There’s no question that I really should like Mad Men. I don’t watch a lot of television that falls outside the categories of “sporting event” or “cartoon”, but if they put it down on paper, I feel like I’d be the ideal target market for this one. Along with any under-thirty guy who damns John Kennedy for ending the life of the Fedora (actually, that’s an urban myth – the truth is much dorkier, and not at all fitting with JFK’s tousled appeal), and thinks the world would be a much better place if men behaved like Cary Grant and talked like C.C. Baxter, and the uniform of choice was still the the gray flannel suit. Hell, there’s a bottle of rye sitting on my desk as I type this, next to a retro Colibri lighter in an ashtray. I should love this show.

But I don’t. And it’s damn disappointing, because I wanted to like it.

There’s no question the design is fantastic, evoking with gusto the old New York of the golden age of advertising, as one might imagine it. It’s the stuff of the old magazines on the bottom shelf in your grandparent’s living room (or your parent’s basement if you’re a bit older). The whole thing reminds me of that famed advertising memo – I can’t remember who wrote it, someone email it to me – where the head of a firm requested that the men of the firm drink whiskey at lunch instead of vodka, because he’d prefer that their clients thought they were drunk, instead of stupid.

Sadly, the retro style is where the good stops. One of the reasons I never liked Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s work on The Sopranos was that my introduction to it came in the later phases, when I am told the show had a surplus of characters who were either powerfully unlikeable or completely incomprehensible as anything but the tool of a lazy writer.

In the case of Mad Men, I feel like it’s a different problem: this is Ally McBeal with guys. The situations swing between the obvious, the predictable, and the absurdly cliched. Oh, so now you’re going to play the normal 1960s show game of let’s cover gaps in our plot and make it seem like we’re being epic and ingenious by invoking a pop cultural event everybody knows about. Yes, that’s oh so new and creative. People were so uptight back then! And they had the social family drama of the upper crust as related via off-Broadway theatre! And the man feared emasculation! And there was sexual and racial tension! And they hated adoption! You learn something new every day.

No matter how talented the actors – Jon Hamm always reminds me of Mitt Romney, but he’s perfectly cast, and John Slattery is nearly as good – or the actresses (Lileks’ affection for Christina Hendrick’s Joan is totally understandable) are, they just can’t carry this drek. It’s either the stuff of bad Lifetime movies (there’s another kind?) or bad oversexed FX drama, not the kind of tautly written dramatic material any show depicting such an explosively creative period rightly deserves. Instead, the Sixties agency world is just another period for people to apply the same combination of broad strokes that make up typical TV storylines to a new canvas … and that’s not telling a story, it’s just playing games. Or as Raymond Chandler once said: “This is what is vulgarly known as having God sit in your lap.”

That said, after seeing the PS3 ad mashing up Shakespeare’s Henry V St. Crispin’s Day speech tonight, I was reminded that really is some quality ad work out there. So here’s a quick list of my personal Top 10 Video Game Ads.

The only rules: no fan made inclusions – otherwise Half Life Full Life Consequences or Half Life in 60 Seconds would take the cake, and no print media, even though that’s where some of the best work has been done (who can forget the impressive Divine Comedy PSP promotion).

10 – Water Balloons

A devious little ad promoting the online multiplayer capability of XBox Live, set to the creepy strains of “Teddy Bear Picnic.” Frank Budgen has done some great work on this front – he worked on at least three of the ads on this list, besides his work for Nike and other big names.

9 – Gears of War: Mad World

This is on here mostly as a contrast with the kind of FPS game ad I noted before. It’s similar in some respects to this ad for BioShock set to “Beyond the Sea”, but the Gears ad featuring Gary Jules’ Mad World has an enduring following, and hits the right note for Gears’ post-apocalyptic environment.

8. George Plimpton doesn’t know Henry Thomas

This ad just gets more bizarre every time I see it. George Plimpton was the spokesman for Intellivision, and made a host of good ads for them, but the humor here is that Henry Thomas had just finished making E.T. – the idea that Plimpton wouldn’t recognize him was just ridiculous.

7. Pole Position

Turn your speakers down for another throwback. “Hey! You look like a real jerk!” “Well, I am a corporate executive…”

6. Mountain

Another multiplayer ad, with much the same feel as the XBox one, albeit for a different system. But I love this one more, not just for the soundtrack, but the perfect encapsulation of the exhilarating feeling you’ve experienced if you’ve ever broken into a national Top 100 list (I’ve only done this once – Warhawk, right when it came out) on a multiplayer game.

5. Ratchet and Clank

The Ratchet and Clank ads were ahead of their time in their Youtube-esque feel. I always liked the one with the gravity boots best. Also, Cloverfield is totally a ripoff of these ads.

4. Halo 3

These are all ads from the Halo 3 “Believe” campaign, which are just a phenomenal representation of the war documentary feel. I wish the game was as good as these ads – but I’ve always loved the initial teaser, which ran during the Super Bowl, even better:

3. PS9

Now this is a classic. There is still a minor cult around this ad – and a running joke that whatever console problems there are, they’ll be fixed at the PS9 stage – and the design in it is excellent. The only problem: at the rate we’re going technologically, I doubt we’ll have to wait til 2078.

2. “Banned” XBox Shooting ad

I still kind of doubt that this ad was actually “banned”, as opposed to just released as a bit of internet fodder. But it does take me back to the days of running around the backyard with fingers raised or nerf guns, and the inevitable arguments that would emerge about whether someone got hit or not.

1. Double Life

By far, the best ad ever done for any game system ever. And one of the few bizarre ads created for Sony (and there have been a lot of those, many of which are magnificent triumphs of awful) that actually works. This doesn’t just work: it speaks to anyone who’s ever played a game and loved it so much as to enjoy “a life of dubious virtue.”

It’s a simple construction: sex sells. And I’m sure that any boyfriend would be proud to post this. Except that, on further inspection, this looks like it’s just another viral ad – albeit a somewhat edgy one for otherwise child-friendly Nintendo. Shoemoney lays it all out:

The first clue to me was the username on YouTube: tinsleyadvertising

Then a quick search on the Tinsley Advertising site lead me to the employee page where I found 1 guy who looked very similar to the guy in the video. His name is Giovanny Gutierrez.

From Gio’s Bio:

Giovanny Gutierrez
Director of Interactive Media

Gio comes from the future. He is perfectly versed in most programming languages, dreams in code and can’t sleep when his pixels aren’t in order.

As Tinsley’s Director of Interactive Media, he creates web, e-mail and interactive marketing solutions that perfectly integrate with television, radio and print campaigns. Gio is a master of e-commerce, having created web portals for scores of businesses. He was founder and creative director of web-design firm Ionic Studios, teaches digital web programming at Miami-Dade College, is a certified Macromedia Developer, an Apple Certified System Administrator and a Certified Internet Webmaster. He’s also won numerous awards and accolades in the web design circuit.

Gio will be your point man on anything even remotely futuristic. Be nice to him or he will hack into your bank account.

Then doing a quick search on flickr with those tags we come across some interesting photos also tagged as tinsley which also give us clues as to who the girl is in the video. It appears to be another tinsley employee named Lauren Bernat.

If you want to see photos of Lauren and Gio fooling around at what looks like an office outing, head on over there. What is the internet coming to if you can’t even believe that a hugely popular web video with a gyrating female is honest and sincere, instead of some devious capitalist plan?

Christine has the Wii Fit in DC right now, or we could try a more honest substitute.

Update: The Consumerist is all over this.