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I usually don’t care for advertising. The people who work in advertising are extremely hard working, sometimes brilliant, sometimes over-reaching folks who do their best. Just like you and me, really. (I don’t intend to come off like advertising folks have two heads and a lizard tail, but…they often get a bad rap. Yes, from folks like me.)

It seems that most of the work they do fades into this ever-growing background of noise that permeates our culture. We’re bombarded with like, what, 10 billion marketing messages every day? Newspaper ads, magazine ads, those crazy postcards that fall out of my favorite magazines, radio ads, TV ads (thank Shiva for TiVo), internet ads, email ads, direct mail, logos on every stinkin’ thing–I can’t even go for a run without noticing brands on my running shoes and shirt! Ads popup, pop under, flit around in front of us, dance along our peripheral vision, dig their way into our lizard hindbrains and lay their memetic payload in some easy-to-forget region.

Yes, ain’t it grand, from an evolutionary biology standpoint? As we emerged from the last Ice Age, we were perfectly suited to survive on a hostile landscape, with our upright stance, opposable thumbs for making and grasping tools and weapons, and our binocular vision attached to a brain that could problem-solve and analyse better than any million Mastodons intent on smashing us flat.

But now we sit here, several dozens of millenia later, with that same wonderful predator cortex slowly being steeped in….ads. Like a big tea bag at the end of a string. I always get the feeling that this is all just one big plan to lull us into complacency while something sneaks up on us. Ah, well.

Despite this semi-coherent rant (can anyone say, “Boy, Clarinex is just swell!”) there are a handful of ads that really stick out. In print, the “Charlie Chaplin ads” that IBM ran for its PCs are still easy to recall. The Captain Morgan “the Captain was here” ad campaign is still fresh. I can’t think of any TV ads I remember, but that’s mostly because TiVo has allowed me to live a blissful life of consumer-controlled media. (An interesting byproduct of Tivo is that I take fewer breaks now. Commercials on TV used to be my cue to go to the little room or raid the fridge. Now I find myself watching prerecorded TiVo for hours on end.)

The commercials that take the cake for me, though, are part of the radio campaign run by Bud Light called “Real Men of Genius” (originally called “Real American Heroes”). These commercials are funny, inventive, and stand out in your mind. Just this morning I heard the “Mr. Discount Airline Pilot Guy” and laughed so hard my staff actually peeked their heads into my office to make sure I wasn’t choking on a pretzel or something.

There’s a total of 79, and the Fun Times Guide lists 49 of them. There were other sites that ran the ads as MP3’s, but Annheiser-Busch has shut them down. Dunno why, as these sites just keep the word goin’ about Bud Light.

Here’s a few to whet your appetite.

1. Mr. Fancy Coffee Shop Coffee Pourer

2. Mr Bumper Sticker Writer

3. Mr. Gian Foam Finger Maker

4. Mr. Furniture Assembly Manual Writer

5. Mr . Mail Order Bride Orderer

6. Mr. Discount Airline Pilot Guy

(Go ahead, ask me. Don’t be shy. It’s okay. “Tom, do you do drink Bud Light?” No. I usually drink Bass Ale or Fat Tire. I haven’t consumed one of the “Big Three” beers since the late 1990s, when one of my wife’s relatives handed me a Coors from an all-Coors ice bucket. Apparently, that’s how you spell beer in and around San Berdoo.)

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