Craig McNamara writes

We referenced this ad campaign in an earlier post , but it really deserves its own entry. This memorable/notorious American Airlines campaign appeared back in 1971, at the behest of National Airlines'  Lewis Maytag  who sought to modernize the airline and the image of its stewardesses.  (Yes, they were still known as stewardesses back then.) At the time, airline advertising had frequently based their messages on the friendliness and attentiveness of their stewardesses, but previous efforts tended more toward the chauvinistic end of sexism spectrum, treating them more like Ladies Of The Air than ladies of the night: (Despite the caveman ethos of the headline and illustration, if you click on the ad to enlarge it and read the copy, you'll see it's actually about men being so beguiled by their stewardesses that they often took them for wives -- after first mistaking wives for servants, I suppose.) But now, with the sexual revolution and women's liberation in full swing (an...

You'd be hard-pressed to find a less ambitious name for a cereal than Product 19.  There's  no clever allusion here to the cereal having nineteen vitamins, nineteen ingredients or even nineteen spoonfuls per bowl.  Apparently, it's nothing more than what the name suggests -- the nineteenth product that Kellogg's marketed back in 1967. In all likelihood, Product 19 was the code name for the cereal while in development and for some reason, it jumped to the top of the short list of potential names.  Maybe focus groups just thought it sounded somehow more important and more adult than their kid-brands like Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops.  Maybe Product 19 sounded like a close cousin of their Special K.  Maybe Kelloggs execs just liked it 'cause the name told grocers where to place it on their shelves.   If the name alone wasn't apathetic enough, in 1971, it got saddled with one of the laziest, dreariest headlines ever in cereal advertising.  Well, I'll say this:...

"Comedy is tragedy plus time." That's how Alan Alda's character explained it In Woody Allen's movie, "Crimes and Misdemeanors." As an example, he used jokes about Lincoln's assassination, but I suppose he could have just as easily used advertising's frequent riffing on the sinking of the Titanic. That billboard, of course, more clever than disrespectful.  The Audi ad is more of the "hindsight is 20/20" genre: Similar to the ad above, this one from Citroen actually posits an alternate history, where the Titanic apparently avoided the iceberg and completed her journey, arriving in New York City (and thus sparing us from this overwrought 1997 epic ): Considering the more than 1,500 people who lost their lives on that early morning in 1912, you can't help but wonder if other more recent events of such catastrophic magnitude will ever reach such iconic and desensitized status. Can you imagine the following ad, for instance, with the ...

I get the point -- that this is a MiniCooper unlike the other models -- but why any advertising manager would want to imply their car is a bastard is beyond me. What's doubly curious about this recent ad that appeared on the back cover of this week's Entertainment Weekly is how -- with the same background black and use of silver -- it almost seems to be intended as one big spread, an odd juxtapostion of the innuendo-laden headline with the cover blurb mentioning singer Usher's "wild past." NOTE: Maybe you've noticed the new title for my blog. I've been trying to come up with something that better encompasses the type of postings I specialize in, and this seems pretty good to me. Same web address, though -- no need to change bookmarks (you have bookmarked this site, right?).

Concluding our special few days of Fun and Games: Today: Visual brain-teasers. Click on the ads below to enlarge them and try to make sense of what you see. Okay, fun time's over. Back to serious (and by that I mean, seriously entertaining) postings tomorrow. See you then!

Continuing our special few days of Fun & Games: Today: Dizzying optical illusions. Click on the ads to enlarge them and hang on to your desk tightly.

It's Fun & Games Week here at Craig McNamara's advertising blog! Since it's a holiday week, let's take a break from the arduous work dissecting ads and just relax for a few days. Today: Lose yourself in some mazes. Click on the ads to enlarge them and go to it.