Be a real man

So that was Easter, that time of the year when we celebrate the anniversary of baby Jesus being nailed to a chocolate cross. Confusement reigns Chez Chimp at the almost complete lack of any religious reference on the packaging of the seemingly hundreds of chocolate eggs consumed by the three small inheritors of my DNA.
Here's my personal favourite, received by Chimplet #1, which appears to condone anal rape while delivering a confusing message about eating raw eggs and being a REAL man. Somewhere there is a holy scripture which records the religiously significant event of the holy prophet John Cena packing Gnarls Barkley's fudge in a wrestling ring, presumably after eating a fortifying man-meal of raw eggs and that staple of the macho diet, jelly-filled mallows.
Very odd.

See also: Wrestlers have nipples removed by Jetpack (ouch)

Nutters in yeti suits

The Observer newspaper - the often-wrong, Blairite Sunday version of the Guardian (beloved of the corduroy-wearing Crouch End crowd) - has some cracking advertising.

It's really a spoof from Armando Ianucci

Bad Taste News

Anyone who has read the excellent expose of how the British media operates in Nick Davies' Flat Earth News will not be surprised at how those lazy sods at Sky News tried to fill space on their website by asking viewers to send in their photos following the recent storms that hit the UK. The BBC are guilty of this too.
Let rip the scamps with bad taste and Photoshop. Private Eye explains:

Another week, another victory for citizen journalism at Sky News… As storms battered Britain at the beginning of last week, presenters on the rolling news channel begged viewers to “help us put together the fullest national picture possible” by sending in their photos of the damage.
Hundreds took up the invitation – including posters on the Football 365 web forum, who, finding out that such pisspoor efforts as a shot of a watering can (“the wind blew it round all night”) were being featured on the Sky website at yourphotos.sky.com, rose to the challenge and began to send in increasingly outlandish scenes created using photoshop and snaps lifted mostly from the rival BBC website.
By 11.30am on Tuesday, despite a solemn promise that “your photo will be checked by moderators before it can be displayed”, the 408 photographs in Sky’s “Wild Weather” gallery included a shot of a young Norman Wisdom dismayed by a car crushed by a tree; footballer Carlos Valderama in flooded New Orleans captioned “it’s windy here in Widnes”; a still from environmental disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow captioned “Whitley Bay”; a suspicious number of scenes of destruction featuring either teddy bears or the athlete and television presenter Kris Akabusi; and several shots of fallen trees and flooded streets in which missing toddler Madeleine McCann was clearly visible in the background.
Sadly the fun was terminated after a mere 24 hours when moderators caught on and deleted all the images.

Examples:
"I can't find me mate James Brown cos it's a bit windy here in Widnes"
(Carlos Valderama in New Orleans)

"My mum's car this morning"
(Missing child)


Norman Wisdom!



Kriss Akabusi surveys the damage



Pics shamelessly filched from contributions and various bulletin boards

Call that an impact? THIS is an impact

Clicken to embiggen

It seems like they've been around for years... these fucking awful ads that stare at you from every bloody carriage of every bloody train on my route.

The bird - is it an emu? an ostrich? a rhea? Who cares - but what any school child will tell you is that this type of bird has a brain the size of a pingpong ball. Its natural programming includes a limited number of instructions along the line of PECK ... RUN ... POO ... SIT ON EGG but I'll be buggered if there's a subroutine that says MAKE A FUCKING IMPACT. I'm sure Darwin would agree. As for a fish with a brain the size of a pinhead...

Several years ago, and on the same train route, I was slouching in my seat on the Vomit Comet (the last train home on a Friday night), listening to the usual racket of drunken City Boys and smelling the stench of McDonald's and KFCs when two tramps boarded.

One was male, the other female. Both had that red-faced, dirty, rugged skinned look typical of those for who had lived for decades on the streets. They both carried half-full plastic pint glasses and both were extremely drunk.

They were treated with wary glances, except for the City yobs, half a carriage down, who were happily laughing at the leery duo.

The two tramps leaned against the toilet doors, about four feet away from me.

That curiously British habit of pretending that nothing unusual is happening has been well captured by recent series of Dr Who which has shown the natives behaving normally even amidst a violent alien invasion. Such a thing happened here, even when the tramps started singing a tuneless, wordless ballad that only they were familiar with, while the movement of the train caused the cheap beer to slosh over nearby passengers.

Who's gonna bolt first, I wondered. We all obeyed the golden rule: Avoid Eye Contact.

And then Mrs Tramp collapsed into the seat opposite me and ran her hands through my hair.

"FUCK OFF!" I yelled and yes, dear reader, I was the first one to scarper, finding refuge behind the City yobs. Even so, I had a superb view as, spurned, Mrs Tramp stood up and, eyeing the people sitting around her (I think she was so pissed that she hadn't realised I had made myself scarce), shouted something like "Wyyyyyyyuuuuuuuurrr woddddda fuckinell yoooooo orlllll lookin at yer fucknfuckfuck wuuuuurrrr!!!"

And then, while Mr Tramp looked on laughing, Mrs Tramp squatted down in the middle of the carriage, tugged her filthy knickers down to her knees and released a chocolate hostage.

She knew how to make an impact.

New kids on the block

There's something refreshingly enjoyable about new blogs where fresh adbabies are recording their efforts to land a job. Funny how most of these tend to be creatives who, for some reason, always seem to have a more difficult time than most at breaking into the agencies.
Check out All About The Crit, by a pair of newcomers treading the gold-paved streets of London. Their characters shine through the blog and it's a fun read too.

WTF? Up the A

Spotted on the side of a Roman bus.

via b3ta

Gooing, gone

A tiny bit of nepotism here as I succumb to an appeal by those close to me to post this, the final episode in the suicidal Creme Egg campaign. To understand the poignancy of this execution, you need to be familiar with the previous videos, which have been running on British telly for a month or so.

True

Spotted in a card shop, the motto written just for me.

Road traffic mutation

The endearingly angry copyranter featured one of the most annoyingly frequent road safety ads on his recent link haze. This gruesome work has been on the telly so often I wonder at the diminishing effectiveness of the campaign. Still, I crack an inappropriate smile at this evil mashup by one of those naughty denizens of the subversive b3ta.

Buy organic and kill a fat poor person

My foot is caught on the tripwire of an ethical logic bomb.
Here’s how it goes.

Obese poor people buy junk food because it’s cheap and convenient.
Corduroy-wearing Guardian readers who live in Crouch End want everyone to eat organic because it’s healthier and is good for the planet.
Organic vegetables, on average, require more farm land than veg grown using evil traditional farming methods.
Organic vegetables are therefore more expensive.
Demand for organic food from corduroy-wearing Guardian readers who live in Crouch End outstrips supply.
70% of our organic food needs to be imported by sea and air to satisfy demand.
Organic yields vary between 50%-85% compared to produce grown using evil traditional farming methods.
More land will need to be turned over to agriculture for organic veg to match the yield of evil traditional farming methods.
If nirvana arrives for the corduroy-wearing Guardian readers who live in Crouch End, and we all move to organic farming, more effort will be required to grow the same amount of food grown using evil traditional farming methods.
Organic food will therefore be more expensive.
Obese poor people will continue to buy junk food because it’s cheap and convenient.

Bang: Ban organic farming. Use the land to grow cheaper food.

Proof that the ad agency is obsolete

The creativity demonstrated by some small businesses on low budgets is amazing. This is a contender for my favourite ad of the year.

via the Holy Moly newsletter.

Is that a bear or a gorilla?

There's a potential copyright spat between WCRS and a bunch of US academics over the agency's road safety video for TfL (skip the intro). Brand Republic reports that the video is a direct rip-off of an academic experiment conducted in 1999.
Your resident chimpmeister draws your attention to an earlier CMM post where Sainsbury used the same concept (using shopping rather than balls as the vehicle of distraction). It would have been a coincidence too far if Sainsbury's agency at the time was WCRS but, sadly for conspiracy theorists, it was AMV BBDO.
Here's a monkey sticking a finger up its arse.

Cockaroochee

Dammit, when you've had a hard day exercising your advertising muscles, what you need is a classy Asian bug killer ad. Wednesday? Bring it on.

Hey Jesus, are them nails made of irony?

7 November 1948: "If you want to get rich, you start a religion." - L Ron Hubbard.

10 March 2008: "Becoming obscenely wealthy is a mortal sin." - The Vatican.

...estimated Vatican wealth: $15 billion.

Tiscali screws around

Q: What are the three words you don't want to hear when having sex?
A: "Darling, I'm home!"
That one's straight out of the Bob Monkhouse Joke Book, circa 1973.
Circa 1973 is also where you're likely to find the first draft of this shamefully inept horror that's currently haunting British telly. Remember, that cowpat from Specsavers is still doing the rounds... you wait forever for a truly shite piece of advertising, and lo! two come at once.
The fact that both ads are being shown over and over and over, it shows that the strategy is the one I call The Chinese Water Torture. It's starts off as a mild irritation and progresses to being a drill hammer straight into your brain. That's the plan - it'll annoy the pants off you, but you'll remember the brand. Sadly for them, Tiscali also have pages of websites dedicated to slagging off their risible broadband service.
As we all know, today's consumers are more inclined to research online, especially for techie stuff. By Googling "Tiscali" and "complaints", the obvious conclusion would be: crappy ad, crappy service.

Busy

But not dead yet.

Phwoooarmy

Good to see The Sun taking war seriously.

Aussie foreplay: "Brace yourself, Sheila"

(Original here.)

See also:
We rock too;
Digging Australia;
Missing canoeists