I love it because it goes in for the kill with just five brutal words: “John Raese’s ideas are crazy!”

Craziness. That’s why the midterm election this year is so different from campaigns in the past. Thanks to the Tea Party and Palin-inspired D.I.Y. politics, there are candidates for national office who should never have made it that far. The Tea Party national candidates are inexperienced, lost, cartwheeling, and spouting ideas that are, yes, crazy. Consider:

• Stephen Borden, a Republican running for Congress in Texas, refused to rule out a violent overthrow of the government if the election doesn’t go his way.
• The Republican candidate for governor of Colorado, Dan Maes, opposed a local program to encourage bicycling because it “could threaten our personal freedoms” and it’s “part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.”
• Christine O’Donnell, the Delaware Republican candidate for Senate, recently sounded unsure if our Constitution guarantees separation of church and state.
• In Colorado, Republican candidate for Congress Ken Buck actually opposes separation of church and state.
• In Nevada, Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senate, expressed concern that Dearborn, Michigan was under “Sharia” law.
• Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul supports abolishing the U.S. Department of Education because, “I don’t like the idea of somebody in Washington deciding that Susie has two mommies is an appropriate family situation and should be taught to my kindergardener at school.”
• In Utah, Republican candidate for Senate Mike Lee opposes birthright citizenship.
• In Alaska, Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller cited East Germany as a good example of border security, saying, “We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could, we could.”

There’s not much else to say, really, other than these ideas are crazy. I keep thinking of Barney Frank’s famous line: ”Trying to argue with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.”

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

OK, did you watch it? Let’s talk about it.

First, the story so far:

A decidedly mainstream Muslim organization called the Cordoba Initiative wants to build a community center in Lower Manhattan. Some conservative political types—possibly feeling desperate after getting blamed for the housing crisis and watching their “Drill Here, Drill Now” slogan backfire in the worst possible way—have seized upon this urban “mosque” as a cheap way to stoke rage and anger among their supporters. The subtext, as I see it, is that plenty of fools are still so desperate to believe Barack Obama is a terrorist that they’re prepared to write checks to any organization that hints at similar leanings. Somehow this insanity landed in New York City this summer. Anti-Muslim activists, having rehearsed last month on Staten Island, are trying to shut down the Cordoba House project with as much noise as possible.

Now, where did this nutso video come from?

The ad above was released this month by the National Republican Trust—not part of the Republican National Committee, but actually a political action committee that came together to run smears against Obama during the 2008 campaign. It has a multi-million-dollar budget and ties to the web site Newsmax. (More here.) The ad is getting attention today because two TV networks declined to air it. Nevertheless, it’s getting a lot of exposure thanks to blogs and talk radio.

We could try to argue with the simple facts in this ad (like the fact that the planned Muslim center is actually on Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site, a dense and mostly commercial area that no New Yorker would consider “Ground Zero”) and its logic (that the Muslims investing in this building are terrorists who want to destroy their own neighborhood) but that would be falling into a trap. You can’t fight this one with sense. We’re talking about a TV commercial opposing a building on the basis of the religion of the people building it, punctuated with the line “We Americans will be heard.” I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would think of that.

I work close enough to the World Trade Center site to see it from my office windows. Like every person who works in Lower Manhattan, I work with, shop with, and commute with Muslim people every day. The idea of a PAC in Washington producing ads attacking these neighbors of mine just makes my blood boil. It should make yours boil too.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

How quickly things change. Remember when we used to wait to tape songs off the radio? Today we can find almost any piece of media we’re looking for with a few taps on a screen.

When we can’t find something, we actually get frustrated. Recently I read a book called Where The Suckers Moon about the history and impact of advertising, as told through the story of Subaru’s ill-fated 1991 ad campaign. Later I went online looking for samples of the 1991 Subaru commercials mentioned in the book. They’re nowhere! How exasperating!

With this impatience, we anticipate instant progress. This week I read a Bloomberg News story titled, “Time Warner Supports U.S. Postal Service Elimination of Saturday Delivery“. I thought to myself: “Quaint!” Magazine publishers and the Post Office are both collapsing. Surely within 10 years paper distribution of magazines by mail will be a mute point.

Our calls for instant progress are unrealistic. Then I remembered a scene from Where The Suckers Moon in which the ad writers predict the demise of car dealers within 10 years. Dealerships are inefficient, unnecessary and old-fashioned, they reason. Customers would rather order cars and have them delivered, and factories would rather sell right to customers. Didn’t happen. Today, the Internet enables custom ordering and delivery of many products, but not cars. The car dealer system is too deeply entrenched. The same may be true of Time Inc. magazines, the U.S. Postal Service, and the massive and diverse business infrastructure intertwined with their interests. Maybe we’ll be reading paper copies of magazines in 2110.

But we need to demand progress anyway. Nobody ever solved a problem by sitting around waiting for things to happen, or predicting that everything new would fail. Impatience can bypass realistic (and low) expectations. Impatience can invent new systems on the fly that are often stronger and nimbler than if they’d been carefully planned. We need to be impatient. Impatience is good.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

The problem is that this commercial reaches the wrong demographic. This is fast food breakfast. It should look like a Denny’s commercial. Instead, the ad agency is using edgy humor to appeal to young adult males like me. I would rather go hungry than order an egg sandwich from Burger King. The commercial won’t change my mind, but it made me laugh!

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Now, time travel to present day. Beth Grant has showed up in a Skittles commercial. I love this:

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy Skittles’ TV advertising. Truth is, I don’t even eat Skittles. They were the sticky, waxy snack I gnawed on at the movies when I was 11. (I seem to remember eating an entire one-pound bag with my friend Doug while watching “Hot Shots.”) They’re the candy you move on to after you’ve devoured all the Milky Ways in your Halloween basket. They’re, above all, for children. Which makes it all the more weird that their TV commercials over the last few years (under the guidance of ad agency TBWA\Chait\Day) have been so twisted and grown-up.

Do kids get these ads? Does anybody get these ads?

If you want to read more about Beth Grant, she recently did an interview with The Onion A.V. Club.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

That slogan has been drilled into our brains repeatedly since 1985, when ad agency DDB created it. It’s poetry in a tire commercial. Why is it so good? Six reasons.

1. It takes a totally boring product and invents an emotional benefit. What’s riding on your tires? First, the safety of you and your passengers. Secondarily, your job, your social life, and any other reason you need reliable transportation.

2. It’s good writing. The slogan is concise and easy to understand. It has a rhythm that naturally emphasizes the important words so much.

3. It contains a pun that isn’t a groaner.

4. It lends itself to charming commercials involving adorable babies.

5. It’s perfectly suited for the product it’s selling. Tires are mysterious. We only buy them every couple of years, and a layman can’t tell the difference between a good tire and a cheap one. But if you convince us, through repetition of a catchy slogan, that your brand-name tires are better than the cheapo brand, we just might buy them.

6. It contains an implied threat. “If you don’t buy our tires, your children will die and you will live out the rest of your days wracked with guilt, you pathetic cheapskate.” Said with a smile!

Now, here’s the crazy thing. Michelin doesn’t even use this tagline any more. They haven’t for years.

The company’s current slogan is “A better way forward.” Not only is it totally unmemorable, it could represent anything. It’s just a shade away from Toyota (“Moving forward”), or the Wisconsin state motto (“Forward”). Presumably, the new slogan is meant to signify that the company is about more than tires, and to make its products appeal to customers beyond just families with children.

Thing is, I’m a single adult with no kids and no car. I have no interest in tires. But I can’t get “so much is riding on your tires” out of my head. I have a positive opinion of the Michelin company based almost entirely on that old slogan. (OK, and its much-celebrated travel guides.)

It’s a hard thing to get right. But when it’s right, advertising works.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

The song is “Pata Pata” by Miriam Makeba. The ad agency is RPA. Visual effects by a52. More ad credits here.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

The commercial has been playing for months and the first few times I saw it I ignored it, as you probably did. Then after the repetition sunk in, I realized this was something special. “We must march my darlings!,” the ad proclaims. What is this? Turns out it is a Walt Whitman poem called “Pioneers! O Pioneers!”

Photographer Ryan McGinley has his fingerprints on the “Go Forth” campaign—he gets credit for print/outdoor executions—and his “look” was obviously translated into motion for the TV component. Sometimes his work is hard to take—celebrations of intoxicated youthful excess make me concerned about the next morning’s hangover. Naked kids cavorting in fields are lovely, but really, it’s lollygagging, and we all have a lot of work to do.

But in this ad, there’s something more. These free young things are mashed up with a call to arms: “Get your weapons ready!,” the poem insists, over thunder, drums and strings. Here is a perfect pairing of words and images. Whitman’s poem grants purpose to the lanky kids in the pictures and erases the guilty pall of wasted time. More incredibly, the pictures give the Whitman poem a new layer of meaning, as if he’s calling not just to rouse soldiers, but to endow outcasts and nonconformists with the dignity of a mission. The music—barely even there—provides just enough glue to bond it together.

Then there’s the matter of the voice reading the poem. What a sound! It turns out to be a vintage recording of Will Geer, whom Wikipedia tells me was an actor and activist who died in 1978. Doesn’t he sound like John F. Kennedy declaring, “We choose to go to the moon!“?

Levi’s ad agency is Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, which should collect an award or two for this work. Even if they don’t, they deserve credit for getting a risky and high-minded ad approved and seen. All in the interest of selling casual apparel. Don Draper would be proud.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

And here’s one for Munchos featuring a what looks like Cookie Monster:

And this one is pretty excellent:

(Much more here and on YouTube. Spotted via Adfreak via Boing Boing.)

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

But… but… Donuts are bad for children too! There’s no logic— Hey, are those sprinkles?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.