Zombies capture visceral fears of Ford motor company

By Dan Brooks in advertising 7 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GW9bLQa_Xo&feature=player_embedded

The video above is Ford’s attempt to sell the 2011 Fiesta via an advertisement suggesting that, in certain situations, keyless entry might prevent your being consumed by the soulless husk of your dead grandmother. Caution: zombies, and surprisingly gross makeup/realistic ligament-crunching sounds for a car commercial. If you’re like me, you consider zombies by far the most frightening monster western culture has ever come up with (second most frightening monster,) to the point where watching Shaun of the Dead made it impossible to sleep for the next 48 hours. You are probably not like me. Humorous or at least tongue-in-cheek zombie products—Zombieland, The Zombie Survival Guide, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—far outnumber tongue-on-floor zombie products in contemporary culture. America seems to have decided that living corpses bent on surrounding and then mindlessly forcing their way into your boarded-up house so that you wake each morning to the sound of scratching, scratching, until finally they eat your face and ears have at least some camp value. Zombies are hip.

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Is it just impossible to sell a cell phone or what?

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 6 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfpAkNyHAtQ&feature=player_embedded

Everyone’s favorite Meghan Gallagher sent me the foregoing ad for the new Microsoft Kin, which promises to do for cell phones what Bing did for internet search engines. If you’re wondering, the song is by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, a band I liked without reservation before they sold their best work to a phone commercial and forced me to yet again consider how much of my aesthetic taste is aesthetic taste and how much is just contrary esotericism.* Anywhom, the ad has provoked an extremely small firestorm of controversy, due to allegations by Consumer Reports that it promotes sexting. You remember sexting, right? It’s the totally real thing that teenagers do all the time nowadays, when they’re not cyberbullying or attending rainbow parties. I quote intrepid CR reporter Mike Gikas: “The video…includes a downright creepy sequence in which a young man is shown putting a Kin under his shirt and apparently snapping a picture of one of his naked breasts. The breast is then shown on the phone’s screen, just before the guy apparently sends it to someone.” Needless to say, Gikas did not get away with referring to a man’s bare chest as his “breasts,” or, worse, “the breast,” and comments-section hilarity ensued. Despite the obvious sophistication of its reporter, the CR piece prompted Microsoft to re-edit the spot so as to remove the breaxting, as well as change the Kin’s slogan from “Send a grainy picture of your breasts or breast!” to “We’re all in this together!” Except, of course, those of us who are peering at our phones. Which brings us to Combat! blog’s question of the day: Is it just impossible to sell a cell phone or what?

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Verizon Droid commercial in your face, completely baffling

By Dan Brooks in advertising, consumerism, corporatocracy 5 Comments
Previously the most terrifying advertisement involving phones

Previously the most terrifying advertisement involving phones

First of all, those of you especially perceptive readers may have noticed that Combat! blog now contains ads. Right now, for example, it contains a big, full-color ad urging you to fight against the government takeover of health care, which I think is frankly hilarious. Also right now, the ads are completely effing up my layout, because I haven’t yet determined how to configure them properly. We should be working that out shortly. I’m going to be honest with you: I was vehemently against putting advertisements on the site, but the five unpaid interns who actually write the posts in Combat! blog and answer the Combat! phone while I’m out getting illicit massages outvoted me. Now they’re getting paid those sweet sweet Google AdSense bucks, and you—just like you do everywhere else—will have to start averting your eyes from certain portions of Combat! blog so as not be hypnotized by genius marketing. Finally—and this is actually very important—DO NOT JUST CLICK ON THE ADS A BUNCH OF TIMES. Seriously—that won’t help me, and Google will only realize what you’ve done and ban me from AdSense, as they did Sarah Aswell when I tried to help her in the same fashion last year. Don’t click on the ads unless you’re actually interested in buying gold or night vision goggles or whatever. Also also, I’ve been screwing around with the sidebars, so now you can see a live-updated list of the most recent comments on the left side of the page, which today features my exchange with a dude who is strongly against the interracial kiss in that Levi’s commercial. So it looks like my grandpa finally figured out DSL.

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New Levi’s commercial offers hope to dirty, half-underwater America

By Dan Brooks in consumerism, counterculture, fake cool, hipsters, oppositional culture 25 Comments
Woman, you also need a shirt.

Bitch, you also need a shirt.

If you’ve recently been to a movie targeted at 18- to 34-year-olds—Zombieland, say, or Couples Retreat, which are basically the same movie when you think about it—you’ve probably seen thew new “Go Forth” line of Levi’s commercials. The campaign involves a variety of spots for film, print and television, but the one I like best opens on a flickering neon sign half-submerged in floodwater. The sign reads, of course, “America,” and the ad proceeds—over a wax-cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reading his famous poem of the same name—to show us a series of slums, riots and scenes of rural poverty, intercut with shots of dirty children/manchildren running around in blue jeans, ending with the gunshot crack of fireworks and the admonition, “Go forth.” As usual, by “like best” I mean “am most disturbed by.” Video after the break:

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