Chevron: adding insult to injury

Chevron's "Will You Join Us" campaign brands a new level of ignorance in advertising. Their "Conservation" ad, for example, makes several mistakes so huge as to be downright insulting to the viewer.

They state that, "As an energy company, Chevron has a great responsibility." And go on to say: "And now we ask you to join us in one of the most important efforts of our time: using less."

Another way of saying this would be: "We have made countless billions of dollars in easy profit at your expense. Now will you join us in trying to undo some of the damage we did while making all that money?"

Just to make it more insulting, they also note that their huge conservation effort is that they have "improved our own energy efficiency 27 percent since 1992." So in 17 years, their internal energy usage has been cut by one quarter. That's their big contribution? Really?

Microsoft just can't get it right

Microsoft is running an incredibly uninteresting ad (I paid so little attention to it, I never noticed it was animated until I looked it up for this post) in which they play clips of an interview with an apparently not-very-with-it CEO of a surfboard company.

He says, “Tsunamis in surfing are an exciting prospect…” a comment which I find it difficult to believe anyone in surfing would ever say. A tsunami is a wave a tremendous destruction and probably only fun to surf for a few seconds before the chaos and death kick in.

Then he says “a tsunami in business is kinda terrifying.” What exactly is a tsunami in business? And that, apparently in such a circumstance “you have to watch the management of your assets very carefully.” I guess that's unlike non-tsunami times, when businesses don't mind their assets at all and just hope for the best.

He goes on to say that “without technology, we'd be nowhere.” Another brilliant thought, since technology is defined as the use of tools.

One has to wonder why Microsoft just can't make a good ad. Ever.

McDonald's makes the case for vegetarianism

Currently, McDonald's is running a filet of fish commercial featuring a "gag" fish-on-the wall singing a song bemoaning its loss of, apparently, part of itself to a sandwich being eaten in its proximity.

The fish concludes, "If it were you in that sandwich you wouldn't be laughing at all."

It just seems a little odd that McDonald's, one of the largest sellers of meat, would present such a sympathetic commercial. The message is very much like that of the ethical vegetarian: empathy for the animals killed to produce food.