21st-century superhero played by Robert Downey Jr.? You might have heard about it. Considering the two films have cumulatively grossed over a billion dollars in worldwide box office sales so far, it’s highly probable that you’ve even seen it. You couldn’t miss it.

Oh?

Really?

Somehow you managed?

Well, no worries. Here. A quick crash course.

Iron Man (2008) trailer:

.

Notice the AC/DC track that opens the trailer? “Highway To Hell” has basically become the official theme song for Tony Stark. So much so, AC/DC even made a special Iron Man music video for the song with Marvel in conjunction with the release of the sequel:

.

.

.

.

And you think, seriously?? Is this actually happening?!

The Megamind wiki page says that originally Robert Downey Jr. himself was slated to be the voice of the supervillain (now voiced by Will Ferell), which would have, perhaps, made it more obvious this was supposed to be a parody. And, yes, DreamWorks is big on the satirizing of established literary  conventions and characters, like with Shrek poking fun at familiar fairy tale tropes, etc. Hence Megamind’s “borrowing” of the Superman origin myth, no doubt, and even the whole Unbreakable dealie-o with the story being driven from the villain’s point of view. But whereas with Shrek the satire was immediately apparent, Metro Man’s appropriation of not only Tony Stark’s charming-yet-ironic personality but his freakin theme music!? just comes across like a poorly-made knock-off.

Even Dimension Films’ genre spoof, Superhero Movie, suddenly seems less derivative:

.

.

What do you think? Megamind’s Metro Man: nuanced spoof or not-so-subtle imitation?

.
Aaaaaaanyway, here it is, the best advertising commentary you have ever read…..

taquito enlightenment:

Two nights ago I decided I wanted to get really, really, horribly, hungover-so-bad-that-you-seriously-question-everything-you’ve-ever-done-because-it-led-you-to-this wasted. And, somehow, I failed. Couldn’t get anyone on board, somehow. Ended up watching No Country for Old Men and turning in early. So yesterday I decided I was going to get wasted no matter what and I started drinking early and my memory is spotty at best after, say, 8pm, and thank god my wife doesn’t mind watching after me (or driving).

I’ve had worser hangovers, sure. That’s not the point. The point is that on the way to the French toastery, Simone stopped into a 7-11 to buy her wobbling, whining husband some Advil. I stayed outside. I couldn’t deal with fluorescent lighting, and the cold weather felt good. While Simone was inside, I saw this:

And my mind broke. I thought I was hallucinating, or that the world had gone crazy. There are so many things wrong with this ad that your mind basically won’t let you look at it for long enough to comprehend how intrinsically wrong the ad is. It’s too big for comprehension. You just scan it, think “Hey, taquitos!” and get on with your life. I must have looked hilarious, barely able to stand, in the cold, and engrossed in a shitty taquito ad.

Lets go over it, though, because holy shit.

• First of all, seriously what the fuck could Sherlock Holmes and taquitos possibly have to do with one another? There is exactly zero common ground. I promise you that there will not be a scene in the Sherlock Holmes flick where Downey turns to Jude Law and says, “Watson! Quickly! Hand me that taquito!” Maybe, maybe this would work for like coffee or something. But taquitos?
• Also, the tagline. “Get a clue.” A taquito clue? WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN. What should I be clued into? That taquitos cost $.99? Is that a sale price? Is it a good deal? I’ve never, as far as I can remember, bought a taquito, but I can’t imagine paying more than a dollar for one. Maybe if it was a bad pun: “Get a taqueCLUE.” Maybe then it would have some direction.
• Holy god are those things filled with smegma? They are straight up coming out of darkness and are full of spoiled cottage cheese or something. They are foreboding taquitos. They are frightening, and maybe even evil. They are not meant to be consumed. And yet their name is written in wacky font, which is in such sharp contrast to the somber feeling from the rest of the poster that it makes the whole thing feel psychotic. This juxtaposition is why serial killers dressed as clowns is infinitely more frightening than serial killers not dressed as clowns.
• Robert Downey Jr. is not just a smug asshole in the photo, he is a preternaturally smug asshole. This makes me question his motivation in selling me these taquitos. What is his ulterior motive? And where is the other half of Watson’s golf club?

This poster is like a zen koan. The longer you concentrate on it, the more likely you are to realize that there is no correct answer. There is no sense to be made. The flag flapping in the wind is as much my mind as my mind is a flag in the wind. There is no spoon. And standing there, sick, dehydrated, and weak-minded in the cold, drizzly, hungover morning, I came as close as I ever have to breaking through the doors of perception — and what I saw was Robert Downey Jr., looking like the supreme dickhole emperor of douche, trying to get me to eat smeggy, fried, 7-11 food. And I am afraid.

More Jason, if you can handle it, here.

Maybe this is a good idea if you’re deliberately trying to speak to that coveted douchebag demographic, but otherwise, this just comes off sounding like the advertising equivalent of thinking that knocking the popular kid will somehow earn you friends at school. You just end up sounding like a jerk.

Who Okay-ed this? If you don’t look closely you’d think this was an ad FOR Lexus. Comparing yourself to the competition (including reiterating their own messaging in your advertising) is NOT a branding strategy. Get your own identity, Buick.

Makes you want to sit at Lexus’s table at lunch just out of annoyance.

.

Taking over from the exiting party which has heretofore been responsible for bestowing the bless-age, and to whom all unanswered questions had previously been directed, the new ephemeral, universal, entity that apparently has $5,000-a-month jobs for ye that ask to receive, will forthwith be G-ogle.

Also, the Singularity is here.

You’ll be getting an email.

The use of religious language (particularly next to the image), was perhaps deliberately intended to appeal to consumers for whom religious faith is a big, defining aspect of their identity, and for whom this kind of  messaging could therefore make the ad specifically relevant. I don’t know what the statistics are on Christian stay-at-home moms, but I imagine the numbers would make this approach worthwhile.

(Ironically, if we’re gonna get biblical, the first Commandment is actually all about God insisting that there’s only one of him, and in case it wasn’t clear, Commandment #2 is basically, “and ye best not forget it.”)

Anyway… who’s got ideas for how we can rebrand Saturnalia…

I know the Trojan “Evolve” Campaign has been going on for a while now, but just recently something occurred to me that I hadn’t quite realized about it before.

The campaign started out last June, with the premiere of a commercial featuring women being hit on by a bar full of anthropomorphized pigs. It’s only when one of the pigs finally shuffles off to the men’s room, and purchases a condom, that he is transformed into a hot guy, and returns to the girl he was chatting up to find that she’s now suddenly totally interested in him.

In addition to the ad, whose message at the end reads: “Evolve. Use a condom every time,” the campaign also includes a website, evolveoneevolveall.com, driven by celebrity and user-generated videos dealing with the subject of sexual health, the Trojan Evolve National Tour, a mobile, experiential campaign “Raising awareness and stimulating dialogue about America’s sexual health in towns and campuses across the country,” radio ads that deal with STDs as Christmas gifts (”How about Herpes? It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” / “Would you like Chlamydia wrapped?” / “No, I’ll give it to her unwrapped.”) and more. All of this, hinging on the word “Evolve.”

“Evolve is a wake-up call to change attitudes about using condoms and, on a larger scale, the way we think and talk about sexual health in this country,” said Jim Daniels, Trojan’s VP of marketing. As Andrew Adam Newman pointed out in the New York Times piece, “Pigs With Cellphones, but No Condoms,” the campaign is an evolution for Trojan itself:

While Mr. Daniels does not disparage the company’s double-entendre-heavy “Trojan Man” campaign from the 1990s or similar Trojan Tales Web site today, the tone of the company’s promotions is moving away from “Beavis and Butthead” and toward “Sex and the City.”

“The ‘Evolve’ ad does a nice job of being humorous, but it’s also a serious call to action,” Mr. Daniels said. “The pigs are a symbol of irresponsible sexual behavior, and are juxtaposed with the condom as a responsible symbol of respect for oneself and one’s partner.”

Newman suggest that “The perennial challenge for Trojan and its competitors is the perception that [condoms] are unpleasant to use.” But I think, for a company that, according to A. C. Nielsen Research, has 75 percent of the condom market (Durex is second with 15 percent, LifeStyles third with 9 percent), Trojan oughtta have really known better than that.

“Over the last few years conservative groups in President Bush’s support base have declared war on condoms,” wrote Nicholas D. Kristof, in an opinion piece, also in the New York Times:

I first noticed this campaign last year, when I began to get e-mails from evangelical Christians insisting that condoms have pores about 10 microns in diameter, while the AIDS virus measures only about 0.1 micron. This is junk science (electron microscopes haven’t found these pores), but the disinformation campaign turns out to be a far-reaching effort to discredit condoms, squelch any mention of them in schools and discourage their use abroad.

Then there are the radio spots in Texas: ”Condoms will not protect people from many sexually transmitted diseases.”

A report by Human Rights Watch quotes a Texas school official as saying: ”We don’t discuss condom use, except to say that condoms don’t work.”

Last month at an international conference in Bangkok, U.S. officials demanded the deletion of a recommendation for ”consistent condom use” to fight AIDS and sexual diseases. So what does this administration stand for? Inconsistent condom use?

Kristof was posing this question back in 2003, while he could still add, “So far President Bush has not fully signed on to the campaign against condoms, but there are alarming signs that he is clambering on board.”

In the now almost six years since, the very subject of contraception has become as politicized as abortion, and the emphasis on condoms’ ineffectiveness has become a standard component of Abstinence-Only sex education. (You knew about that, right?) It’s even begun to affect mass media. In a written response to Trojan about why they would not air the pigs-with-cell-phones ad, Fox (which had aired prior Trojan ads) said “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.” CBS refused to air it, too, and didn’t even offer further comment. Meanwhile, as paid advertising for condoms is being turned away, in the past few months I’ve seen at least two TV shows where characters made a point of mentioning that condoms don’t work: Fringe, and The Practice–a show about DOCTORS for cryin’ out loud! (Clearly, “First do no harm” must not apply to the practice of TV medicine.)

As a teenager of the 90’s, I’ve never known a world where AIDS didn’t exist, and where condoms were anything but an unequivocal necessity for “safe sex” (also a 90’s-ism that seems to no longer be in use, replaced instead by the millennial “sexual health crisis”). Sure, no one was going around preaching that condoms are 100% fail-proof, but in the decade when Magic Johnson and Greg Louganis both came out as HIV-positive, I can’t imagine any TV program deliberately broadcasting (or being allowed to get away with it), the kind of message that says, “Condoms don’t work. So why bother using them at all?”

As of 2006 the birth rate among 15 to 19 year-olds in the United States has risen for the first time since 1991 (that was the year of Johnson’s announcement). While teenage sex rates have risen since 2001, condom use has dropped since 2003. In other words, more teenagers are having more sex, and using less and less condoms in the process. But then, Jamie Lynn Spears or Bristol Palin could have told you that.

And so it is we find ourselves in a situation where Church & Dwight—the consumer products company that owns Trojan—is taking on what should have been the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services. Teenage or not, the U.S. apparently has the highest rates of unintended pregnancy (three million per year) and sexually transmitted infections (19 million per year) of any Western nation. (What the fuck?!)

“Right now in the U.S. only one in four sex acts involves using a condom,” Says Daniels. “Our goal is to dramatically increase use.” Then what in God’s name convinced the Kaplan Thaler Group, the New York advertising agency that created the “Evolve” campaign, that aligning condoms with evolution was the way to go about achieving this?

Cuz here’s the thing: The majority of Americans do not believe in evolution!

(CRAP!)

In fact, according to 2006 research in Science Magazine, out of 33 European countries where peolpe were asked to respond “true”, “false”, or “whuuuu?” to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” the only country that scored lower on belief in evolution than the US is Turkey (Also what the fuck?!)

Disturbing as this unfortunate reality may be, this is the contemporary American Landscape, and pushing Trojan as “Helping America evolve, one condom at a time,” in the face of it, seems ludicrous.

Hell, why not just call the campaign “Darwin’s theory of contraception,” while you’re at it?

The biggest threat to condoms is not the perception that they don’t feel good. It’s not even condom fatigue. The biggest threat to condoms is the Christian Right’s propaganda that they don’t work, and the government’s, and much of media’s, wholehearted complicity. And it’s the same people who are waging a war on contraception that don’t like Evolution either. I don’t know about the ultimate impact that the Evolve campaign is effecting (or not), but in my view, if, as Daniels says, Trojan’s focus is on growing the market beyond the–pardon the irony here–already converted, and getting more people to use condoms, I think a completely different slogan/campaign theme would be the way to go.

I keep envisioning some situation where it’s like, they actually had some really kick-ass, slick-style design, and a tag-line that wasn’t written by Tarzan, but it was so high-concept and mind-blowing that it got stuck in endless rounds of focus groups, and approvals and whatnot, and as everyone was scrambling around, the deadline to get the final ad design to wherever it is that billboards and bus-wraps get printed was fast approaching, until it was only, like, minutes away, and finally some executive at 20th Century Fox got some assistant to open up MS-Paint and just slap the thing together, and clicked “Send.”

It’s so unimaginative and uninspired, and so blatant its sheer simplicity actually makes it totally meaningless. 1996 called, it wants its rejected Independence Day poster design back. In fact, so do I Robot, I am Legend, and a bunch of other future/apocalypse Will Smith movies. For that matter, every aliens/robots/zombies/mutants/monsters movie, ever, does too. At a time when our options for global crisis threats could not feel any less extra-terrestrial or non man-made, this just seems so irrelevant. Especially for a movie where the alien looks and talks exactly like Keanu Reeves, and says totally climate-crisis-compliant stuff like, “If the Earth dies, you die. If you die, the Earth survives.”

There! Look! That could have been such a better tag-line. I mean, anything could, really.

This ad is such a boring disaster that no one has even bothered to take a photo of it, or scan it or upload it or anything. It’s actually almost impossible to find any image of its lameness online anywhere.

Almost.

What you CAN find, however, is this:

Right on the heels of my previous post, about the Death Race/alcohol ad “PSA” for “Race,” this one mashes up The Day The Earth Stood Still with 90210, and is just as awesome! Not to mention, packs a message that’s actually relevant in the 21st century.

Well played, billboard mashup artist.

Ps. In the previous post, I was speculating that this kind of thing couldn’t be an accident. I am now completely convinced.

Billboard mashup is so the new street art. Word.