Surprisingly the Catholic League gets angry when you mention a woman’s waning right to choose. “These billboards, we think they’re absolutely disgusting,” said Kiera McCaffrey of the Catholic League.

“For one thing, it’s strange enough that this company feels the need to advertise their pro-abortion stance on their billboards for mini-storage units, but the fact that they have to do it in so vile a way.”

And for some reason *coughracistscough* CBS has a quote supporting the sign from the National Latina Institute.  “We like the creativity, and we think it’s an eye opener as well as engaging people in dialogue,” said Silvia Henriques of the National Latina Institute.

I know that whenever I’m confronted with an arbitrary political conundrum I can’t wait to hear where the National Latina Institute is going to chime in.

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Each child was given chicken nuggets, a hamburger and french fries from McDonald’s and baby carrots and milk from the grocery store. The children were given identical portions of food, some carrying the McDonald’s logo, and others wrapped in plain paper. With one exception, significantly more children said the McDonald’s-labeled product tasted better. Oddly enough, the product they did not rate as better is McDonald’s signature item: the burger.

“We found that kids with more TVs in their homes and those who eat at McDonald’s more frequently were even more likely to prefer the food in the McDonald’s wrapper,” Mr. Robinson said. “This is a company that knows what they’re doing. Nobody else spends as much to advertise their fast-food products to children.”

Nothing like preying on the naïveté and trusting nature of kids to create lifelong fatties that think McDonald’s crap food makes them feel better.

“We found that kids with more TVs in their homes and those who eat at McDonald’s more frequently were even more likely to prefer the food in the McDonald’s wrapper,” Mr. Robinson said. “This is a company that knows what they’re doing. Nobody else spends as much to advertise their fast-food products to children.”

I’m starting to respect the crazy Park Slope parents that refuse to have a television anywhere in their five-story single family brownstones.

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State Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman ordered the temporary restraining order against raising the billboards at the request of the Rev. Neil Rhodes, pastor of the interdenominational Times Square Church.

I started seeing the TV commercials for the Washlet a while ago and at first I thought it was a joke. I mean the commercial shows people walking around with smiley faces on their butts and talks about making your butt happier.

I have to admit though, after visiting their website cleanishappy.com I’m kind of intrigued. I can’t tell you how often I’ve finished pooping and just sat there wishing there was some alternative to actually physically wiping myself. The Washlet seems to address that issue.

The ruling did give msnbc a chance to wax a little more philosophically with this classy lede:

Exactly.

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In an effort to praise the Lower East Side, Virgin Mobile calls attention to the fact that the neighborhood’s true, artistic community has been forced out by trust funded jocks and cheerleaders who nurture their creative sides through faux hawks, fringe bangs and tattoos.

The company lauds the Lower East Side’s progress:

You’re no longer the Bohemian cousin of the East Village. You’ve got the Fancy hotels and trendy boutiques that finally make you part of the gentrified downtown scene. Go on with your bad self. But amen for keeping it real even in the shadow of your new, overpriced condos. LES, you’ll always have the soul of an artist. It’s just not starving anymore. That’s the kind of flexibility and change we embrace. With our cell phone plans, you can switch hassle-free. Annual contracts? That’s the kind of closed-minded thinking that will get your ass kicked on Orchard street.

Virgin holds a mirror up to the confused hipster: she hates the Lower East Side’s gentrification, but she really can’t protest too much because she just moved to Ludlow three months ago. She, in a way, is the “overpriced condos.”

In Virgin’s pre-Stonewall reduction of New York’s gay community, Chelsea becomes a gaggle of lisping stereotypes. The poster reads, “You’re the Queen of New York living. From your pedicured toes to your slimming tees. Chelsea girl, you’re the tops. Or the bottom. Whichever you prefer.”

You can almost hear the intro to Sex in the City playing softly in the background as the heterosexual, male copywriter channels his inner homosexual.

These ads, according to CMO Howard Handler of Hamas McKinley, an ad agency based in North Carolina that has every right to make claims about New York, “attempted to change the conversation about wireless. We like to say that our customers are in control.”

However, this campaign has only succeeded in depicting New York as being overwhelmed with silly jerks.

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The city insists that the 11.5% increase in water bills set to take effect on July 1 isn’t paying for the campaign.

Of course the campaign has nothing to do with trying to hike up some of those new, higher water bills either.

Health officials say the campaign was conceived after a focus group discovered that most kids and immigrants don’t know it’s ok to drink tap water. In other news, there are officially focus groups for everything.

Heather Huber of Park Slope thought the short glass of water with a lemon wedge was liquor not water. “I thought it was a cocktail. It’s a bizarre spin,” she said. “It seems the $700,000 could go to a better use.”

Eugene Yurman, 41, a Park Slope homeowner, asked, “This is for tap water?

“That is an astronomical amount of money, but if the city has the money, they are using it for a good reason,” said Yurman, adding, “I’d rather see my water rates stay the same.”

Even cats figured out NYC tap water is safe to drink!

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Or maybe they’re just trying to say that carrying/using a condom makes you less of a dirty pig and more likely to bang the hot blonde at the bar who probably has HPV anyway so the condom was probably a good idea.

Whatever it is they’re selling, Fox and CBS aren’t buying.  Because, you know it creates a bad image to promote the use of condoms to avoid an unwanted pregnancy between two stupid, horny kids.

Ads for condoms should strictly be used to inform people about HIV and other scary STD’s otherwise the religious cucku-nuts will get all bent out of shape and start another holy war or something.

The message at the end of the commercial says simply, “Evolve: Use a condom every time.”

“We have to change the perception that carrying a condom for women or men is a sign they’re on the prowl and just want to have sex,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive of the Kaplan Thaler Group, the New York advertising agency that created the “Evolve” campaign. “It’s a sign of somebody being prepared — if the opportunity arises — to think about their own health and the health and safety of their partner.”

So when you say, “use a condom every time,” you mean use a condom every time you like, talk to a girl right?

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A series of television commercials promoting the borough of 1.3 million will be on the airwaves starting June 25. The 30-second spots, the first television advertisements the Bronx has used to sell itself, are part of a marketing campaign called “We’re Talking the Bronx,” starring Adolfo Carrión Jr., the borough president.

In the nine commercials, Mr. Carrión boasts of the borough’s Zagat-rated restaurants (there are 25 of them, he says), its booming residential and commercial development, its physical beauty and its many attractions, like the Bronx Zoo and Yankee Stadium. The $200,000 campaign was paid for by several Bronx institutions and companies featured

25 Zagat-rated restaurants!?! Wow! I’d only have to pass 2,098 other Zagat-rated restaurants on my way there, sign me up!

Also, if you’re going to spend $200,000 on an ad campaign you might want to mention something besides the only two reasons people come to the Bronx.

The commercials which, will be aired in the New York region, seem to focus on the obvious.

I’m pretty sure that most people in the “New York region” already know the Bronx Zoo is in the Bronx and that the Yankees are called the “Bronx Bombers” because of their locale.

Maybe you could have thrown in a, “hey, we’re not on fire anymore!” I’m no marketing genius but I have a feeling that would have been very effective angle.

Things you may want to take with you on your fabulous Bronx vacation:

1. A sleeping bag: The Bronx has exactly zero major hotels for tourists.
2. Spare change: the Bronx had the fourth-highest poverty rate in the nation, trailing three counties on the Texas-Mexico border [NYT]
3. A job: The Bronx has the highest unemployment rate in NYC by far.

Man, I should start writing my own travel guide. A whole series of travel books called, What to Take When you Go There. I creative.

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“Unilever has adopted a new global guideline that will require that all its future marketing communications should not use models or actors that are either excessively slim or promote ‘unhealthy’ slimness,” Ralph Kugler, president of Unilever’s home and personal care division, said Tuesday.

Unilever, which makes Lipton teas and Skippy peanut butter, said it will not impose strict criteria for models and actors, but all brand directors and agencies would be expected to use a Body Mass Index (BMI) of between 18.5 and 25 as a guideline for models and actors.

I swear to god if they let some heffer like Nicole Richie start modeling I’m so boycotting Skippy peanut butter.  I don’t want to be nauseated by some overweight size two model in my Skippy peanut butter ads.

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Thanks to our BFFs over BWE for the hookup.

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Maybe it’s just us being finicky but we prefer our “reliable” news sources to use brand ideas and taglines that contain words that actually use their proper English meaning.  Unless of course MSNBC is changing their format to cover “A hammer used by a blacksmith for grooving or spreading iron Spectrum of News”

Fuller spectrum of news?  Seriously?  That’s what you came up with?  Why not just say, “MSNBC.com: It’s a Gooder Spectrum of News”?  Who the frick came up with this tagline?

We can only imagine that MSNBC.com’s new marketing guru must be Cletus Spuckler.

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