Yes, you can advertise!

Is it just me, or has advertising gotten exponentially worse over the past few years?

I fondly remember the “Wazzzzzup” campaign of yesteryear, and each time I have to endure the Geico cavemen, I dearly miss Spuds MacKenzie. Today we are left with the unfortunately immortal “saved by zero” Toyota ads that unbelievably have not been stopped by the Facebook groups protesting them.

If I hear that excruciatingly annoying voice chant “the fit is go” one more time I’m going to start pulling my hair out. And now terrible
advertising is expanding into new territory.

White House lawyers are quickly moving to stop the commercial use of Barack Obama, whose popular slogans have been usurped by everyone from Ikea to Southwest Airlines. Even Ben & Jerry’s recently unveiled “Yes Pecan” ice cream.

Over the weekend, of course, the greatest event in televised advertising took place, and as usual nothing comes close to the ads intended for the big game.

Fortunately, NBC rejected the  Super Bowl ad by a Catholic group based in Chicago that made use of the Obama name brand. The 30-second clip features ultrasound images and then suggestively poses the question “Would you abort Barack Obama?” It pulls at our heartstrings, pointing out that Obama was abandoned by his father and had an unfortunate childhood and then advocating the anti-abortion stance.

Besides the logical fallacies begged by the ad itself – for instance, the fact that legal abortion did not prevent Barack Obama’s fetal development or that, using the same logic, you could promote abortion by questioning why Adolf Hitler’s mother never had the procedure – an ultrasound image is just not something I wanted to include in my Super Bowl XLIII experience.

Then again, I don’t really want to see women being seduced by vegetables either. NBC came to the rescue to save us all from PETA’s promiscuous Super Bowl ad the animal rights organization described as “a comely crop of models demonstrating their fondness for fresh produce.”

Whew ... crisis averted.

Did we really want to take the chance of a vegetable malfunction?
NBC cited concerns regarding a woman “rubbing pelvic region with pumpkin” and “screwing herself with broccoli.” I realize that sex sells ... but seriously?

Some Super Bowl ads that did air may have inspired hope for the future of TV watching. DreamWorks and Pepsi teamed up to bring us the first-ever 3-D commercial, which aired at halftime. It was also rare in another aspect: It was the first 90-second ad to run since the mid-1990s when Nike ran one. Of course, if you never made it to your local grocer to stock up on 3-D glasses, you missed out.

Sadly enough, we have a whole year to wait for next year’s Super Bowl clips. However, I can only hope that in the meantime Toyota finally gives up on incessantly insisting you be saved by zero and maybe, just maybe, someday we can once again be enthralled by Michael Jordan taking on Larry Bird for a Big Mac.