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This video by Dove is a well-done public service spot encouraging parents to talk to their girls about body image before the media does. This is some nice positioning work for Dove, itself a beauty brand, trying to place itself outside the anorexic mass media mold.

The video is part of this site and its ‘Dove Self-Esteem Fund’, aimed at buying back self esteem from England’s foreign creditors. The 21st century economy is a strange and mysterious thing.

In the end this still breaks down to brand building, but its easier for a brand like Dove to criticize its own industry than it is for a cigarette company to pay for anti-smoking ads. Dove really can legitimately find ways to sell beauty products without inflicting psychic damage to women, while it’s hard for a tobacco company to claim it doesn’t support the use of tobacco products.

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The last game you will ever play

This video goes from being a Halo retrospective piece to a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the franchise, and the video game industry itself.

In the not-too-distant future, the Halo franchise becomes so popular it is the only form of media produced in the world, and society eventually falls apart as no corpse is left un-humped.

My favorite part of the video is when the Nintendo branch of Microsoft Game Studios tries its hand at a cell-shaded sequel, which fails horribly (and no one will sit through the opening cut scene).

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It’s just like every fucking Thanksgiving

This one-minute spot for Bud Light I unfortunately don’t have any back story on. I would suspect it never aired, and is just used to promote the bud.tv link mentioned at the end of the spot.

This spot is pretty good, especially for the times where it’s not 100% clear what the swears actually are intended to be. The woman’s reaction to “that’s doesn’t count” might be the high point of the spot.

It’s really a shame the FCC is so uptight about this kind of thing, though I guess some of you out there have fucking kids to raise.

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Cracked presents: A crazy fold-in on the back no wait that’s Mad Magazine wait maybe they ripped that off too I can’t remember

Nothing says I’m too lazy to make a legitimate post like linking to another site’s content. In that spirit, this article on Cracked features literally ten commercials featuring celebrities who probably wish they were never in the commercials.

Or that’s what the article says. Most of these are just the actors when they were children, and they had no careers to mar. And Matt LeBlanc’s spot is more or less a classic, and the writing is funnier than an average Friends episode. Oh, take that, Friends.

Please don’t tell Friends what I said.

It should be noted that the number one spot, featuring Bruce Willis, actually wasn’t a commercial, but was just an everyday evening on Willis’s porch that just happened to be caught on camera.

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It was the weirdest episode of Reading Rainbow

This two minute mock video for the Axe ESP campaign is a good follow-up to our previous post about body spray commercials, and is one of my favorite things in the world: a parody of an awful commercial.

The video mocks home-shopping TV commercials and pokes some fun at its own campaign.

Explore their web site (danger: audio, maybe NSFW), and watch the actual video commercials that go along with this campaign.

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