Time’s Belinda Luscombe had an interesting piece recently on Bud Light’s new web ad, which I’d seen linked by more than a few folks on Twitter. It’s posted on YouTube as “The Best Bud Light Commercial Ever,” and features a male customer caught in an increasingly embarrassing situation thanks to his attempt to purchase a dirty magazine with his beer.

As Luscombe writes:

The ad, which quietly appeared in February as part of a viral campaign, has attracted little notice thus far, but because it comes from a highly respected American brand, it seems to mark some kind of cultural tipping point, where pornography has soaked so far into the fabric of mainstream culture that it’s no longer seen as a stain.

That’s the concept of “porn creep,” as she rightly identifies it, a phenomenon that seems to be getting increased attention as the porn industry becomes socially commonplace and accepted as ubiquituous to the internet age.

There’s little question that over the past two decades, porn creep has extended significantly into music videos, reality TV, and increasingly into mainstream movies — even artsier ones like Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, The Girlfriend Experience, which has an entire promotional program built around pornstar Sasha Grey. None of this is all that surprising — Soderbergh has his awards and his critical appeal, so he’s got nothing to worry about, he could do Ocean’s 17 tomorrow and I doubt that Focus on the Family would make a peep — but it is surprising to consider how far porn creep has extended into the world of corporate advertising, which presumably has to worry about customers and image to a much greater degree than Hollywood or MTV.

One of the strongest waves in American advertising over the past few years has been following the trends of Europe and South America toward using sex to sell fast food to young men. Slate’s Seth Stevenson wrote about this a few years ago, and in the time since, it certainly seems like sister burger joints Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. have made the food porn method their calling card. Stevenson wrote about the blatant “straw girl” and “fist girl” ads, but those were clumsy and too blatant — the more effective examples since include the “Girlfriend” and Paris Hilton spots. But the most popular have to be the legendary Western Bacon Thickburger commercials, featuring model Cameron Richardson writhing on a mechanical bull to Foghat’s Slow Ride:

And Bravo’s Top Chef star Padma Lakshmi, an ex-model and a foodie in her own right, describing the decadence of her fast food craving:

Of course, having been in more than one Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. over the years, I have yet to see any of these women showing up to partake. But whatever these burger joints have going on, it must be working: they just filmed the latest food porn ad with bikini-clad Hills star Audrina Patridge.

Using blatant sexual appeals to sell products to the hormonally motivated isn’t a new thing — just go find every ad from the 1970s and 80s featuring Farrah Fawcett — but it’s noteworthy that we’ve gone beyond cars, alcohol, cologne, tobacco and movie tickets to Doritos, websites, and heavily processed cheeseburgers. Slippery slope arguments aren’t always proven out by history, but often they are — and in this case, I don’t think that cultural conservatives have any hope of guilt-tripping the companies involved into putting less skin into their sandwich ads.

The solution shouldn’t be pushback in that vein — not just because it won’t work in the longterm, but because government overreach is always at risk. Instead, traditionalists should focus on giving parents more tools to protect their children. If Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. are going to run ads like this during viewer-heavy television that isn’t DVR-able — family-friendly live sporting events on Sunday afternoons come to mind — parents need to be able to block out ads that, if they had ratings, would be categorized as far more mature than the show during which they run. There’s no technological barrier at issue to prevent that from happening, and it should.

The broader ramifications for porn creep aren’t necessarily severe — the reactions to the Playboy rape list incident a few weeks ago shows us there’s still a line that goes too far for most people, even in the crazy world of the blogosphere — but there are ramifications. The top Yahoo search the other day was for Kendra Wilkinson, the reality TV icon famous for being one of the Playboy playmates tapped as one of Hugh Hefner’s “girlfriends,” who just announced her pregnancy by her husband, Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Hank Baskett. In Louisiana over the past few months, the possibility of pornstar Stormy Daniels challenging incumbent Republican David Vitter for his Senate seat seems more of a lark than anything else.

It’s hard to see the longterm negative social impact for this sort of porn creep into the common culture, besides perhaps kids learning a few words from CNN and watching an NFL game a lot earlier than they otherwise would. Sure, things are coarser now, and sex becomes a matter of daily life earlier and earlier. But these trends are cyclical. It’s easy to say: Where’s the harm in it?

But then, you consider that Wilkinson got into taking her clothes off for the cameras after she lost her virginity at age 14 — and that Daniels started stripping in Baton Rouge when she was 17 — and you understand why parents should be given every tool they can to raise their children responsibly, in an environment where having sex for money (even if it’s with a cheeseburger) isn’t just another lifestyle choice.

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.”

Video game ads can be, quite frankly, terrible. If you’ve watched any TV appealing to the nerd demographic, you’ve seen them. Horribly forgettable and captive of their genre, they use the same crunching music over and over again, the same jumpy cuts from one FPS kill to the next. Even good games can be made to look uninteresting and cliched – while great games, like the beautiful Shadow of the Colossus, just aren’t the sort of things that play well in the 30-second ad format. It’s similar to movie trailers that way – the more features, the more complexity, the less ability to simplify and sell – so a crappy and formulaic genre film paired with a recognizable drumbeat, an ominous voiceover, and a quick jump cut at the end is transformed into nicely motivational preview, while plot-heavy indie films can be harder to scale down. Sometimes impossible.

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.”

This week, there were more than nine thousand Diggs for this Youtube Vid, “Why every guy should buy their girlfriend a Wii Fit.” The vid itself has over 780,000 views at the time of this posting, and no wonder, since it primarily consists of a t-shirt-and-underwear clad girl gyrating in time with the Wii Fit’s hula hoop game.

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.

>> An extremely accurate piece on why web advertising so often = fail. Scott Karp writes: “We need to invent new forms of advertising on the web. But it’s more than that. Facebook introduced Beacon as a new form of advertising — but it didn’t create a lot of value for users. Online advertising must create value for users or it will create little or no value for advertisers. This would seem self-evident, but it has not been the case with traditional advertising, which was developed for CAPTIVE audiences, and web users are increasingly anything but captive.” (h/t Ruffini’s FriendFeed)

>> I’m an ad addict.  Everyone who knows me knows this – they’re the pop art form of the modern age.  I even find some of my favorite songs through them.  And yes, all ad addicts have our favorite agencies – the ones which manage to make everything seem effortless, charming and authentic – and I’m not alone in loving 72andSunny, whose work you might recognize (they worked on the new Nike/Guy Ritchie campaign).  Their most recent ad to stick in your head is this wonderfully childlike I Love The Whole World campaign for the Discovery Channel.  Gosh, I love this stuff.

>> Nike remains the all-around best TV advertiser of all time.  They have the power to make anything seem awesome.  So even if you hate soccer, you are required to watch this. Ah, that takes me back. (And oh yes, that’s Guy Ritchie and the Eagles of Death Metal).