The Worst Ad of 2009 (so far)

Shame on you, eMusic. I saw your ad yesterday on my way to work, and a little part of my enthusiasm for the magic and delight of the internet died on the spot. Not only did you have to go and take a perfectly good organic social phenomenon (if you haven’t heard of Sleeveface before now, well… now you have) and shamelessly piggyback off of it, but you missed the entire point of the joke by a mile. Taking a stock photo of some businesspeople on a subway and pasting famous album covers over their heads does not a successful Sleeveface image make.

What were you thinking? You couldn’t even round up five interns to at the very least stand behind some real sleeves in such a way as to give the slightest hint of continuity between the cover art and the scene behind? Nope, you could only be bothered to spend 15 minutes strolling through iStockPhoto and Amazon and ultimately slap together this.

But hey, don’t stop there. Why give any sort of nod to the source of this idea when you can try to co-opt it entirely? Did you learn nothing from 3M? If the Vegas.com represents the absolute pinnacle of integrity in advertising, you have set the new lower bound.

I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

(Photo via Ask A Copywriter)

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