Since we crank out so many stories each week some really good ones get lost in the cracks. And since so many new people visit Guyism every day (thank you), we thought we’d take some time on the weekends and holidays to share a few classics that many of our newer readers may have missed.

Making a good Super Bowl commercial is hard. It takes months, if not years, of planning and research to make people remember your company’s ad. Conversely, 30 seconds of awfulness can make people remember you too, but for all the wrong reasons. Here are seven ads which definitely fall into the latter category.

6 Christopher Reeve walking – Nuveen Investments, 2000
In 2000, paralyzed former Superman star Christopher Reeve “appeared” in this commercial. The message was that in the future, a whole lot of crazy crap is going to happen. Including, apparently, Christopher Reeve’s head being grafted to the body of a giant.

The goal of the commercial was to touch the hearts of Americans everywhere. Instead, everyone just kind of went, “Uh, that was creepy” and awkwardly took a bite out of their chicken wings. Oh also no one had any clue what Nuveen Investments did either because the commercial was really vague and almost made Nuveen Investments seem like an evil corporation from the future. Probably like the one that made Robocop.

5 Meet the official Holiday Inn transsexual – Holiday Inn, 1997
The gist of this commercial was that being a man getting a sex change was basically what Holiday Inn was doing to their hotels. Why this would make you want to stay there, no one was really sure, but if it’s good enough for Seinfeld’s Kenny Banya, it’s good enough for me.

The commercial was universally disliked and even resulted in some boycotts from various gay/transsexual/transgender groups. Probably not even for the hurtful depiction of their people, but rather for the tremendous slap in the face of being compared to a Holiday Inn.

4 White guys hunt down Kenyan, give him shoes – Just for Feet, 1999
There are few situations in which white men hunting down a black guy is going to make for a nicely received ad. This ad falls in line with that bold theorem on my part.

The premise if you’re too lazy to click: A Kenyan guy is walking around, being barefoot and Kenyan when some white guys in a Hummer drug him, capture him, then put sneakers on him. Eventually, he gets up all wobbly and runs, trying to free himself from these strange objects on his feet. The ad was so poorly received that it got a feature story on how bad it was on Salon.com, got the ad agency behind it sued (Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency in question, would countersue for Just for Feet’s ineptitude), and had a hand in Just for Feet’s bankruptcy later that year. So yeah, that turned out well.

3 Lemmings – Apple, 1985
In 1984, Apple had what some have called the most amazing commercial ever with their cleverly titled ad “1984”, a name which no one has ever been able to decipher the meaning of. Amidst pressure to possibly match that ad, they came up with another artistic bizarre ad that, well, sucked. Hard.

The commercial was so poorly reviewed that Apple stayed away from Super Bowl ads until 1999. And to make the indignities suffered to viewers worse, this is the one Apple commercial that has a bunch of people dying gruesome deaths, yet Justin Long and his smug Mac-loving face are nowhere to be found. Bastards.

2 Salesgenie.com and their racist panda bears – Salesgenie.com, 2008
After a 2007 Super Bowl ad universally rated as the worst one of the year, Salesgenie.com came back determined to make more awful ads that would stick with viewers for being so awful. Seriously, they even distributed a press release about it. Well they can wipe their hands thusly because this certainly proved to be a job well done.

It may shock you to learn that this ad never ran again amidst protests from Asian groups for A) Being racist and B) Finding a way to make pandas seem utterly annoying (do you know how hard that is? Look at this guy!). Also I fail to see how pandas could be running a profitable business, particularly when it’s a business selling furniture made of their favorite food. I’d find myself wholly incapable of selling Hamburger Chairs so it wouldn’t be fair to expect more from my cartoon pandas.

1 Fred Astaire dances with vacuums – Dirt Devil, 1997
I don’t think this was the first in the tacky “Dead Guy Sells Product” type of ads, but it was definitely one of the earlier ones. And what better way to honor probably the only masculine dancer ever than by putting a vacuum in his hands.

I’m a big Jack in the Box fan and wish it were still around in the NYC area. At the same time, based on this commercial, I’d be a little hesitant when I ordered a bacon burger and found it doused in special sauce.

Not only does that banner immediately make me laugh, it also goes to show me that the brewery has a sack. This is the sort of comment that you’d expect to see on The Flint Skinny, not from a publicly traded company. While Miller is busy lying about High Life being the Champagne of Beers, Redhook is out there cracking jokes like, “Redhook always goes for two. Points, twins, whatever.”

Upon further investigation, the brewery seems to cruise the median between macro and craft beers. The first thing that came to mind was Maker’s Mark. It’s the first bourbon that everyone moves on to when they want to upgrade from Jack or Jim. It’s a perfect holding ground for those who aren’t ready to fully start experimenting with big boy bourbons, but are done with the sweet stuff. Not costing a fortune is also a big selling point.

Redhook has more flavor than most macro beers you’ll find, but it doesn’t quite get to the huge flavor bombs of many of the craft breweries. They’ve carved out an ideal niche and stayed there. It’s light bodied and refreshing, but you still feel like you’re drinking a solid beer. If that doesn’t make you at least want to try it, what I said they sponsor go karts?

No, you can’t actually call them up and ask for them to sponsor your amateur Mario Kart 64 team (as far as I know). But they are down in Indianapolis for the Super Bowl with the Dan Patrick Show. You can see the their banners lining the track outside Lucas Oil Stadium as well as a couple branded karts.

Check out more of their attention grabbing ads in the pictures below. You can also visit their website to learn more, find their beers, or even check out the Pandora playlist, which I imagine is just the Reel Big Fish song “Beer” on loop.

As noted a couple of times, it appears to be a decent shot in the arm for the franchise. Part 4 felt pretty stagnant, despite it being on sexier hardware. Glad to hear that the overly complicated armor breaking aspects have been toned down, though I still have mixed feelings ultimately about it having more Street Fighter-like super meters and combos. In the end, change is absolutely necessary, plus the fact that the women no longer look as whorish is another bonus.

Oh, so remember Namco’s method of selling the game in Japan from before? Well, they’re sticking to the program…

Then you had this…

Which turned out to be fake. It was from a screenshot from part 4. Which is a shame, since women deserve the same kind of target marketing as well. Primarily, women who dig deaf and blind mutes that are contortionists and have an affinity for cutlery.

Then again, maybe that’s just the type of vacation you want. It’d be like the episode of The Simpsons where they go to Itchy and Scratchy Land. Maybe the trip features a little too much death and destruction to be truly relaxing, but fighting for your life and/or recreating the Jack/Rose scene from Titanic may be just what you need to get your life back on track.

Thanks for the tip, Gregory.

So if you want to watch closeted homosexual men make out with mannish blonde women as creepy Jay Glazer-looking bald men look on, now you know the place to go. Frankly, I don’t know why Springfield doesn’t start running this in national spots to promote tourism to the state. It’ll be appealing to some audience as a claim to fame far more than “a city that The Simpsons might take place in.”

That’s Your Hair Salon: Blow [Videogum]

Never has a metaphor that should also lend itself to plenty of cheap laughs, i.e. a guy getting kicked in the junk (even by a tough guy midget), been so poorly executed, let alone unfunny. I can’t say I agree with Super Punch on this one: is the following spot for Glyde clever? Not really. Is it trying to hard? Most definitely…

Look: I think it’s pretty outrageous that GameStop sells used games just a few dollars less than the price of a new copy, but why should this person (or anyone really) be all that pissed that their cut for being the middleman is just a few paltry dollars?

If one pays full price for anything, and (hopefully) gets plenty of enjoyment out of it, and therefore one’s money’s worth, then not a damn thing else is owed. Any return after the fact is pretty much gravy. I can’t stand GameStop, but the whole used games things is definitely nowhere on my list of grievances.

It’s like when people who pay full price for X, and then bitch about the price going down shortly afterwards. Well, sucks, but that’s life. What’s worse is if the person fully enjoyed the item in question. Which inevitably leads to the classic line: “But X is expensive!” Yup, and what isn’t these days.

While many were entertained by the following ad, one D.B. Grady is not one of them…

And who exactly is this Grady guy? The aforementioned vet, a former paratrooper who has seen plenty of read deal action, up close and very personal, in Afghanistan. And in his column for The Atlantic, he explains why he finds the ad above so offensive.

“There is a television advertisement for a video game called Modern Warfare 3 that is so base and strident that it’s hard to believe that it’s not deliberately offensive” is how Grady kicks things off. And he goes on to state: “The advertisement trivializes combat and sanitizes war. If this were September 10, 2001, maybe it wouldn’t be quite so bad. Those who are too young to remember Vietnam might indulge in combat fantasies of resting heart rates while rocket-propelled grenades whiz by, and of flinty glares while emptying a magazine into the enemy. But after ten years of constant war, of thousands of amputees and flag-draped coffins, of hundreds of grief-stricken communities, did nobody involved in this commercial raise a hand and say, “You know, this is probably a little crass. Maybe we could just show footage from the game.”

Well, at the very least, his last point touches upon my main beef with the ad, that being how you don’t see the game. As for the thrust of his argument, who am I to defend a game I don’t even like to a person that has done more for this country that most of us will. Sorry, but as an ex-military brat, I still have the upmost respect for veterans.

That being said, how is the commercial any different than all the other attempts at spinning the horrors of war into some mindless form of fun? Which is nothing more than yet a piece of the propaganda, something that the US Army (and everyone else, to be fair) thrives upon, to get young men (and women) to enlist?

Not sure if everyone has been keeping track, but every new flagship Android device that Google releases has been accompanied by YouTube shenanigans featuring ninjas. Here’s the very first one, for the Nexus One, which I still think is the sexiest looking Google phone to date (as well as the best looking handset that HTC has produced period)…

And then for the Nexus S (again, lol at Samsung for refusing to allowing their device to be called the Nexus Two), you had this fourth wall breaking effort that I unfortunately cannot embed for technical reasons. And most recently, for the just launched Galaxy Nexus is this…

It’s an actual game that you can play, via YouTube. And it’s not half bad! As far as these kinds of things go, it’s actually pretty decent. It definitely has that old-school, NES vibe (you’ll definitely be reminded of TMNT and Battletoads).

But it also plays pretty damn well to boot; virtually every other effort of its kind always falls short in the playability department. Punching and kicking is crisp, as is grabbing and tossing foes aside as well. It’s hardly deep, but its three levels will keep you entertained. For those wanting more, there’s a free Android app that seriously picks up right where the YouTube version leaves off.

BTW, been working on an iPhone vs. Android piece for a while now; unfortunately, the Android phone I’m using is no longer the hottest Google phone on the block, but given the rapid fire pace in which such devices are released, I guess it can’t be helped. Look for it by the end of the week!

Note: Objects in picture may have significantly more penis than it would appear.

HEMA’s new “Mega Push-Up Bra” claims it can push women’s chests up two cup sizes. So, in some respects, the campaign is kind of brilliant.

Pejic has previously walked both the men’s and women’s shows for Jean-Paul Gaultier and the men’s shows for Marc Jacobs and his bios consider the 20-year-old one of the world’s leading androgynous models.

And hey, props to Andrej. If you can look as good as 99% of the female models out there without, you know, being a woman, that’s a damned impressive feat.

Has Mr. Pejic stirred your now-confused loins? Well, you can see more pictures at the Daily Mail.

A MAN modeling women’s lingerie? Andrej Pejic proves a push-up bra can create serious cleavage… even for the truly flat-chested [Daily Mail via Buzzfeed]

So it is with a simple technology designed to let people know that their bus is arriving. From this noble goal, advertisers have come up with something pretty vile, actually.

The basic problem most advertisers have with your smartphone is that you’re perfectly willing to download a free app for it, but you’re not willing to constantly leave it open to let them annoy you. So a company called Densebrain had an idea during a meeting with Proctor and Gamble:

“We said we wished we could just set people’s phones off when they’re standing in front of [a] product. And all of a sudden, we thought, ‘We have something that can do that.’”

The technology is actually fairly simple: you mount beacons that transmit high energy signals that you’ll never hear, they’re too high up in the audio spectrum. But your phone will pick them up, activate the app, and start acting like you have a text message.

Needless to say, they’re worried about “notification fatigue”, so you can opt out from having your phone annoy you with a coupon you don’t need for a product you don’t want if this tech really catches on.

Of course, this raises the question of what’ll happen once the app comes preinstalled on every phone…

Sound-Triggered Smartphone Ads Seek You Out [AdWeek]

According to a completely unsourced forum post, Crazy Mickey is now running a company called Sign Services. It sells signs. The dream may be dead, but long live the Beeper King.

Surprisingly though, there aren’t many celebranded malt liquors. The only one that comes to mind is Frank Thomas’ Big Hurt Beer. Our only hope to bring a larger variety to market (Afroman anyone?) is for BHB to become the best selling beverage in a can. The good thing is there are people out there working hard to make it happen. The bad thing is that their work is pretty terrible.
 

 
See what I mean? The hook was good, but it’s impossible to take these guys seriously. The main guy looks like the bastard child of The Miz and Matt Stafford and the only decent rapper in the bunch sounds like E-40 but looks like Will.i.am. They mentioned several times that they rap for free, and I think we can all agree why.

The Retar Crew isn’t the first time we’ve featured a baseball related rap song on Guyism. This seems like a perfect time for you to get reacquainted with Miles Stone. That is of course if you like lyrics such as, “Do you want me to throw my balls in your face. Hoes, yeah, uhh. Do you want me to swing my dick like a baseball bat(bat(bat)).” Miles is clearly the 6th greatest rapper on all time behind only Dylan.

Borderline pedophillic incestual pseudo-cannibalism has never been so heart-wrenchingly delicious. Which is surprising given what a popular storytelling crutch that is.

Unofficial Ad for Sour Patch Kids is Terrifying, Oddly Effective [Geekosystem]

Of all these things, I think I’m most shocked by the fact that they still have D batteries in the future. All the technological advancements in Star Wars and we’re still using batteries the size of a brick that hold an amount of energy equivalent to a fat person riding a stationary bike? Evil science just isn’t as practical as you’d think.

The Dark Side of The Dark Side [Retina Burn Blog via Buzzfeed]

QR codes have been gaining popularity for a couple years and have popped up in advertising for just about everything. Now they have made it all the way to your beer. Crabtree Brewery, of Greeley, CO, has decided to slap the codes on their newest bottle, the Berliner Weisse Ale. I was ready to immediately write this off until I saw where the label leads. Instead of just sending you to their website or facebook page, this link takes you directly to a video by founder of the brewery, Jeff Crabtree.

In the 47 second clip, he introduces himself and tells you a little bit about the beer. I’m not exactly sure why they couldn’t just write the description on the bottle, but I see the benefit of putting the brewer himself in front of the consumer. One of the most appealing parts of the craft brewing industry is that every beer and every brewery has a story. By getting face time with the customer, he is improving the likelihood that you explore his offerings further than just one six pack.

While the video was shot before the Great American Beer Festival, it just so happens that the Berliner Weisse Ale took home the gold medal for German-Style Sour Ale. I still don’t know how I feel about using QR codes, but that medal alone should buy them a little more time to experiment with their marketing. I’ve embedded the video for you, but the image above is the actual, and functional, label. You can use a bar code/QR scanner on your phone to check it out if you’d like. The real question is, how do you feel about slapping codes on the beer bottles? When it all comes down to it, the consumers will determine if the trend continues.

Story via Denver Westword and Draft

Behold the unholy fusion of Activison and Pepis Co, their Rank Up XP initiative. This is how it’ll work: if you purchase Mountain Dew and Doritos, you’ll get a code that will double your XP points during Modern Warfare 3 for a set time. A 20oz bottle will get you 15 minutes, a 12 pack will get you 45 minutes, and so forth.

Why does that matter? Because having XP points will allow you first dibs of additional weapons, game modes, and much more. So basically, a company that’s already been accused of nickel and diming their customers via the aforementioned highway robbery plot known as Call of Duty Elite, is now officially nickel and diming folks.

Needless to say, the reaction to this campaign has been vitriolic. The diehards over at Reddit are not happy. Yet there’s plenty who don’t see it as that big of a deal, but as the games writer over at Forbes points out, when you have your teeth kicked in during Modern Warfare 3, you won’t know if it’s because the other person is simply better and earned his spoils or if he just eat a metric ton of cool ranch chips.

Unfortunately, it’s also absolutely brilliant. The best things to ask someone to buy are things that they were going to anyway, but now there’s an added incentive. And again, folks who play Modern Warfare also partake in such crap delicacies, there’s no denying that simple fact. Though I also find this the most douche-chilling idea ever, make no mistake.

I don’t think I’m alone in finding these guys eminently unlikable. Like even if they came up with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg broke into their rooms and stole the Winklevoss’s product plans and codes for it, I still feel like most people would go, “Yeah, well, tough shit.” But let’s put that aside and pretend these two entitled gentlemen are the coolest dudes around and beloved by all. This commercial would still blow dicks. Putting two guys completely uncomfortable on-camera in front of a desk and having them talk about cracking nuts isn’t exactly making me run out to commit homicides in the name of liberating pistachios.

Also pistachios are disgusting. I rarely get cravings for a snack that tastes like the undercarriage of a Persian man’s balls, but that’s just me.

Watch the Winklevoss Twins Make Zuckerberg Jokes in a Pistachio Ad [Vulture]

The following will make you miss the days in which the only thing that got you upset were billboards for real life junk in your Tony Hawk Pro Skater…

Listen, I actually feel really bad for advertisers, because they are fighting an uphill battle on virtually ever front. But it’s already been established that there’s a correct way of getting the attention of gamers… like the free XBLA game that Doritos funded, which blew up like crazy, as well as the most successful example of them all, those Burger King Xbox games that folks were more than willing to pay money for (cuz they were actual games plus actually fun). Along with the not so correct way, and part of it is accepting the facts that ads by themselves are not “cool” unless they’re completely out there, something that most ad folks are afraid to do, or are simply so retarded that they become viral in a manner that was not intended.

The only example given that’s alright in my book is asking for more information to be emailed to you. But all the other “interactive” nonsense is just that. Like the first one, involving Twitter; I’ll only pass along an ad if it’s genuinely engaging or a train-wreck, the type of stuff that I hardly expect to see on my Xbox. Also, who the hell uses Twitter on 360? NO ONE. Though the last example is my fave, the stupid quiz, in which the dude openly admits that it’s stupid cuz the question asked is dumb. That fact that zero effort was put into the very thing that’s supposed to get people actually engaged is proof positive that those involved don’t get two simple truths, which aren’t even exclusive to gaming: a platform by itself ain’t jack unless you actually do something with it, and just because an option is available doesn’t mean everyone will want to exercise it in the first place.

Again, I blame Halo 2. Because of it’s pioneering use of alternative reality gaming (people are still trying to top ilovebees to this very day), which aside from being well executed, just made total sense given the subject matter, advertisers have been struggling to figure out other means of interactivity, i.e. getting the customers to do the work of promoting your goods and services for you.

See Xbox 360’s Kinect-Enabled Advertising in Action [Kotaku]

The one thing that bothers me about the video is the claim that bras’ pokiness and discomfort is somehow men’s fault. I mean, sure, when bras were invented, men were the primary inventors and probably didn’t care much about women’s happiness. And it kind of makes sense that you’d want women to feel uncomfortable in bras so they’d be more likely to take them off. Hmm. Maybe these women are onto something. Look forward to my new line of Porcupine Hair underwear in stores soon!

What Would You Ask the Bra Genie? [The Hairpin]