Acuvue lets you snorkel the Great Barrier Reef

Acuvue Oasys is a moisture-giving contact lens that purportedly allows you to venture places that other contacts cannot take you, like snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef in Australia:

This ad had other places including the wilds of Africa, but this image was the main one.

Sunscreen killing off coral ~ 10% of reefs in danger

A few years ago, while on a scuba-diving trip to the Red Sea, I looked at a friend of mine who was sunbathing and told her that you could make a killing promoting "Coral-Safe Sunblock."  She freaked at me because she wasn’t wearing any.  Then she suddenly realized that no such product existed.  I looked [...]

Pharmaceutical companies spend more on ‘placeless’ ads than research and development

We’ve talked at some length on this blog about the placeless places used in pharmaceutical ads.  Would you believe that the industry spends more on those ads than they do on research and development?  One study suggests so.

Obama jokes about Viagra in campaign speeches

Whether you’re into Barack Obama or not, he made a Rapidsea worthy comment about drug companies.  He said:
"A whole bunch of these profits are going into these TV ads where you don’t even know what the ads are for… There are people running in fields and they are all dancing.  Actually, that is not true.  [...]

White Cat Brand Inhaler ~ Breathe in the tropics

Small towns can reveal some of the most interesting products.  This picture was taken in a little shop in Orland, Maine:

I have never heard of this product before.  What exactly could a small plastic tube contain that transports you to the tropics?  You can sense all four seasons if you believe this display, or maybe [...]

A must see ~ paradise can destroy your liver and maybe even kill you

Halloween has past, but the fright continues.  The scariest website on the Internet might just be TravelSafely.com, which is a site advertising Hepatitis A and B vaccines by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).  Just swimming in that pool can lead to disease according to this weird doctor-like, lab-coating-wearing public informant.
The most shocking part of the site is certainly [...]

CVS happy-place, caregiver ad that Bob Garfield says "makes you want to puke"

Bob Garfield, blogger/critic at Advertising Age, really hates the new CVS ad with this happy little scene in it:
 
He says of it, "…how often it is that you see a TV commercial that makes you want to puke?  Well done, CVS. … You want your customers to love you. Alas, flattery will get you nowhere, [...]

Tiger Balm YouTube Contest ~ Hawaii or $5,000

A contest that hasn’t gotten too much publicity to date is the Tiger Balm YouTube contest where you are supposed to post your videos on how you get sore muscles and are fixed with Tiger Balm.  The prize for the video with the most votes is either a trip to Hawaii or $5,000 to [...]

The opposite of mental illness is oceanfront

Pharmaceutical companies pump out the Rapidsea ads out like nobody’s business.  I wrote about it here with Aleve, and there are plenty of other examples to go around.  Here’s a new one that you might think is a public service announcement for families going through the loss of a loved one:

Actually, it’s AstraZeneca announcing [...]

Selling sleep ~ Do these mattresses float?

How can a company that sells $5,000+ mattresses really get away with having an ad like this one in Dwell’s November issue:

This ad is obviously supposed to mean that sleeping on this very expensive Hästens mattress is going to take you away to lakeside restfulness. Yawn. I’m falling asleep now without ever having [...]

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