:: adgruntie :: Advertising and pop culture

+ The Daily Press's "Life in the irony age" takes a look at some recent ads that have "refined the art of regurgitating pop culture through an ironic lens". A worthwhile read.

Some of those laboring in the offices of advertising agencies follow the old rule for novelists: Write what you know. The result: Some ads are self-referential in ways that aren't so obvious.

For Geico the Martin Agency created a series of commercials in which cavemen, shown living in apartments and working on laptops, are insulted by a line in what amounts to a Geico commercial within a Geico commercial: "It's so simple a caveman could do it!" the smiling spokesman says.

The final ad shows the spokesman taking the offended cavemen to lunch and apologizing. "We didn't know you guys were still around," he says in chastened tone.

Lawson says those ads were a direct reflection of the adman's reality.

"Advertisers and brands are inundated with e-mails and letters," he says. "People are always offended by something you've done. There's not one group out there anymore that hasn't been offended by something.

"That led us to thinking the only group that hasn't been offended is cavemen, basically because they don't exist."