Can not airing a commercial bring you as much publicity as airing one? Apparently, the advertising brains down at Miller High Life think so.

High Life has garnered a lot of brand recognition positioning recent spokesman Windell Middlebrooks as a beer delivery guy who's extra picky about which establishments "deserve" to stock his precious product. As beer ads go, these rate pretty high: Middlebrooks brings a lot of energy and personality to the table and the image-building is spot on now that High Life spends more time battling with the anti-establishment antics of Pabst Blue Ribbon for marketshare than Bud's mainstream ideology.

Pushing those ideas to the next level, Miller High Life has announced plans to air a 1-second Super Bowl ad instead of paying out the $3 million dollars required for a full 30-second spot. "I don't care how big the game is, who got $3 million?!" emotes their outspoken delivery man in an online commercial. High Life would rather be "delivering more honest beer at a tasty price."

As with most Super Bowl ads, the details are being kept under wraps until the big game, but you can see "outtakes" at 1secondad.com. (They're actually kinda funny.) However, let's just hope for Miller's sake that this big-budget, anti-advertising adverting-stunt doesn't backfire on the them. (It sounds like dangerous territory!)

Tell you what, I feel a bit like a dirty corporate shill just reporting on it. Blech!

[via MSNBC]

As a company, once you find a marketing strategy that works, you usually stick with it. Nike had the swoosh, milk has the mustaches, and PETA? Well, they have naked women.

Over the years, PETA has used women celebs like Alicia Silverstone, Eva Mendes, and Cindy Crawford to encourage the masses not to wear fur or eat meat. And while they've gotten a lot of flak, they continue to pay women to drop trou for the good of the animals.

Today in Philadelphia, PETA's "lettuce ladies" (women wearing little more than lettuce-shaped undergarments) will be handing out soy turkey sandwiches to promote the company's "Turn over a new leaf: go vegetarian" campaign.

A few points that should be noted, here: PETA rarely uses men to advertise its messages. It did use MTV Jackass' Steve-O, who was nude, but the ad a) only showed his backside and b) was quite obviously in jest, poking fun at the typical oversexed PETA model and keeping in vein with the show's brand of humor. Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix have also done commercial spots for the organization - fully clothed. Somehow, I wonder if the effectiveness of the message is lost when we're too busy ogling Pam Anderson's generous chest to worry about what she's promoting.

Now, I'm all for soy products, either as meat replacements or as an addition to a healthy diet. Isn't it fascinating how, in campaigning to stop exploiting one living thing, another is exploited in its place? Maybe PETA should stop pointing its fingers at others for a second and turn the magnifying glass on itself.

Food for thought.

It's hard to believe that Burger King ads could get too much worse than the ones that featured The King, but they have gone from weird to weirder. This Eat Like a Snake ad features a man drawn to a triple Whopper that a friend has carelessly abandoned on the lunchroom table. He slithers snakelike across the floor, unhinges his jaw and swallows the sandwich whole.

Usually, even fast food restaurants try to make it seem like diners are savoring the flavor of their foods, but all this one seems to be doing is encouraging binge eating, as snake-man doesn't seem to have tasted the burger at all. It might even be encouraging bulimia on top of compulsive eating, as more than a few people expressed the desire to void their last meal - fast food or not - after watching that burger go down in one mouthful.

[via supersizedmeals]

If you thought that eating sugary cereal could be hazardous to your health, just try starring in a commercial for it. The star of this recent Frosties cereal ad (the name for Frosted Flakes in the UK), a 15-year old gymnast from Johannesburg, South Africa, has actually gotten death threats as a direct result of appearing in the ad. Apparently, people just find the jingle to be so irritating, that they have said things like "He's a revolting despicable child - he deserves to die." Kellogg's put a stop to just about all the interviews with the star, just to be on the safe side, but spokespeople say that the ad is actually quite popular with viewers.

Having seen the commercial in the video clip above, I have to say that the viewers of this ad must be a very lucky bunch because this is by no means the most irritating or disturbing ad on TV - Skittles and Burger King already have a head start in those departments, and the recent Folger's ad is in its own category of weirdness. Death threats? It's just breakfast.

Smirnoff is the latest company to join in the viral marketing trend, putting a video on YouTube to gain interest in their newest product. Since we all enjoyed the Folgers ad so much, it seemed only natural to put up new Smirnoff ad. The ad is a music video featuring the "New England gangsters" known as "Prep Unit" - in other words, three white guys rapping about Cape Cod, the Hamptons and Harvard while playing croquet and tennis. The ad promotes Smirnoff's new malt iced tea beverage, Smirnoff Raw Tea, which is in limited release on the East Coast at the moment (but can also be found online). It's a funny ad, but as far as raps about food go, nothing can beat the SNL Lazy Sunday cupcake rap.

At this point, it's hard to imagine coffee needing any sort of advertisement, let alone one that hypes it as a performance enhancer. But, a few decades ago, the National Coffee Association seemed to think that the next generation of movers and shakers ("the new coffee generation") could use a boost. Enter this 1984 ad, affectionately known as "The Coffee Achievers." Yep, it's a good old 80s-style montage featuring everyone from David Bowie to Kurt Vonnegut to Heart to Cicely Tyson. All of them, ostensibly fueled by coffee. "Coffee gives you the time to dream it. Then you're ready to do it. No other drink does that like coffee," says a rather tranquil female voice-over.

A new U.K.-based ad campaign for I Can't Believe It's Not Butter will feature Ozzy Osbourne and celebrity impersonator Jon Culshaw playing Ozzy Osbourne. The crux of the television ad, launched by Unilever UK Foods, is that neither the fake Ozzy or the real Oz-Man himself can discern between real butter and the butter-like spread.

“I can't believe it's not Butter' now tastes so much like butter that the two Ozzies can't tell the difference,” a Unilever brand manager told Checkout Magazine.

The ads accompany a re-launch of the product with a new recipe and a new package.