I got engaged last weekend. My fiancée got an email from Pottery Barn this morning congratulating us on our engagement. How on earth did they know we got engaged? I thought maybe a friend signed us up for emails. I know you can sign up for a registry on their site, but I can't find any way of sending someone else Pottery Barn emails. Maybe Pottery Barn is stalking us on Facebook and saw my fiancée's status...

Unfortunately, the Pottery Barn registry FAQ does not include the question "How the hell did you know that I got engaged?"

I wrote Jacob back and asked whether the future Mrs. Jacob had recently registered with TheKnot.com or a similar site. She had not. She did register with them a few years ago, but never added anything about her engagement. So what's going on here?

UPDATE: It turns out that the fiancée's Facebook profile is 100% friends-only. Marketers could not have gleaned her new relationship status from the public Internet.

(Photo: RockaWolf)

The revisions have drawn sharp criticism from product manufacturers, advertising agencies and trade groups who say it is the "aspirational" theme of their ads that motivates consumers to purchase their goods. Show less than the ultimate achievement, they say, and consumers are less likely to buy.

Translation: Easily deceived consumers wouldn't buy useless products if they knew they were useless.

"For a good part of the last decade, we have noticed a problem, particularly with consumer testimonials," said Richard Cleland, assistant director of the FTC's division of advertising practices. "The use of consumer testimonials had become almost a safe harbor for companies as long as they threw in some sort of disclaimer about results not being typical."

The rules are undergoing a final review, after which they will likely be adopted. Late night and daytime advertising will never be the same!

Federal Trade Commission's plan to change rules on ad endorsements, testimonials worries marketers [Chicago Tribune]

Make Yourself Invisible:
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Go-Karts Race to College:
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ECONOMIC DISEQUILIBRIUM: Can You Have Your House and Spend It Too?
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I'm not so na ve to think that photos (especially food items) are entirely indicative of the end result, but shouldn't they at least resemble the product somewhat realistically? In the drive through image the '4-Alarm' Spicy Chicken looks like quite a sandwich. The chicken is overlapping the bun and everything is stacked impressively high. In reality, the chicken on my sandwich was nearly hidden inside the sandwich and stacked maybe half the height of the advertisement.

(Photos: Tengaport,Tengaport)

An American Airlines passenger jet flies through an impossibly blue September sky, hurtling fatefully towards two beautiful Twin Towers. Hey, it's September 11th all over again in this exciting advertisement from American Airlines, advertising their new TiVo sweepstakes!

In this case, the Twin Towers are just the speakers of a surround sound system, as opposed to massive skyscrapers filled with innocents. To be fair to American Airlines, they pulled the ad lickety-split and replaced it with a version with the speakers Photoshopped out. Of course, an equally valid solution would have been to reverse the plane and insert arrows pointing away from the towers that said "No, really! We're Flying THIS WAY!"

American Airlines 9/11-Themed Ad [Museum of Hoaxes]

Buy some here. Buy some here. Buy some here. Buy some here.

It's almost as good as this inane Pennysaver commercial that enthralls the listener through hypnotism.

The power of repetition. We're filled with an uncontrollable urge to go find some pennies right now.

[The Byrd House Review] (Thanks to Karl Hungus!)

From shots.net:

"The shoot, which took place in February last year, took five days and was... one of the largest undertaken in South Africa, with over 250 extras roped in to play the various multiplied versions of each character...The spot broke on MTV in Australia this week, and is set to be the centrepiece of Coca-Cola's global campaign for this summer.

Second spot found on Screenhead.

Previously: Jack White's Coke Ad

Regardless, companies would be doing their customers a better service to make their advertising as visually appealing as this work.

This new Coke ad, spotted at Ad-Rag, debuted recently in Australia. It features music penned by Jack White of the White Stripes. The video was directed by Michael Gondry Nagi Noda, who also directed four White Stripes music videos. The agency is Mother London Crispin Porter & Bogusky. the agency responsible for the creepy Burger King and the new VW ads, who are like the UK CP&B except with class and imagination.

I love the expressions on the kids' faces: "Bu... bu... bu... you didn't have to kill him." And is Superman channeling Arnold Schwarzenegger's lobotomized brother with his accent? "Wid muh X-Ray vizzhun, Ah cahn say duh arm dat underage masturbation causes..."

Superman Hates Smokers [You Tube]

The movie advises you to go to Lynx's viral website, Clicknow.com. We'll save you some time: don't bother, it's terrible. Just watch the movie and crack a grin. Word of warning: though the movie is pretty work-safe, we've been told by friends that the banner ads around it sometimes aren't. So make sure your boss Mr. Solomon Kane isn't looking over your shoulder before you click.

Lynx Click More Viral Ad [Kontraband]

From YouTube's comments:

Some context: the Stones recorded this *very* early in their career—October 1963. They had only released one single at that time ("Come On"). This was recorded around the same time they recorded the song Lennon & McCartney gave them, "I Wanna Be Your Man". Anyway, that's why the Stones weren't featured in the ad, or even mentioned—they were still pretty obscure. It wouldn't be until "I Wanna Be Your Man" and especially their first EP were released that they started to be noticed.

1963 Rice Krispies Commercial by The Rolling Stones [You Tube]

Last time we posted a picture of an advertisement encouraging people to kill themselves, a reader commented: "If they said things like "kids like psp" no one would give two fucks and the consumerist wouldnt be posting everyday, giving the psp more exposure that it would ever have on a site like this. quit reading into this shit, and shut up"

We're right there with you man. Unfortunately, we can't exactly run a site like this by not talking about clueless companies, stupid ads and bad customer service. Trust us, we've tried to convince our Gawker overlords to take the Consumerist in a direction where they continue to pay us, yet we don't have to write anything intelligible. They aren't biting... they point to Kotaku as a failed experiment in that direction. So the reader in the comment above will have to join us in howling at the moon, flinging feces and clubbing each other to death with monkey femurs in our impotent rage over the injustice of having to actually, you know, write stuff for a living.

Which is only tangentially apropos to the above ad we saw on Adfreaks. Like the Playstation ad, it encourages readers to get themselves vaporized by an incoming train. Even better, it is for a Funeral Director's Association.

Another subway ad that wants you to jump [AdFreak]
Related: Sony To Customers: Kill Others
Related: Sony to Customers: Kill Yourselves

We guarantee this is decidedly not your typical Micky D's creampuff dollop...

Way to make lemons out of lemonade (and then inject fat into the beverage). Slurping down a calorie bomb isn't a guilty pleasure, breaking your diet or immoral, it's getting spiritually centered and back to basics.

Frankly, the office drone actors look like they could use a little nourishment.

We'd have a very different ad, however, if instead of wiry stringbeans, the adults pictured were overweight or even obese...

We just hope someone, someday, will sneak on to the freeway and do a perspective painting of a perambulating granny slowly traversing the middle lane on her walker. Make sure to take a picture and send it to us!

This looks a bit photoshopped, but assuming it isn't, it's pretty dang cool. Of course, we're not entirely sure about whether a three-dimensional perspective painting is really good advertising, especially on the highway, where one has enough to worry about without trying to dodge imaginary fifty foot long horizontal beer bottles rolling out of the back of eighteen-wheeler trucks.

And do they even work? Sure, it's swell if you happen to be driving at exactly the same speed as the truck, on the left side, hovering behind at exactly the distance required to make the illusion work. But otherwise, all you see is a long distracting smear that causes you to veer wildly into oncoming traffic.

Seen over at Mind Hacks.

An advertisement for a statue of the Virgin Mary veiled in a condom has embarrassed the publishers of the U.S. Catholic magazine America, and prompted some heated comment on Catholic Web sites.

America, a weekly run by the Jesuit order of priests, said in a statement it was embarrassed and offended by the ad, which it said had been published unknowingly in its December 5 edition.

The apparent prank by a London-based artist offered what he called the "Extra Virgin" statue for sale, "a stunning ... statue of the Virgin Mary standing atop a serpent wearing a delicate veil of latex."

On the other hand, could someone explain why the Virgin Mary using a condom would make her "extra" virgin? Cavalierly brandishing a flaccid condom about, at the very least, usually implies a healthy menu of carnal penetration... a course pretty much the anti-thesis of plain old virginity, let alone "extra" virginity.