ANTICIPATING TOMORROW'S NEEDS TODAY Red and yellow pitched themselves as spokescandies for the new millennium - "We'll be the first ones out the gate! We'll run it into the ground, and by the time the year 2000 gets here, it's passé!" - and all that was missing was a knowing reference to a Super Bowl placement, to follow hard on the heels on the California Raisin's "We Heard It Through The Grapevine" Motown revival. As anyone's who's ever ordered the minisub from the back cover of a Marvel comic knows, the selling copy is almost always better than the real thing - and Madison Avenue seems to have taken this to heart, thinking it better go one level meta and pitch the pitch rather than try to create the illusion of a consumer paradise. As Continental Tires proclaimed, "We don't make great tire commercials, we just make great tires," we could only feel the pain for the seven percent of Super Bowl viewers - ourselves included - who tune in just for the commercials (and not, we suppose, for the tires). FedEx seems to have taken this less-is-more lesson to heart, when, in the great tradition of radio, it asked us to imagine a US$1.3 million ad that "starred lifeguards from Baywatch and dancing kangaroos ... it was very funny." Maybe Image Is Nothing, but we would have liked to have seen the dancing kangaroos, all the same.

words
Sucksters

pictures
Terry Colon