Submitted by admin on Fri, 2005-10-07 02:00. ::
It was while watching Wednesday night's annual Fair Go best and worst advertisements awards that I recalled the recent enraged phone call from a friend protesting over the latest Jenny Craig advertisements.
For those of you who haven't seen it, the new weight-loss ads show former Cheers star Kirstie Alley appear in a series of self-congratulatory boasts about her ever-increasing incredible lightness of being.
While the series aired, Alley began appearing during the advertisement breaks all signed up and in the Jenny Craig zone, dutifully doing a road-to-redemption disappearing act, demonstrating how adherence to the programme can give you a second lease of life.
Alley bounced on trampolines, told us to kiss our personal trainers and in the latest ad update, the now acceptably Buxom Actress appears in a plum-coloured, figure-hugging ensemble and reveals she has lost 50-odd pounds. To illustrate the impressive weight loss, a first-grader who weighs the alleged 50lb appears in the ad with Alley who, in the highest of heels, tries to pursue the tot to pick her up and feel the weight she has shed.
Sure, Alley looks enviably amazing, but her face is thinner than it ever was in her Cheers days, and when she runs, her gait resembles one of those computer-enhanced moas from Frontier of Dreams. She's thin, but she sure looks strange.
Back to my enraged friend, who had just read in the October 3 issue of Women's Day how Alley had lost 55kg since topping the scales at 130kg last year. Now, 50lb is a long way off 50kg so either the ads are hopelessly out of date or the women's mag is telling porkies about the porky.
Meanwhile, on our version of the Oscars, the annual Fair Go awards, complaints had come in thick and fast over the winner on the night – the Toyota Bulls on the Run advertisement.
Fair Go had tracked down and filmed those who had objected to the ad on several counts with one chap registering a size-does-matter complaint. There was no way, he fumed, that the new Toyota could accommodate two bulls plus the additional passenger weight of their two cow-hefty girlfriends.
One middle-aged woman thought that the bulls were not good role models and decried their casual vandalism of farm property, running rampant across the land with their joy ride culminating in cowsential sex.
However, no complainant was bold enough to object to the gentle undulations of the Toyota as its magnificent suspension moved to the sway of bovine passion taking place in that century-old preferred choice of breeding ground, the back seat.
Fortunately, humour won through and the nation voted Toyota Bulls on the Run the Best Ad while the worst was awarded to the pesky Tower Insurance Worries ad. TVNZ must have breathed a sigh of relief that their promotional ad, with its heavy focus on outgoing news reader Judy Bailey, had failed to turn up in the worst list.
With the nation all expecting the mother of the nation to depart at the end of the year, the continual linking of Bailey with TV One current affairs was a piece of advertising folly, throwing good money after bad.
This is cache, read story here
