The chocolate drink in the new ad for Caribou Coffee looks mighty yummy. It's piled high with whipped cream and studded with chocolate shavings. In Caribou's "Get Real: Chocolate" ad, a pair of obnoxious marionettes sitting on a bench in a mall, wonder why they never get to drink anything as tasty as that Caribou mocha.

"Because we're not real," says the annoying male marionette to the annoying female marionette.

Imagine you're a teenage boy whose parents are helping you move into your freshman dorm. Ooh, the excitement of starting college! You and Dad are hauling some cartons in, when suddenly you stumble across Mom having some kind of orgasmic têtê-à-têtê with your dorky new roommate. Ewww!

That's what Halls is serving up in a bizarre ad for its new product Halls Refresh, giving new meaning to the concept of "hard candy."

The roommate offers Mom a Halls Refresh and takes one himself. They suck their candies with exaggerated lip-smacking movements while they lock eyes and go into a mutual, implied reverie. They look like they've been to an opium den, not the candy counter.

That's when the son and his dad show up and respond with predictable outrage and disbelief.

The wait is over. Finally there's a new sneaker on the market for women that makes your butt look so great, no one will ever look at your face again.

Not only that, these sneakers have the power to make your boobs talk to each other!

Reebok's Easytone sneakers are supposed to firm and tone your butt to such an extent that the actress in one of their ads actually has to halt her pitch several times to chide the cameraman for lingering on her posterior. "Dude!" she says, and the camera, momentarily startled, goes back to business. It follows her like a puppydog and then, once again, the actress has to remind it to focus a few feet north.

Chris Farley's brother Tom has weighed in on the controversial TV ad that uses Chris to help sell subscriptions to DirecTV. "Bottom line," Tom writes in response to my original Ad Rant post on the topic, is the line Spade says when he turns to the camera at the end: "It never gets old."

"Because I miss my brother so much, seeing him in a new creative light and hearing that great, taunting laugh of his once more -- it certainly doesn't ever get old. At least to me," writes Thomas Farley Jr., who is managing director and president of the non-profit Chris Farley Foundation.

Tom Farley confirmed via e-mail that the post comment #1048 was from him, and sent along contact information for the foundation as well for purposes of double-checking.

Friendship is a beautiful thing, except when you have a friend like David Spade.

The minor-league SNL alum's close buddy Chris Farley died at 33 of a drug overdose in 1997, and the grief must be eating away at Spade's brain cells (and ethics) all these years later.

How else to explain the monstrous lack of judgment involved in Spade's new commercial for DirecTV? The ad uses the wonders of modern technology to meld Spade's pitch for the satellite TV giant with a scene from Tommy Boy (1995) showing Farley trying to squeeze into a too-small suit jacket. Farley frequently made fun of his own girth -- which does not mean that a minor fat joke is how he would have liked to be remembered.

New legislation introduced by, among others, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), would cut off the federal tax deduction for drug companies that make those "direct-to-consumer" ads, the ones on TV convincing you to pop prescription drugs like candy.

There's plenty to hate about those ads. They're ubiquitous, for one thing. They manage to be misleading without being downright untrue. They play into the "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" category, because you've got people self-diagnosing without understanding that, in some cases, the side effects can be worse than the underlying condition. ("Death" is one of those annoying side effects.)

Would you buy a pair of used-looking Levi's jeans from this man?

I would.

But I draw the line at using a great ad celebrating the pioneer spirit of America, along with Whitman's stirring words, as a springboard for a crass $100,000 treasure hunt.

For the past few months, Levi's has been piggybacking the poetry of Walt Whitman on its "Go Forth" ad campaign, linking its jeans to the can-do, hard-scrabble, exuberant spirit of early America. It even has Walt himself as its pitchman.

You'd think that would be difficult, given that the poet died in 1892. But, like DNA, MP3s live on forever: There is an original, 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is presumed to be Whitman's voice reading four lines from his poem, America. Levi's cleaned up the soundtrack; you can download the scratchy original here.

His voice is as stirring and passionate as any bootstrapper this country ever produced, as he extols the richness of the American people:


Watching this ad gives me chills. The good kind.

In our newest column, film critic, author and book doctor Jami Bernard will take a look at advertising - commercials, billboards, social media campaigns and print ads - and weighs in on the best and worst of the bunch. Check out her video rant, and tell us what you think.

This week, we look at Bud Light Lime's new campaign called "In the Can," in which everyday people utter suggestive lines about getting it, yes, you guessed it, "in the can." Has the attempt to create buzz-worthy ads in the hope that they will go viral gone too far? Perhaps the age of the sexual ad has finally passed as consumers simply look the other way when one of these productions airs on the TV or the Web.