Ads that steal from sitcoms

How original is today’s advertising anyway? According to this article on Slate, not very. The piece, nestled amid the magazine’s excellent Katrina coverage, points out that Chrysler and Coors Light have both co-opted infamous phrases from Seinfeld (and in the automaker’s case, one of its stars, too) all to get a “gratis kind of celebrity endorsement.” Seinfeld writer Peter Mehlman, for one, is none too pleased. “It makes you wonder about just how incredibly lazy ad writers have gotten,” he says, referring to a Coors Light ad in which a woman says of the brand’s new bottles: “They’re plastic, and they’re spectacular.”