Signs

I am surely not the only person who's driven through town on southbound I-85 in recent days whos asked, "what the hell is that supposed to be selling?"


Ordinarily, i wouldn't bother to call attention to this. I mean, we're surrounded by bad advertising and ugly graphic design. It's as much a part of the landscape as cell phone towers, and most of the time we can just filter it out with our thoroughly modern brains.

But as it happens, i know what this ad is selling. And that's where it gets ironic. See, the Addy's are the Triangle Ad Club's annual award for best marketing and advertising work done in the region. And this year's theme is, apparently, "The Evolution of Advertising."

From the website:

That's the theme for the 2008 RDU Addys, sponsored by American Advertising Foundation, AAF Raleigh-Durham. It's an historical, occasionally hysterical overview of the good and bad (ok, all bad) advertising of previous decades. Of course, the real purpose is to celebrate the brilliance of today's advertising and marketing professionals in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.

I'm sure that the actual honorees will be awesome. But let's remember that advertising, like science fiction, is and always has been subject to Sturgeon's Law, and that its suckitude is in no way related to the decade in which it was produced. Meanwhile, i'm hoping that, with the awards dinner to be held on the 29th, this embarrassment will be down by March 1.