I was very excited to stumble on this TV commercial from 1985 for the Nikon One Touch instant camera. Their slogan? “It puts great photography at everybody’s fingertips.” Their mascot? A dismembered hand, of course! Thing (sometimes spelled “Thingg”) — the ambulatory hand that lives in a box and serves as a literal “handyman” to […]
Category: Advertising
Appearances of Das Unheimliche in popular advertising and marketing.
Animated Weeds and Supernatural Pesticides
Lawncare season is in full bloom, if the television is any indication. More and more, I’ve been noticing advertisements for riding mowers, hedge trimmers, and all sorts of products targeting the green thumb. But one popular subgenre of these gardening ads have been employing the medium in a way that is undeniably uncanny: commercials for […]
You Don’t Eat Your Own Kind
My favorite Bizarro comic of recent days involves Mr. Peanut — that dapper mascot of Planter’s nuts — in a scenario that makes plain the inherent contradiction of advertisements that employ cartoon mascots to represent the very same products they sell. What IS the appeal of these imaginary spokespeanuts and mascots and similar characters in […]
JC Penney — Screaming For Retail
In their latest campaign, “Enough. Is. Enough,” JC Penney is running what is, to my mind, a hilarious television commercial, involving a serial montage of consumers shouting for outrageously loud and extended time periods at sales tags and other marketing tricks familiar to us all. What makes this commercial so great is all the horror […]
The Freakiest Ads of 2011
Thank you, Tim Nudd at AdWeek, for posting the 30 Freakiest Ads of 2011. Some of them were quite disturbing (I think the anti-child abuse PSA from Ireland hit me hardest (literally). And some are freaky in the way they just push the boundaries of what is taboo. But many are prime examples of the […]
Eternal Moments and Smoking Billboards
The endless breath of smoke. The unexpected blink. The sudden nod. Visit the “Eternal Moments” gallery of cinemagraphs by Ana Pais for some stunning moments of the uncanny. The portfolio opens up with a citation from Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” that reads: “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats, […]
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