Weren't we supposed to stop using captive great apes in ads, Google?

Business Insider just published Ace Metrix's list of top-performing ads in 30 categories for the first quarter of 2015. Among them is Google's "Friends Furever" spot for Android:

Wait a minute here: Didn't the US Ad Council announce that it no longer supports the use of great apes in ads back in 2008?

PETA has been lobbying the ad industry to stop using apes as props for years. As a result,  Omnicom Group's BBDO, GSD&M and Merkley & Partners; Interpublic's McCann Erickson, DraftFCB and RPA; Havas' Arnold and Euro RSCG; WPP's Grey Group, Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam and JWT; and Publicis Groupe's Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett all agreed to stop using great apes in ads in 2011. The Google ad was created by Droga5, who apparently didn't get the memo.

I'm not PETA's greatest fan, but as a human (and having the Jane Goodall Institute as a client) the exploitation of our closest cousins by my industry troubles me.

The challenge with using any animals in advertising is their treatment, since they are not willing performers. The most intelligent social animals, such as great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans), elephants, and whales/dolphins, are wild animals that suffer from anxiety and depression when removed from their peers — even if captive bred. (Dogs are domestic animals, so they're a little bit of a different issue.)

The Google ad has representatives of all three of these animal groups performing for your amusement, and that of 16 million of your closest friends.

Jane Goodall is asking people like us, who create ads and entertainment, to sign a pledge not to use captive great apes in our work. I think it's time we stopped treating our cousins like props.

K-Y and the sexual objectification of fat middle-aged men

I'm not going to complain too much about this one, because it made me chuckle with a bit of self-effacing irony. But let's watch and see what issues this lube campaign from DDB Toronto raises:



You see, it's funny because the "warming" lube is so effective, the chubby old slob is irresistible to his more put-together wife.



While I think mature men like me can take the hit on our egos, there is another angle to consider here. In an AdWeek post on "Hunkvertising," my social media friend David Gianatasio interviewed another blogger peer, Sociological Images' Lisa Wade, about what the trendy treatment of men as sex objects in advertising actually says about women.

Many ad experts and social critics see the whole thing as a harmless turning of the tables following decades of bikini-clad babes in beer commercials. Double entendres abound when dissecting the trend, the overriding feeling being that it can’t be taken all that seriously because, after all, we are just talking about guys here. “We’re all in on the gender-reversal joke,” explains Lisa Wade, associate professor of sociology at Occidental College. “It’s funny to us to think of women being lustful.”

When the lust is treated even more ironically, as with these men who are not exactly Isaiah Mustafa, both the woman's lust and the man's sexual desirability are the gag.

As Dr. Wade added in her post about the post she was interviewed for, "the joke affirms the gender order because the humor depends on us knowing that we don’t really objectify men this way and we don’t really believe that women are the way we imagine men to be."

And here, the men aren't either. It's good for a laugh, but over the long term is it good for men and women?

Wes Anderson makes an ad from the wonderful mind of a child

Every PD day at school (a school day when teachers do professional development sans students) I bring my son to the agency. As a result, he has grown up helping his dad make ads. Usually they're about environmental issues. And sometimes he comes up with the most marvellous ideas, like saving money on energy bills by having a tank full of electric eels generating electricity in your basement.

Wes Anderson, McCann Worldgroup and Sony took the amazing resource of unfettered childish imagination a step further when they produced a high-budget TV ad written and narrated by an 8-year-old actor from Long Island named Jake Ryan:



According to AdWeek, Wes Anderson discovered Jake and his magical concept after holding interview sessions in New York, Los Angeles and London, and asking more than 75 kids what they thought goes on inside Xperia phones.

As professional adult creatives, we can only dream of recapturing the absolutely wonderful and unexpected ideas kids have every day. (I guess that's why there are so many substance abuse issues in the industry.) After watching this, I'm starting to wonder if we should hire my little guy full-time.

Full credits at AdWeek.