Badly thought-through advertising

Advisory: Ranting.

On my commute this morning I was contemplating how badly thought through advertising is sometimes. I can't find an image on the net (partly because I don't know the product's name - you'd have to be really close to read it, and for bus stop advertising, this is stupid in itself), but there is a poster around at the moment which conveys to me a message which I'm sure the advertisers didn't intend.

The background is a waterfall in some idyllic spot. A man is standing with his head tilted back so that it's aligned with the waterfall as if he's drinking from it, but he's clearly not. Behind him, low down on the bottom left, is an ugly bottle of some yellow drink which I assume is the product.

Here's the thought bubble I imagined:

"Ugh, that looks like flourescent urine. I'll turn my back on it and fantasize about drinking fresh water instead."

I'll try to take a photo of it if I see one close to home.

The last advertising campaign I saw that was this stupid was a long, rambling poster about how some woman - I forget her name - "used to walk this way to work", but now she doesn't, because she went to some tertiary institution - I think Unitech - and got a qualification and now she's doing what she wants. (Presumably involving either working somewhere different, living somewhere different, or owning a car, or some combination.) These posters were all over the city. It made me wonder how, a), this woman ever got any work done if she was walking all over the city on her way to work, and b), how she ever had time to study as well.

And don't even get me started on the Burger King bikini girls. Quite apart from the obvious objectifying exploitation angle, those models have clearly never eaten a burger - or, probably, a square meal - in their lives.