Super Bowl Vigilantes Strike Again

As we predicted in Super Bow Vigilantes, guardians of the public order have taken down a Super Bowl spot for being offensive.The New York Times reports that SalesGenie.com has announced that it will no longer run a spot with a talking panda bear that had a Chinese accent.The spot is offensive on many levels. Not least of which is how dreadful it is. Exactly the kind of free speech that needs

Big, Dumb, Expensive Super Bowl Ads

As advertisers get conned by agency and media hype into believing that their Super Bowl buys are just a promotional platform, they are forgetting something -- if the spots are no good, the rest is irrelevant.Continuing a dreadful trend, Super Bowl commercials got bigger, more expensive and stupider than ever this year. Production once again trumped concept.The majority were witless and unoriginal

Super Bowl Vigilantes

Super Bowl Sunday is a great day for sports, a huge day for advertising, and a lousy day for the First Amendment.It's the one day of the year that every interest group and every advocacy group has its thought police on duty (see this from USA Today) looking for any ad that might be "offensive" to them. It's the day that advertisers and agencies fold like single-ply toilet paper when some