Some Ads Live In A Yellow Hubmarine

I have started writing Hubs over at HubPages (well, OK, I have written ONE! But I will be writing more and then I can use the plural)…I think I’ll probably use the Hubs to write about the teeniest of teeny ads, I have a lot of those and this seemed like a good place to put them. We’ll see how it goes, anyway!

Here is the first one, if you have nothing else to do and want to have a look…I’ll set up a link on the side here shortly. I mean, I’m not going to make a huge fussy fuss every time I manage to crank out a lil Hub, OK? I promise!

If you have any ideas of anything you’d like me to write about – Hubwise or otherwise, do let me know!

Thanks to Wikipedia for the picture. No thanks to my addled brain for the horrendous pun of a title!

Zen and the Art of Loveliness Maintenance

More fun with one of those weird tiny magazine ads, now up close and all too personal thanks to the wonders of digital editing (well, mine anyway, such as it is). I think I like the tiny ads best of all. They tend to veer into truly inspired levels of strangeness. They seem less self-conscious, no one is really looking too closely at the original. (Oh great, now she is anthropomorphizing the ads. Could it be time for a holiday?)

So here we have yet another ad for deodorant. Can’t miss the idea behind this, it is even called Ban-O-Dor. I get it. And she gets the creepy matinee-idol-wannabe who stands in his own personal Dark Shadows. This would not persuade me to use the stuff. Not if the end result was attracting this sort of guy.

The other things I like about this ad is the found-art aspect of the bottom right corner. You see, I found this magazine in a rather sad state, in the basement of my favorite secondhand bookstore (a wonderful, old-fashioned, rather messy bookstore basement) and it was all crunched up. As you see, another ad (for Onixol)has intruded and turned this into a retro Mad Lib - ”Your foot can be famous/ In ask at any Dr. foot expert.”

All this can happen after I apply Ban-O-Dor cream. But I must apply it as if it was a lipstick (more puzzlement there). What does it all mean? Perhaps it is just a rumpled-retro Zen koan: “If you apply lipstick under your arms, will your feet be famous for following fresh and lovely romance?”

And if a tree falls in the forest, will someone make the paper for more weird ads out of it?

And finally - is the guy in the ad the “Dr. foot expert”? He does seem to be looking down at the ground, you know…