“I don’t mind fantasies, but shouldn’t it be a female one?”

I started working in the ad industry a year and a half ago. Since then I’ve paid a lot more attention to the commercials, especially ones that seem slightly off. This one from Bounce struck me as a little wrong the first time I saw it. The second time I watched the ad (while viewing Project Runway online at Lifetime) I realized what was wrong: the ad showed a t-shirt being ironed and folded.

Who irons t-shirts, then folds them?

Maybe there’s an alternate reality out there I know nothing about. But more likely the ad wasn’t checked by someone to say ‘Okay, do these chores actually make sense?’.

That’s the beauty of working in an interdisciplinary team; you always have someone with a different point of view, someone who knows that ironing a button-down shirt would be a much more realistic choice. Ads don’t have to tell the truth to be believable. Does anyone really think there are currently 4 people stuck in an elevator, a la the Sprint ads? Probably not. But do the Sprint ads make some sense? Yes, because they speak to real things in our lives, like working on the final-final-final-revised-final copy of a document.

I spent last weekend in the Sierras, lounging on boulders set in the Stanislaus River and cooking on this remarkably complicated stove.

The far right buttons are ‘off’ and turning on the stove simply requires the touch of another button…if that button works. While scrambling eggs, it is nice to melt the butter quickly then turn down the heat for cooking the eggs (really great scrambled egga can easily take upwards of ten minutes), but with this old stove includes non-working buttons. Which means that those 10 minute eggs actually take 20 when you realize they’ve stopped cooking.

(The dial is for the oven.)