Ad Stuff: Holy Shit, this is amazing

I have long felt that SFW porn is the greatest shit in history, and now Diesel, known for their generally cheeky attitude, has outdone themselves by embracing the internet trend in a recent ad.

Peep this shit, and prepare to be amazed aroused




this is really the first time I've seen an ad so good I didn't even have the heart to be jealous I didn't do it. Holy. Fucking. Shit.

If you're not familiar with SFW, you should read this article from ED, or else just read this explanation here, from me:

Basically, you take a pornographic image, and use MS paint to cover up the dirty parts, making it look like something innocuous.

Diesel's Viral Agency, creatively called the Viral Factory made the spot of vintage porn for Diesel's XXX Dirty Thirty, 30th Anniversary party... I'm sorry, this would be a longer post, but I need to go watch that clip again. Fucking amazing.

Ad Stuff: More Nut Ads Plz

Nut Ad Reviews

I love nuts. I’m thinking about running to the store after class and buying some nuts. I can visualize the jar, and possibly the flavor, but I can’t call to mind a brand. I’m guessing a lot of people are kind of in that same boat, which explains why I’ve been seeing nut ads all over the damn place of late.

Why the fuck am I seeing nut ads all over the damn place?

Background for the slow learners:

the Academy Awards, which, in terms of advertising dollars, is basically the Superbowl for broads. Obviously, as the Acamdey Awards are artistically based they don’t want to have the full level of integration that you find in the Superbowl, but still, that fucking thing has gotta be a goldmine, ( By the way, Robert Downey Jr. got fucking ROBBED) While people pay more attention to (and more money for) the commercials in the Super Bowl, there is a school of thought that says you can reach a more desirable market segment through the Academy Awards.

Got it?

Anyway, so despite all that, the Academy Awards is full of weak-ass ads for some brand of nuts I’ve never even heard of. On top of all that, to quote Bill O’Reilly’s immortal words, “the fucking thing sucks.” Here it is:




Now, Adweek’s Barbara Lippert who is usually wrong about everything was wrong about this too,

“The four spots had a very Kashi-ish vibe mixed with an Obama-esque determination to make a difference, which all somehow came off without seeming overly earnest.”

Sorry , but these fucking commercials sucked. The whole thing was boring and irrelevant. I’m not enough of a client-whore to say that the product needs to be in the spot, but it should be slightly relevant, or at the very least, the ad should be interested. Talking for 30 seconds about some cutesy hobo kitchen in Chicago is a special interest piece for a 7 pm local news broadcast, not an ad campaign. As my copywriting professor was fond of saying, “It’s borrowed interest,” and as I am fond of saying, “it fucking sucked.”

Okay, so I said that at the very least it had to be interesting, but I take that back. Failing even that, at the bottom of the barrel minimum, they should’ve said something like, “True North is proud to donate $50K to this kitchen, in addition to 3 metric tons of nuts, which the hobos promptly scarfed down like filthy squirrels.”

Dear True North Nuts: I am currently looking for paid employment, and will work for a fraction of the cost of your current agency.

Oh, and as long as I’m talking about nuts, a topic I enjoy, I might as well address Emerald Nuts.



Emerald Nuts has weird, uncomfortable ads. They started a year or two ago with Robert Goulet, I think this ran during the annual advertising suckfest that is the Superbowl. Basically Emerald Nuts is here to tell you that they’re creepy. Whatever, that’s fine. They did a shit-ton of that during the bowlgames in December. I probably watched at least 20 bowl games this year, and as a result I likely saw 80-100 ads for emerald nuts. Okay, whatever. My pops hated them, and I thought they were a bit odd, but at least they have some character.

Dear Emerald Nuts: Keep being weird, but try and make it funny.

Infinite Steez's Top 5 Websites that depend entirely on Top 10 Lists

Like most of you in the unwashed rabble, I have a love/hate relationship with top-10 lists. They can be fun to read, but on the other hand they're completely subjective and usually bullshit. On the other other hand, as a blogger I can see the appeal in boiling your writing down to a few bullet points. Apart from anything else, I suppose it gives your work an air of finality. It sounds better to say "Top 5 Crazy Cat Pictures" than it does to say "Here Are Some Pictures of Crazy Cats That I Found." Therefore, I'm going to give it a shot and provide you, the loyal Infinite Steez reader, with my top 5 list of sites that would be nowhere without their top 10 lists.

#5 Time Magazine.com





Time Magazine, which apparently used to engage in journalism, now relies solely on lists. This used to be the province of late night host David Letterman but Time Magazine figured it made more sense to save it's dumb as dildos readers the trouble of sifting through pages and pages of writing and instead disseminate everything into bullet points. I actually just remembered that I have already ragged on Time Magazine for this shit in a previous blog post, but whatever, here we go again.

With Time, it usually starts out something like this,

"Tom Hanks isn't the first celebrity to activate a particle collider, in honor of the famous actor being tapped to switch on the Large Hadron Collider, we take a look the top 10 ten Celebrity Particle Collider Moments."

This prevents them from providing much in the way of opinion or commentary, they just have to say that whatever it is has happened before. It's kind of like when you're watching football and the commentator says, "This is the first time a Quarterback has run in more than three touchdowns since 1965, when..." You get it, right? Time Magazine is kind of like the dipshit who passes a card with the fact on it to John Madden.

Right now, they'd be happy to tell you about Letterman's Top 10 Awkward Guests, Top 10 Celebrity Twitter Feeds (+10 pts for Celebrity inclusion), and Top 10 Pregnant Performers (+25 points for the always rewarding baby, vagina, celebrity trifecta. Fuck you, Time.

#4 AskMen.com





I actually have no real beef with AskMen.com. My original number four was College Humor.com, but that site depends entirely on videos developed by others, drawing only a small amount of it's readership from lists. Ask Men, on the other hand, is largely lists. I do have a book by them entitled, 'From the Bar to the Bedroom' which one of my roommates found out by the trash and gave to me, but other than that I've had little interaction over the years.

You see, this is the part of list formation that presents something of a challenge. You can think of three examples of something, but 'Top Three' doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Therefore, you have to spin it out and pick some subpar examples. Fortunately for me, however, Ask Men is ripe for pwnage.

Here is a list of some of there current top lists:










They also offer a list of top ten long construction projects (sounds riveting-- see what I did there? If you didn't it was a great fucking pun), top ten female spies, and a top ten list of myths about Canadians. Good work AskMen.com. The only thing worse than the inane subject matter of these lists is the staggeringly irritating format in which they proceed. You begin with a splash screen, suggesting that, before reading the article, you buzz it up, or put it on digg, then you start a tedious slideshow, and when you press the button taking you to the number one, you get some shit ad in your way. God I hate advertising... Fuck You Askmen.com. I have proved, yet again, that I can spend 5 minutes thinking about any subject and manage to get really annoyed about it.


#3 Spike.com








Spike is another one of those websites that men should feel embarrassed about. It's sort of like Ask Men except stupider, and more proudly ignorant. Spike drinks Budweiser. Spike goes to stripclubs. Spike votes Republican. Spike is dumb as shit. I don't really have time to get into the abysmal programming the network has to offer, as this article has already taken me literally minutes to write, instead I will focus on the terrible top tens.

Case in point, the article that inspired this whole blog post, a top ten list of deaths caused by video games. While I enjoy schadenfreude (lulz) as much as any other asshole, I have some serious qualms about any article that has a top ten list where two of the answers are about babies being beaten to death.

Still, I don't want to impose my prudish sense of good taste on you, so it's fortunately that in addition to finding Spike to be morally questionable, I also find to be trite and unfunny. Their Top 10 Valentine's Day Tips was peppered with the predictable included (Spend a Ton of Money, Surprise Her) as well as stupid shit (Give her a Nickname, Don't Groom). In addition to this, the topics they choose aren't even really especially interesting. They tend to favor the Ask Men formula of _______ that will get you laid, and that's pretty much the height of their creativity. Having said that, this blog has a 'Shit that will get you fucked' tag, so maybe I should hold my tongue...

Anyway, Spike would be nowhere without these lists, and the lists fucking suck. Maybe that's why Spike.com is fucking nowhere. Next.

#2 GamesRadar.com







You've got to love Games Radar, because they make no fucking effort whatsoever to make their lists coherent. It's kind of like they just sit down and go, "Alright, let's think of something bizarrely specific and then get a bunch of examples. As they say themselves, they have Top 7 lists of " everything from girl-on-girl kisses to Mario Party drinking games." The lists on Games Radar are always full of bizarre shit, and like all good lists, the order pretty much doesn't matter. Unlike the previous two entries, I dig this site because there's some creativity involved in what they do. The kind of creativity it takes to find 7 Gory Deaths in Cutesy Games, 7 Shower Scenes, 7 Enemies You Didn't Want to Kill.

Better than this, however, are the lists that aren't simply weird, but are also interesting.The 7 Worst Parts of Best Games is pretty interesting, as is their compendium of 7 worst release dates. They sort of lose it with their crazy long lists such as the top 101 best moments in gaming (part one) but on the other hand, who the fuck cares.

Now, while I dig the lists on GR, I totally hate the shit out of everything else they do. The reviews are terrible, the features are weak. All this site has is lists. Still, unlike many other sites, their lists are pretty much okay.



#1 Cracked.com







My whole life I had always considered Cracked Magazine to be a runner up to the already fairly lackluster Mad Magazine. A Pepsi to their Coke, a Penthouse to their Playboy. You get the idea. Anyway, over the summer, when I first began getting all of my news from the always intermittently funny news media compiler, Fark, I started reading Cracked Magazine's Top # List of Whatever. These were pretty good, as you can skim them for the gist of what they're talking about, and get your lols that way. They are pretty varied and sometimes interesting, though never particularly funny. Still, I kept reading away for a few months before I started to reflect on what bullshit this is.

I probably go to Cracked two or three times a month and I can confidently say I have never looked at anything but a list. Somehow, their lists manage to pop up on Fark every week, and people are getting a little sick of it, with "Still no Cure for Cracked lists" being a common headline ammendment. Anyway, good or bad, there's little doubt that without it's lists, Cracked.com would be a fucking ghost town.

Don't believe me? Here's their homepage-- Can you spot any lists?













Runner Up:

Digg

Prove me wrong.

Ad Stuff: Facebook is a fucking dead zone.

Being that I’m an ad man, and that I’m currently sitting in a boring as balls marketing class, thinking that they should probably just have me teach this shit, I’ve decided to drop some fucking knol on you.

While this should be blindingly obvious to anyone who uses the service, I have a brilliant marketing tidbit:

facebook apps are dead as fucking dead.

I wouldn’t have thought this needed to be clarified, given the tremendous backlash against crappy zombie v. ninja games, but every time I talk to Internet marketers, they invariably suggest making a facebook app.

“I don’t know,” they say, “facebook is getting big—let’s try that.”

Sometimes this comes in a professional setting, sometimes in class, but whenever I hear it I cringe.

The much maligned, “New Facebook,” released last summer, shoved a bunch of the silly shit to the back page, which nobody fucking ever looks at. Even Burger King’s brilliant campaign came a little too late to be worthwhile. Oh fucking well., except for a few rare cases, it makes the brand look shitty and awkward.

If you wanna advertise on facebook, have them give away a ‘gift’ in the name of your product or brand. Gifts are these crappy like half-inch .gif squares that you can send to people. It’s sort of like the original facebook application, and one of the few that remains on the front page and, more importantly, everybody has access to it. Originally, facebook charged you $1 for these, later they decided it would be smarter to charge you 100 points, with each point equaling one penny. This allows them to charge 300 points, or 3 fucking dollars for something even more worthless than a greeting card. Sound like bullshit? It is, but that doesn’t matter. It’s infinitely more worthwhile.


looks like profit to me:

What the fuck is this?

As you, the loyal infinte steez reader, are well aware, I am very intrested in the large hadron collider. While the Onion recently informed us of some good news on that front, Some other site has a horrifyingly terrible, new development. Tom fucking Hanks may be the dude who turns on the LHC. Now, first, I'd like to address the fact that I tried searching for this story on MSNBC and CNN and neitehr one was covering it, choosing instead to devote precious time to Octopussy, Missing White Girls, and Steroid Usage. Well done, assholes.













Tom Hanks, (pictured right) star of such films as the That Thing You Do, The Money Pit, and Volunteers, will potentially be the guy who destroys the planet earth.

Jesus fucking Christ.

It's fucking cold.

Check this shit out.

What's that? You think this is a weak-ass excuse for a post after a week off? Tough shit.

Media Pro-Tip: Being Passive Aggressive is the Path to Success

I was reading some article about some asshole from Las Vegas, which I was about to blog about because I figured if there's anything my blog needs it's more bullshit posts about politics that ramble on and on, possibly with extended run-on sentences but then I changed my mind.

Basically, Obama came out and said:

“We’re going to do something to strengthen the banking system. You are not going to be able to give out these big bonuses until you pay taxpayers back. You can't get corporate jets. You can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers' dime. There's got to be some accountability and some responsibility.” (emphasis added, because no one can speak in italics)

Well the crabby mayor of Vegas came out swinging, by which I mean he started crying and demanded an apology:

“That's outrageous. He owes us an apology. He owes us a retraction. What is a better place, I say, for them to come here. For them to change their mind and go someplace else and to cancel at the suggestion of the president of the United States, that is outrageous.”

I will address the issue of pretending to be offended for fun and profit in a later article, but the real genius here comes from the end of the article.

"Goodman last made national news for defending an earmark he wanted put in the stimulus package, a $50 million museum dedicated to the history of organized crime."

Boom! Headshot! Article authors Sunlen Miller and Jake Tapper aren't writing an opinion piece here, they're writing journalism. Journalism is different from the opinioneering practiced by Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olberman (what an asskicker) and myself. The difference is that 1. Journalism takes actual work, usually in the form of difficult research (as opposed to just yelling) and 2. Journalism generally requires you to feign neutrality Miller and Tapper manage to maintain their journalistic impartiality while still defending Obama. They do it by including an anectdote about Goodman, the mayor, that makes him look ridiculous and frivolous. If I were them, I would've referenced another incident I read about in which the Mayor told a room of 4th Graders all about how much he loves gin. Me too, Mayor Goodman, me too.

Good work abc, there's nothing like being passive aggressive to make others look ridiculous while still appearing reasonable yourself.

Know What I Don't Care About? Other People's Kids.

Now Missing White Girl Syndrome is a well documented phenomenon, as is the MSM's fascination with shit nobody oughta care about. In the past week there have been stories alternating on the news--- The Stimulus Package, That Caylee Girl, and The Octuplets. Can you guess which one of these will have an effect on your life? Only one. It's totally sad that some crazy broad killed her adorable little girl, but tons of sad shit is happening all the time. Just because something is unpleasant doesn't make it news. The Nooz runs shit like this all the time, and then, they feel like they need to run human interest pieces to make us feel better, so we get stories about children writing letters to soldiers in Iraq, which I also don't give a shit about. Oh, and that chick who had like a hundred babies-- I don't even know how that qualifies as news. What the fuck.


Oh, I also don't care about hotel fires in China, particularly if the hotel isn't built yet and nobody was fucking hurt.

Culture: The International Kinda Sucked.

Here's a tl;dr for you-- the international, that clive owen movie, kinda sucked.

I saw an advanced screening and while I was expecting to be wowed, it actually was pretty weak. Not only is this not Clive Owen's best film, it isn't even his best film about a bank. Side Note: I when I saw the trailer I was hoping it was a sequel to the brilliant inside man (but in fairness when I saw the trailer for inside man, I was hoping it was a remake of the brilliant Quick Change starring Bill Murray) and this was not the first time I was disappointed by this movie.

The acting was pretty much alright but then again I know dick about acting, I won't address that too too much. The plot was sort of convoluted and this comes from a guy who likes shit complicated. The bank didn't reall come off as sinister enough, but paradoxically at the same time they seemed to be just as ridiculously and lamely evil as a 90's era Bond villain. If this is Owen's attempt to show us why we should be grateful to have Daniel Craig as bond, mission accomplished.

It wasn't all bad though. There were a few sweet scenes including an epic shootout that I was hoping was the signal of the movie's upturn. Sadly, it was both the first and last truly balls-out epic part of a movie that should've been balls-out epic from start to finish.

TL;DR-- Seriously, kinda sucked.