A few weeks ago I speculated about whether an advertisement for Samsonite luggage was, as the ad-industry blog Copyranter declared it, “the dumbest ad I’ve ever seen,” or whether it was just so incomprehensible as to be silly. My feeling was then, and is now, that the advertising world is such a cornucopia of dumb that you have to be careful declaring one ad the overall dumbest. Besides which, there are all sorts of variants on the bad ad: The grating ad, the humorless ad, and, in this corner, the ad that turns your stomach so efficiently that the product hurries into the background and starts whistling and looking at the sky and trying to get really small and unobtrusive.
Don’t misunderstand me: I’m no more squeamish about body fluids than the next guy. But if I were an agency I’m just not sure I’d want ‘CREATED THE URINE SAMPLE AD” carved on my corporate headstone. The fact that the client is the CLIO Awards, which recognize excellence in advertising, only gives the thing an extra little jolt of irony. It works on so many levels!