In mid July, 2011, the California Milk Processor Board launched a new advertising campaign called ‘Everything I do is wrong,’ created by the same advertising firm, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, who started the wildly successful ‘Got Milk?’ campaign of previous years.

The campaign was instantly controversial, so I grabbed some screen shots of the site (http://everythingidoiswrong.com/) before it was taken down.* Here they are:

The site included a number of social-networking enabled features, including printable ‘Pre-Approved Apologies’:

• “We can both blame myself”
• “I’m sorry I listened to what you said and not what you meant”
• “I apologize for letting you misinterpret what I was saying”
• “I apologize for not reading between the right lines”
• “I’m sorry for the thing or things I did or didn’t do”

And a way to generate videos and post them to your facebook wall. I generated one, which read my facebook profile, found that I was married, and automatically included my wife’s name in the apology.  I’m working on capturing and encoding the video, and will post it here when complete.

* it is still up at time of writing, 7-16-2011.

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From Summer, 2009, Burger King’s highly suggestive ad ‘The Big Seven Incher.’ This was collected by one of my students at McDaniel in the fall of 2010.

The classic PSA from ‘Keep America Beautiful’, aired starting in 1971.

This aired starting on Earth Day, 1971 on broadcast television. It’s effect in the US was profound, both on littering behavior as well as reinforcing the simplistic stereotypes of indigenous people. Wikipedia has an entry on the ad and its impact here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful

70\’s PSA Keep America Beautiful (Crying Indian)

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I’m reading ‘In the Basement of the Ivory Tower’ by the pseudonymous ‘Professor X,’ who teaches English 101 and 102 as an adjunct at two unnamed colleges in the North East – one a small liberal arts college and the other a community college. Professor X’s point is that colleges are over admitting under prepared students, and relying on the temporary adjunct staff to do the dirty work of failing the unprepared out of the program.

This is not a particularly radical claim. But it is worth pointing out a bit of the reasoning:

The increased use of adjunct instructors is a direct result of the explosion in college enrollments, which have expanded dramatically since 1980.  In 1940, there were 1.5 million college students in the United States.  Twenty years later the figure had doubled, to 2.9 million. In 1980, there were more than 12 million students enrolled in college, and by 2004, we were up to 17.5 million. Census projections for 2016 hover around 21 million. Everybody goes to college now, though not everybody graduates.

Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?

Why, however, does ‘Professor X’ give these numbers as quantities, rather than relative to the population of the US – which grew a great deal between 1940 and 2016.  Isn’t that just obvious?  Here’s the numbers in relation to the population:

And here’s the chart:

So it turns out that the big rises in college enrollments as a function of the population happened between 1940 and 1980 – this is no surprise, as the GI Bill famously revolutionized the state university during this period. The change between 1980 and 2016 is less than 1 percent of the population. I can think of no other industry that would be comfortable with this kind of growth relative to the growing population. Surely, then, the rise in number of students cannot be blamed for the rise in adjunct population, which Professor X dates to the 1980′s and 1990′s.

Professor X ends the paragraph by asserting that ‘Everyone goes to college now.’ That is clearly false, even without considering college population to the overall population.  It is so false that it even seems laughable. So what is it doing here?

I would contend that Professor X is inserting an exasperated exaggeration for rhetorical effect. He (and it is clear from the book that Professor X is male) doesn’t literally mean that everyone goes to college. But he’s lamenting that there are people going to college who don’t deserve it. The toss-away phrase becomes a shibboleth – a way for him to identify himself as a fellow elitist to like-minded readers. It thus becomes a kind of appeal to character.

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Pat Robertson, TV evangalist, gives weightless and metabolic advice on his religious show ‘The 700 Club’:

Compare, if you will, to Cortislim.

‘Stop Weighing Yourself’! A classically poor weightloss commercial from 2004-06, Cortislim with Dr. Greg Cedymon

Clips from the show ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ demonstrating product placement in reality shows – in this case, British Airways

The classic ad, which inaugurated the era of heady ‘character-based’ advertisements, as well as the trend of premiering big new ads during the Superbowl. The ad aired during the Superbowl in 1984.

There is much written on the history of this ad, much of it incorrect. Advertising Age has an encyclopedia entry on Apple, which contains a discussion of the ad.

Most ads for American beer are based on humor or scantily-clad women.  Imported beers, however, seem to follow the hard-liquor model of advertisements, emphasizing the kind of person who drinks their beer:

Hennessy’s ‘Flaunt’ campaign (aired primarily on Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’) is typical of aspirational luxury character ads. Part 2: