A few years ago I was struck by the widespread use of what I call "face ads" -- advertisements featuring a close-up portrait overlaid with text. I also noticed the use of flow charts (normally used to diagram the stages of a process) as design elements. Here are a few of my favorites.
I guess they want to suggest in the ad above that Hennessey drinkers have some depth, at least enough to have a thought process. But if you read the flow chart, it sounds like the kind of disconnected sloppy behavior -- in this case involving $60 "found" in the park, clean sheets, his mother and some guy named Adam -- that leads straight to Skid Row.
The ad above makes me wonder if North Korea's Ministry of Propaganda is taking on advertising clients -- say, to make enough money to lure the World Cheerleading Championships to Fearless Leader Stadium in 2010?
And the one below is almost heart-wrenching in its desperation to implant a soul in the heartless corporation it represents. The woman's face is probably from a stock photo house, and already used for cancer ads, etc. The words are corporate poetry meant to answer a question from the future:
After the corporations that run the world have stripped every human inefficiency from their business process, the FedEx conveyor belt from producers to consumers is on auto-pilot, and the artificial intelligence that runs it all has some time on its hands, what kind of poetry will it write?
I thought I could make something interesting by mixing ads -- like the one below, where an IBM engineer fades to black-eyed drunk with Hennessey -- but I lost interest.
