iPhone pilot commercial grounded

I'm so shocked!  A commercial that bends the truth with an alternate reality.  And from Apple at that.  What's next, cigarette commercials that say smoking is good for you?

I don't think any cigarette commercial ever actually said smoking is good for you, but your point is well made.

The point about the ad being total bullshit has already been made, so I will refrain from adding my comments.

About the weather. I'm a weather forecast junkie. I have a bunch of Mac Dashboard widgets for the weather. I get my weather information from as many sources as I can find. All of the forecasts are different. Really. The weather is an extremely complex and chaotic subject.

So, my questions is: just how accurate is the iPhone weather forecast? I think I already know the answer to that.

Happiness is overrated.

Isn't that why they call it a forecast? ;)

The smoking ad comment makes me think of this ad I found.

Doctors were used quite frequently (or someone playing a doc) to help prove that they were safe. Here's one of the many Camel ads:

Everyone knows that nine out of ten doctors smoke camel man.

And today's New York Times weighs in on advertising cigarettes to children: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/26/business/media/26camel.html?ref=todays... 

Camel has a long history of targeting children with its Joe Camel character, which was actually designed back in the 1950s.  It took lawsuits and threats from the US Congress to make them ultimately pull it, but of course according to wikipedia and other on-line sources, RJ Reynolds maintains to this day that the character was never intended to entice kids to smoke.

I find it a little iffy that the story of Billy Coulton conceiving the Joe Camel character "for a european T-shirt promotion" something or other back in the 1950's is only found on Wikipedia and three other online sources that copy the Wiki. They all say "Joe Camel was conceived in the 1950s by Billy Coulton, art director on Long Island working on a T-shirt promotion for the brand in Europe." Why long Island? What agency was located there in the 1950s? This part of the Wiki also says "citation needed" and I'd really like to find one.

We've all seen Joe Camel since 1987, so I'm not denying the character exists, I'm just not sure that it existed in the 1950s. Seems we would have found those images too somewhere online then. Or at least another mention of the Art Director named Billy Coulton, who presumably worked or resided in "Long Island". (No particular town mentioned, doesn't that strike you as odd?). Also, I find "T-shirt promotion in the 1950's in Europe" ringing all sorts of false info alarm bells since using T-shirts to promote anything at the time, in Europe, was a really rare thing if it ever happened.

Everything I read on-line strikes me as potentially odd and suspicious. And although I'm not an advocate of conspiracy theories, I don't put it past RJR to have planted the Billy Coulton story themselves to make it appear they didn't create the character in the 80's just to market to children.On the other hand, I'm sure there were any number of small insignificant agencies on LI in the 50's, just as there are now, and it's of course possible that one could have got some small assignment to come up with such a t-shirt design.  Not very likely, but possible.As for our ability to find the original 1950 Joe Camel images on-line somewhere if they do indeed exist, it doesn't surprise me that we can't.  I look for things on-line all the time that I can't find, and a lot of them should be a lot more accessible that those mysterious Joe Camel drawings.Even with your treasure trove of over 40,000 commercials, I'm always looking for spots here that I can't find, and if I can't find them here, I can't find them anywhere! 😊

I know, a lot of people don't believe the NY Times, but here's their article from 1991 about the origins of Joe Camel:THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING; Camel's success and controversy

So I guess I should have done a bit more research, like Tod did, and yes, I think the New York Times is a more reliable source than wikipedia.  If you do a Joe Camel search in the Times archive, you'll find hundreds of articles about the US Government taking on RJR with regard to advertising ciggies to children.   You'll also find a few which detail Joe Camel's origins, which evidently did not begin on Long Island in the 1950s. According to the Times:  Joe Camel was actually born in Europe. The caricatured camel was created in 1974 by a British artist, Nicholas Price, for a French advertising campaign that subsequently ran in other countries in the 1970's. Indeed, Mr. O'Toole recalled a visit to France many years ago during which he glimpsed Joe Camel wearing a Foreign Legion cap. The inspiration behind Mr. Price's cartoon was the camel, named Old Joe, that has appeared on all Camel packages since the brand's initial appearance in 1913..Joe Camel first appeared in this country in 1988, in materials created for the 75th anniversary of the Camel brand by Trone Advertising. Trone is a small agency in Greensboro, N.C., that Reynolds uses on various advertising and promotional projects.

1-0 Win for the adland sleuths over Wikipedia! The mysterious "for use i Europe" quoted in the Wiki rubbed me the wrong way as well. Pan european ads were NOT a common occurance in the 1950s.