Slate's Bizbox
ad report card: Advertising deconstructed.

The Clio AwardsShameless Canadian hucksters, brilliant Thai ads, and a dirty fish tank.

By Seth Stevenson
Updated Monday, May 19, 2008, at 11:29 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Shakespearean Gecko commercial

—A pair of Silver-winning ads from Thailand, which in recent years has become a font of brilliantly off-the-wall TV spots. In the first, titled "Shakespearean Gecko," a blooming romance between a pair of lizards is thwarted when the piece of ceiling tile they're standing on cracks, sending them tumbling to their deaths. (The people who witness the tragedy are crestfallen and vow to use only Shera brand ceiling board in the future.) The second spot, for Sylvania light bulbs, builds on the idea that ghosts are scary only when it's dark, while in bright light they become rather silly. A family enjoys a daytime picnic while calmly observing the absurd, unscary ghosts who try to haunt them (one of which turns out to be not a ghost at all—just a transvestite).

—A Silver-winning interactive campaign designed to reduce drunken driving in Frankfurt. Called "The Piss-Screen," it placed monitors on the walls above urinals in bars. By aiming their pee from side to side, men could steer a car in a video driving game. The game would ultimately demonstrate that the pee-er was unfit to be driving, as he couldn't even manage to accurately aim his stream of urine. After the inevitable crash, the screen would ask, "Too pissed to drive?"

One Gold-winning print campaign caught my attention, though possibly not in the manner intended. Designed for MTV in Argentina, it consists of three separate ads, each of which shows a pair of faces side by side. On the right sides are instantly recognizable celebrities: Britney Spears, Ricky Martin, and Marilyn Manson. They need no identification, and receive none. The faces on the left, on the other hand, were not familiar to me. And this turned out to be the gag. Small text at the bottom of the ads reads "on the left, Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone" (or "Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin" or "Marie Curie, first female recipient of the Nobel Prize"), followed by a simple MTV logo. The suggestion being that MTV has an amazing ability to drive our culture's interests—which I found less an advertisement for MTV and more a deeply depressing truth.

My least favorite ad of the entire show (it still won a Gold, though only for its cinematography) was a Louis Vuitton spot titled "A Journey." It's an aimless, endless wank: We see beautiful, expensively produced images of someone playing cello on an empty mountaintop, of a naked woman staring out a window at a nighttime cityscape, of a man painting watercolors by the side of a dusty, desolate road. The theme seems to be the wonder of travel, but let me tell you this right now: If I encounter you in some soul-stirring, far-off locale and you're carrying one of those Louis Vuitton bags with the in-your-face logos splattered all over it (polluting my pure experience of the moment with your perverted display of ostentatious "luxury"), well ... I may be forced on principle to kick you in the shins.

A final note on the weekend: No doubt as a result of ad execs' constant, grasping quest for only the newest and the hippest, the festival was held at the spanking new Gansevoort South Hotel here in South Beach. So new was this hotel that, when I attempted to find the rooftop bar, I found myself on an unfinished penthouse floor that was all concrete, bare drywall, and clumps of electrical wires. Also, they seemed to be working out the kinks in the maintenance routine for the large aquarium in the lobby. When I first arrived, it was brightly lit and filled with exotic marine life (including some sharks). By the next day the lights had gone out, and I noticed several of the creatures behaving erratically—with some sinking slowly to rest on the sandy bottom of the tank. By the time I caught my cab for the airport, there were thick velvet curtains concealing the whole thing from view. A moment of silence for those very trendy, possibly dead fish.

Discounted accommodations were provided by the Clios.

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Seth Stevenson is a frequent contributor to Slate.
Photograph of Clio award statues © Clio Awards 2008. Still from Shera Ceiling Board commercial © Shera Ceiling Board/Publicis (Thailand) Ltd. Image of Diamond Shreddies on Slate's home page © 2008 Kraft Canada Inc.
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Comments from the Fray

[The Louis Vuitton ad] wouldn't be half as bad if it didn't take itself so seriously, but it's so ridiculously pretentious you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was heralding a new cultural era for mankind, and not trying to fob a frickin handbag on you. I did notice though, that the only shot of a bag consisted of the weepy lady walloping her beau with hers. Maybe that's the tag...Louis Vuitton, better than Mace for getting rid of unwanted male attention.

--Einhard

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As a person who doesn't own a television I adore the "Ad Report Card" as my only means of exploring television advertising. Stevenson brings these ads to life so well that I rarely even need to watch the accompanying video.

--patriciajps

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