Because of this kind of crap:
Click to see original
But maybe I’m misunderstanding why they all do it: instead of trying to warn me off from illegal activity, perhaps they’re actually trying to get me so irritated that I’ll go ahead and pirate it — and then they’ll swoop! It’s a society-wide legal entrapment scheme!
H/T to BoingBoing.
The much-criticized, so-called unCanadian “Own the Podium” dream is done, stick a fork in it:
Own The Podium has officially gone from a winning blueprint to wishful thinking.
Chris Rudge, CEO of the Canadian Olympic Committee, conceded Monday the goal of finishing first in the medal standings at the Vancouver Games is not going to happen.
“There’s going to be a lot of questions asked about Own The Podium,” Rudge acknowledged. “We will eviscerate this program in every detail when we’re finished. It’s painful to go into the autopsy while the patient is still alive and kicking.
“We’ll quantify the success of the program in terms of total medals after the Games are over. We’re still working as hard as we can to make sure these athletes get the support they need and know we are behind them.”
The Canadian public invested heavily in OTP. Of the $117 million invested in athletes, $66 million of it was taxpayer dollars. VANOC, the organizing committee for the Games, covered most of the remainder through corporate sponsorships.
Canada finished Monday with 10 medals (5-4-1), in fifth place and far behind the Americans with 25. The Germans were second with 21 followed by Norway with 14 and Russia with 11.
In some ways I’m surprised that nobody is winding their collective watches over the “dearth” of bronze medal performances by Canadian athletes: of the 10 medals won so far, only one of them was bronze. If you’re looking for silly things to worry about, isn’t that a good placeholder?
Update: Adriana Barton talks about the odd phenomena where bronze medal winners are often happier than silver medallists.
Third-place winners have upward thoughts (“at least I won”) that increase satisfaction, researchers have found, whereas those who come in second tend to have downward “if only” thoughts that decrease happiness.
Who is Audi trying to sell their little green Panzerkampfwagens to? Folks who think the ad wasn’t Gorewellian enough:
“The ad only makes sense if it’s aimed at people who acknowledge the moral authority of the green police,” writes Grist magazine’s David Roberts on the Huffington Post. The target audience, according to Roberts, is men who want to “do the right thing.” He’s certainly right that the ad isn’t aimed at people (whom he childishly mocks as “teabaggers”) who worry that their liberties are being eroded.
But the message is hardly “do the right thing.”
To me, the target demographic is a certain subset of spineless, upscale white men (all the perps in the ad are affluent white guys) who just want to go with the flow. In that sense, the Audi ad has a lot in common with those execrable MasterCard commercials. Targeting the same demographic, those ads depicted hapless fathers being harangued by their children to get with the environmental program. MasterCard’s tagline: “Helping Dad become a better man: Priceless.”
The difference is that MasterCard’s ads were earnest, creepy, diabetes-inducing treacle. Audi’s ad not only fails to invest the greens with moral authority, it concedes that the carbon cops are out of control and power-hungry (in a postscript scene, the Green Police pull over real cops for using Styrofoam cups). But, because resistance is futile when it comes to the eco-Borg, you might as well get the best car you can.
H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the link.
Lorne Gunter also appreciated Audi’s “Green Police” Super Bowl ad:
Far and away the cleverest ad from this year’s Super Bowl was Audi’s “Green Police” commercial for its A3 TDI clean diesel sedan, which is greencar.com’s 2010 Green Car of the Year. It’s easy to find on YouTube and well worth the search. The 60-second spot is a brilliant send up of the excesses of the environmental movement, so brilliant that green and lefty blogs have been angrily denouncing the ad ever since it aired on Sunday during the NFL Championship game.
Too bad nobody told the carmaker it’s OK to laugh at its own production. The company’s timid explanation is that Green Police are “caricatures” designed to gently steer people through “a myriad of decisions in their quest to become more environmentally responsible citizens.” (I am at this moment sticking out my tongue and making a poking motion toward the back of my throat with the index and middle fingers of my left hand.)
To the soundtrack of a re-recording of Cheap Trick’s 1979 hit song Dream Police, the ad features jumped-up little eco cops — often wearing fetching shorts and driving Segway-like, three-wheeled, enviro scooters — harassing ordinary people about the green morality of their everyday consumer choices.
On its website, Audi insists its ecocops are “not here to judge, merely to guide,” yet the first scene of the commercial features a young man paying for his groceries who chooses plastic over paper. Suddenly, a Green Police officer springs up from behind, slams the shopper’s face into the price scanner and exclaims “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy.”
Yep, that’s both gentle and non-judgmental, alright.
Audi’s ad is an incredibly useful example of how a message can be interpreted in radically different fashion by different audiences. To many in the green movement, Audi is poking fun at their expense and minimizing the danger to the environment posed by allowing people to make their own decisions. To many libertarians, Audi is illustrating the kind of dictatorial control over peoples’ lives that many in the green movement believe to be essential “for our own good”.
At least, for Canadians watching the game on CTV, we didn’t get to see most of these ads, including Audi’s brief trip into the very near future:
Audi’s effort won both best and worst titles from the readers at the Wall Street Journal.
Update: Nick Gillespie also thought this ad to be quite noteworthy:
. . . the great ad in last night’s game was, IMO, the Audi “Green Police” spot, and not simply because it showcased a classic Cheap Trick tune to astonishingly great (read: totally nostalgic for late-era boomers who grew up thinking Robin Zander was cool and Bun E. Carlos was an animatron and Rick Nielsen was crazy funny and that Tom Petersson was, like Kurt Von Trapp in The Sound of Music or Jan Brady in The Brady Bunch, well, I don’t know but he must have done something to be there) advantage. No, it was also right up to the moment I realized that it was a pitch for a car that I will never purchase, it seemed like a Mike Judge vision of a future that is almost the present (finally, a reason to thank SCOTUS for flipping the coin toward George W. Bush in 2000).
Will it move cars? Who knows. It moves . . . minds. Which rarely come with the sort of 100,000 mile warranty that is standard even on overpriced, underpowered, and breakdown prone vehicles like Audis.
Some interesting comments to Nick’s post:
grrizzly|2.8.10 @ 9:04AM|#
Imagine a Holocaust movie. Jews are in concentration camps. Regularly sent to gas chambers. Suddenly one man receives documents proving he is not a jew. He’s set free. He walks away. Happy End.
This is what the ad is.iowahawk|2.8.10 @ 9:10AM|#
I thought it was the best Super Bowl ad of all time, and not for the reasons Audi was hoping for. Hilarious, creepy and upbeat all at the same time. And the punchline: The sponsor (Audi) merrily approves of the dystopian fascism. My jaw hit the ground.Enjoy Every Sandwich|2.8.10 @ 9:16AM|#
When I saw the ad I was thinking “this will give Al Gore a hard-on, assuming he still gets those”. It’s a left-wing dream world.PM770|2.8.10 @ 11:20AM|#
Right. I think Audi probably owes Al one clean television.Tulpa|2.8.10 @ 11:28AM|#
It’s called extremely skilled advertising. Give different messages to different target audiences, hopefully a message that makes them want to buy your product.
I looked at it and liked the (obviously ironic) portrayal of the Green Police, while your average lefty is saying “Yeah man, they should totally send swat teams to people’s houses looking for light bulbs!”
Update, 9 February: Added the tag GreenGestapo, as this appears to be trending in the blogosphere . . . I expect to have further use for the tag in the future.
Update, 2 February 2014: The original video has been removed, so here’s another link instead:
And Mark Steyn‘s original comments, recently republished:
A man asks for a plastic bag at the supermarket checkout. Next thing you know, his head’s slammed against the counter, and he’s being cuffed by the Green Police. “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy,” sneers the enviro-cop, as the perp is led away. Cut to more Green Police going through your trash, until they find … a battery! “Take the house!” orders the eco-commando. And we switch to a roadblock on a backed-up interstate, with the Green Police prowling the lines of vehicles to check they’re in environmental compliance.
If you watched the Super Bowl, you most likely saw this commercial. As my comrade Jonah Goldberg noted, up until this point you might have assumed it was a fun message from a libertarian think-tank warning of the barely veiled totalitarian tendencies of the eco-nanny state. Any time now, you figure, some splendidly contrarian type — perhaps Clint lui-même in his famous Gran Torino — will come roaring through flipping the bird at the stormtroopers and blowing out their tires for good measure. But instead the Greenstapo stumble across an Audi A3 TDI. “You’re good to go,” they tell the driver, and, with the approval of the state enforcers, he meekly pulls out of the stalled traffic and moves off. Tagline: “Green has never felt so right.”
So the message from Audi isn’t “You are a free man. Don’t bend to the statist bullies,” but “Resistance is futile. You might as well get with the program.”
Strange. Not so long ago, car ads prioritized liberty. Your vehicle opened up new horizons: Gitcha motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure. … To sell dull automobiles to people who lived in suburban cul de sacs, manufacturers showed them roaring round hairpin bends, deep into forests, splashing through rivers, across the desert plain, invariably coming to rest on the edge of a spectacular promontory on the roof of the world offering a dizzying view of half the planet. Freedom!
Update, 9 February, 2017: The original and revised video links have all gone sour, so here’s a current version of the ad, triggered by Audi’s latest Super Bowl ad fiasco.
Amusingly, the tag line shown at the end of the commercial, Audi: Truth in Engineering, is proven to be false by the company’s systematic cheating on emission testing software in their cars (being part of the Volkswagon group, where the cheating was first discovered in their diesel models).
In late 2015, Volkswagen Group became embroiled in an emissions cheating scandal that also involved its Audi brand. Delicious irony — here was a brand that had touted itself a leader in environmental stewardship only to be unmasked as a fraud of epic proportions.
As late as November 2016, new revelations about the extent of Audi’s emissions scam were still coming to light. It was revealed that the scandal was not limited to diesel-engine cars, as previously thought, but included gasoline-powered Audi models as well.
So it was a curious choice for Audi to pat itself on the shoulder for yet another politically correct stand — pay equality for women — when its credibility was torn to shreds in its core competency: automobile manufacturing. Perhaps Audi thought this would provide good cover from their credibility woes, or perhaps they banked on an inattentive public with amnesia. A pretty good bet, I admit. But I have a long memory and a nose for hypocrisy.
So what is the answer to George Clooney’s questions? What should he tell his daughter?
I would tell her (and mine) that once a person has lied to you, then you can no longer trust that person. That if the person is truly repentant, they will find a way to make it up to you and rebuild the trust. But if they they try to distract from the extent of their dishonesty, you might as well put that relationship in the junkyard.
AdRants has a bit of fun with Apple’s choice of name for its latest rapture-of-the-nerds tech device:
Apple Introduces New Feminine Protection Product: The iPad
According to an explosion of tweets following Steve Jobs’ announcement of the iPad, the device’s new name isn’t going over so well:
– For now the iPad’s really exciting, but wait until they release the iTampon
– iPad: You only need to plug it in once a month
– Wow – its the iPad. Wonder if it comes in 2 sizes (maxi and mini)
– I guess it’s Apple’s “time of the month”
– The Apple iPad: for all your heavy (work) flow days
– Our little iPod has hit womanhood
– To recap: the iPad will come with an iRag (to keep it clean) + some iBruprofen (to keep it working smoothly) + iWings (protection plan)
H/T to Virginia Postrel, who wrote “And so the jokes begin…Apple needs more female marketers”.
Update: Francis Turner sent a link to the official announcement photo.
More serious coverage of the new product from The Register.
Tiger Woods may be invisible at the moment, but the public reaction to his troubles appears to be contributing to further financial trouble for the PGA:
The troubles facing the professional-golf tour without Tiger Woods will be on display when the annual tournament tees off at the Torrey Pines course in San Diego this week: Ticket sales are down, fewer hospitality tents have been sold, and the title sponsor had to be lured with a cut-rate price.
It is a harbinger of what the PGA Tour may be without its most popular player. Three of the Tour’s 46 tournaments scheduled for 2010 don’t have a lead corporate sponsor, nor do 13 of next year’s tournaments. Television viewership of the first two events of this year’s Tour tumbled.
In past years, Mr. Woods, the game’s most popular player, usually skipped the first three tournaments and began play on the San Diego tournament’s seaside course, perched on scenic cliffs overlooking the Pacific. As Mr. Woods’s opener, San Diego became one of the highest-profile early events of each PGA Tour season. This year, Mr. Woods, caught up in a sex scandal, is on leave from the game, with no word on when he will return. Without his unmatched star power, the value of Tour sponsorships, through which companies cover most tournament prizes, could be sharply lower. And without a rich flow of cash from those sponsorships, the PGA Tour’s economic model is cracked.
This shows the danger inherent in having a single, iconic representative. If the icon stumbles, it has a severe knock-on effect.
It’s been done often enough, but apparently still works every time. I’m talking about generating huge amounts of press coverage by creating a highly controversial ad (whether you ever intend to run it or not), and allowing the media to publicize it for you. This is Air New Zealand’s offering:
Here’s some of the free publicity, by way of The Economist and The Telegraph.
I think this does not go nearly far enough. Clearly the company behind Red Bull should be closely regulated as it is only a matter of time before someone drinks one and jumps off a building and falls to their death because contrary to their claims, Red Bull does not in fact ‘give you wings’.
In short, as people who are not ‘experts’ are moronic halfwits incapable of telling reality from advertising hype, we must simply turn over all aspects of our life to government approved
self-important technocratic prigsqualified ‘experts’ who can determine what we are permitted to see.We must ‘do it for the children’ of course.
Perry de Havilland, “All your images belong to us”, Samizdata, 2009-11-09
The Guardian reports on the umpteen-thousandth demonstration that controversial material gets more column inches than good music:
San Francisco band Girls have made sure their music video won’t be played on MTV — by filling it with “gay porn”. That’s how they describe the “Hardcore XXX Edit” of their Lust for Life video, which features phallus-flaunting footage that is itself a toned-down version of the original idea they sent to their label.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the group’s new video is not safe for work, children or anybody with a delicate disposition. Over the song’s joyous shuffle, there are nude girls in bathtubs, men putting on lipstick and, er, singing into penises. Certainly it won’t be showing on MTV any time soon, but according to guitarist Chet “JR” White, the Hardcore XXX Edit is “not even the [real] hardcore XXX version”. “It got cut,” he told Pedestrian.tv. “I’m kind of upset [the original] didn’t get put out, actually.”
“There’s a gay porn version we were really pushing for that was incredible, like nothing else. But at the same time, it’s really beautiful — about two people who love each other. We’re from San Francisco, so it’s not a surprise to us.”
The only difference with this manufactured “controversy” is that they’re not even trying to pretend that it’s anything other than a publicity grab. In a way, that’s kind of refreshing.
Behold the culinary crime that Microsoft is committing in Japan:
Microsoft is celebrating the release of Windows 7 in Japan with a Burger King promotion for the Windows 7 Whopper: Seven patties stacked on top of one another in one sandwich. Given that Microsoft has been criticized for releasing top-heavy, bloated operating systems, this could be one of its worst promotional ideas ever.
The Windows 7 Whopper weighs in with about 1,000 calories, and likely packs enough cholesterol to require immediate surgery for anyone foolhardy enough to try eating one. It’s a full five inches thick, and costs the equivalent of $8.50.
Jim Davidson watches the new GM television ad . . . and pukes:
They used to advertise “that great GM feeling.” Nowadays it seems more like “that sinking GM feeling.” Case in point, car-neophyte Ed Whiteacre’s current ad campaign.
“Car for car when compared to the competition, we win. Simple as that,” he says in this bright new ad promoting his complete ignorance about automobiles.
Sure, the white haired old man looks alert and sentient as he parades through a nearly empty show room with strange other people wandering around not selling any cars. But the words make no sense.
Car for car when compared to the competition, GM sucks. And they gave up competing on cars when they went for the enormous taxpayer bailout. It isn’t simple as winning in a head to head car making competition. Remember? GM played that game and they lost. They lost all of their money, so they demanded all of our money.
Later he lies again, “So we’re putting our money where our mouth is.” No, you bastard, you stinking lackey of big government, you filthy thief, you aren’t. GM tried putting their money where their mouth is, and they lost. They went under. So now they are putting our money where their mouth is. He isn’t a nice old man, he’s an evil old liar.
After yesterday’s indecent-in-Alabama wine label, today’s outrage is a German candy wrapper that has raised someone’s ire in Britain. Here’s the Telegraph report:
Simon Simpkins, a father of two, said he was shocked at the “pornographic” poses when he bought the sour candy for his children Benjamin and Ofelia.
Mr Simpkins, of Pontefract, West Yorks, told The Sun: “The lemon and lime are locked in what appears to be a carnal encounter.
“The lime, who I assume to be the gentleman in this coupling, has a particularly lurid expression on his face. I demanded to see the shop manager and, during a heated exchange, my wife became quite distressed and had to sit down in the car park.”
H/T to Christian T. for the link. Roger Henry quickly commented:
I can understand why his wife became distressed and had to sit down in the car-park. Probably overcome with hysterics after watching her husband make an absolute public prat of himself.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Unlike in the original story, this isn’t going to be just a ploy to get advertisers to help fund the first moon shot:
“If you’re interested, the logo of your choice could go lunar for as little as the minimum $46,000 bid. (Hurry! Bidding started two days ago.)”
Update, 24 July: For a very interesting discussion of the Apollo program, and the design choices taken, see Charles Stross’s blog post. Good stuff (even if I’m way late in linking to it).
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