advertise, winning

The winners
Ah, but the hits. So many wonderful, ingenious, breathtaking hits. Contrary to Jeff Goodby's silly assertion that I hate advertising, the fact is that I cherish the advertising age and am devastated to be seeing its dying days. I am also admiring verging on ecstatic whenever episodes of unalloyed genius punctuate the depressing preponderance of mediocrity and client-underwritten masturbation. And I've been thrilled to document them.

Among those masterpieces are the obvious: Nike in just about everything it does; the original Energizer Bunny campaign (1989); Levis; Absolut; ESPN SportsCenter (1995-); "Always Coca-Cola" (1993-2000); "Got Milk?" (1993-); Budweiser "Whassup!" (2000); iPod silhouettes (2003); Honda "Cog" (2003) and "Grrr" (2005); Dove "Evolution" (2006); Apple's PC and Mac (2008); the eTrade baby (2008); VW in four countries, including "Da da da" (1997) here here here.

But I've also been blown away by work that elsewhere isn't necessarily regarded as immortal: Cotton Inc. "The Fabric of Our Lives" (1989); Ross Perot's infomercial (1992); Dockers' "Colors" (1992) (a Joe Pytka TV campaign even Pytka believes un-extraordinary); Ikea, featuring a gay couple, just being a couple (1994); a hilarious French Orangina commercial that showed an actor in an Orangina-bottle suit being shaken vigorously (1996); Heinz using its labels as media to announce, among other things, "the rude ketchup" (1999); Dyson vacuums (2003); Burger King's "de-Friend" promotion (2008); Will.i.am's Barack Obama tribute (2008); and Maloney & Porcelli's restaurant's "Expense-a-Steak" online fake-receipt generator (2009).

One of my favorites in 25 years was a 1993 print ad for American Standard bath hardware, which subtly anthropomorphized things such as faucet handles by announcing, "They've seen you naked. They've heard you sing."

Another, unfortunately, was a 1997 TV spot for a Spanish skin moisturizer called Esencial. It depicted a pretty woman bicycling down a country lane when her chain began to squeak. So she took some of her Esencial, daubed it on the chain and resumed riding. But the chain still squeaked, because Esencial is "Never greasy." Amazing: a demonstration of product non-attributes. I gave the spot four stars and lobbied heavily for it to win the Cannes Grand Prix.

HONDA: Garfield calls the 'Grr' spot 'a masterpiece.'

And it might have, had it been a real ad for a real product. But it was a ghost. A fake. A fraud.

Oy vey.

Bum calls
Of course, at least I was correct about the fake ad's real genius. About a dozen times over the years I have been simply, horribly wrong: 1) dumping on the original "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" campaign (2003) and the McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" campaign (2003); 2) Lavishing praise on an obnoxious Australian-rules Energizer pitchman named Jacko (1987), when we should have called for his deportation, and awarding 3 � stars to a quirky Reebok campaign titled UBU (1989), which focused on eccentricity instead of sneakers, infuriated the trade and lasted about five minutes; 3) damning with faint, 2�-star praise the original Saturn "A different kind of company" campaign (1990) and Nike's "Just Do It," -- 3 stars -- which we found a trifle harsh (1988).

Yeah, since then it has harshly become one of the three greatest campaigns in advertising history.

I also kind of regret being the only person in America who kind of liked McDonald's roll-out of the Arch Deluxe (1996). And I'll never live down the most quoted line in AdReview history, my description of the late Dave Thomas, in his debut as Wendy's spokes-founder, as "a steer in a half-sleeve shirt" (1989). The part about him being a theoretically perfect frontman for the square, old-fashioned burgers, that I had right. The part about the clunky writing and halting delivery in the first spots I also can defend. What I cannot defend is the meanness, the snideness, the cheapness of the ad hominem. I broke the Walter Kerr rule, and the shame still burns.

On the other hand, I harbor no regrets whatsoever for eviscerating the most repugnant advertisers of my tenure: Benetton, for ostentatiously exploiting disease, war, religion and the victims of social injustice to push pricey mix 'n' match separates; Calvin Klein, arsonist, for using increasingly aggressive sexual images to ignite outrage, knowing that the media engines and ladders would inevitably race to the scene; GoDaddy, for trafficking in the most puerile and degrading T&A; Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, for smears of the ugliest kind (2004); Camel and Kool (1991), the lowest of the tobacco-marketing low, for using cartoon characters to cultivate children; Nintendo (1994), for telling adolescents to "hock a loogie at life"; and General Motors, for 1) jumping on the gruesome tragedy of 9/11 to sell Chevys and Pontiacs with its perverse "Keep America Rolling" 3,000-dead sale-a-bration (2001), and 2) having the gall on Earth Day, after decades of lobbying against emissions and mileage standards, to celebrate "environmental progress" (1990).

This, I said, was akin to "John Wayne Gacy celebrating the International Year of the Child."

The AdReview staff was proud of that one.