Freak Week: Ruffled Feathers

Here's a first: A controversial billboard in Boston, showing a noose around a bottle of POM Wonderful juice, can't be taken down because a hawk has decided to nest on it. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is upset about the "Cheat death" ad, saying it trivializes the issue to which it's devoted-but because a hawk has hatched its chicks there, wildlife laws stipulate that the entire billboard structure must be left alone. The AFSP claims that POM's parent company, Roll Internation-al, made a verbal agreement not to run the ad in the first place. Roll denies this, though it did take down a similar ad in D.C. when people complained. However this saga turns out, it seems like getting wildlife on your side is a good way to extend the run of contentious creative. This particular execution, by the way, has fended off controversy for a while. It dates from at least 2005, when we noticed it running in the New York City subway.Speaking of fights, Canadian photographer Holly Norris has picked one with clothier American Apparel by getting Jes Sachse, a woman with a genetic disorder called Freeman-Sheldon syndrome, to appear in some parody American Apparel ads. Sachse, 25, who is 4-foot-9 with a curved spine and a right leg shorter than her left, isn't your average model, and that's the point-Norris is seeking to question the way people with disabilities are presented in the media. She writes on her Web site: "I chose American Apparel not just for their notable style, but also for their claims that many of their models are just 'everyday' women who are employees, friends and fans of the company. However, these women fit particular body types. ... Women with disabilities go unrepresented, not only in American Apparel advertising, but also in most of popular culture." To its credit, American Apparel gave its approval for Norris to run the photos in the Toronto subway. As for Sachse, she tells the Toronto Star of the images (some of which are quite racy): "I feel like my own sexual confidence is projected through. ... I feel like I look confident in what I'm doing." In other off-kilter news, TBWA\Chiat\Day released its latest crazy Skittles spot last week -- for Fizzl'd Fruits, a newly launched variety of Skittles that fizz in your mouth. It's a typically zany affair, featuring an old geezer who declines Fizzl'd Fruits from his wife, preferring to get his fizz by being zapped in the tongue by a giant human tube sock who pads around the house generating static electricity. Kids will eat it up -- though they might pass on the candy. Wrote one reviewer: "The caustic burps just aren't worth the tongue tingling."Finally, we unearthed a rarity last week: some great promos for an adult-entertainment movie channel. The spots, by Cossette in Canada for the Amour network, show well-endowed ladies reading scripts during auditions for adult films. Needless to say, their performances are atrocious -- which is just as it should be. "You won't watch for the acting," says the tagline at the end.Best of BrandFreak: Absinthe slowly returns to the U.S.As AdFreak's sister blog reported last week, a long-banned spirit -- absinthe -- has slowly been creeping back onto U.S. liquor-store shelves over the past three years. The 132-proof spirit with the haunting green hue was the drink of choice for Van Gogh, Degas, Verlaine and countless other artists and literati of Belle Epoque Paris. The reason they sipped it became the reason it was banned in the U.S. starting in 1915: Its key ingredient is thujone, a toxic oil derived from wormwood -- and reportedly the cause of bursts of creativity, unbridled euphoria, hallucinations and the occasional murderous rampage. In 2007, the Swiss distiller Kubler petitioned for the ban to be lifted -- and it was, on the condition that the distillers now have to filter the thujone out. To purists, that's like selling Playboy without the centerfold. But some marketers have seized the day anyway. There are now at least seven U.S.-based distillers making their own brands of the stuff.

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Freak Week: Ruffled Feathers

Tim Nudd

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Tim Nudd