Sunday, June 12, 2011

What Were They Thinking? Heh.

.:That’s My Girl!:.


“Let me have two of your best photos!” There’s no way this could possibly go horribly wrong, right?

So apparently, there was a site that allowed you to upload a couple of pictures so you could Be Gerald Anderson’s girl in a mock commercial. It was a pretty cool concept, and one of my officemates was practically gushing as she looped the commercial featuring herself again and again after she created it.

Essentially, the first picture would be used as Gerald’s cellphone wallpaper and the picture in his photo frame. He will end up kissing the photo frame before heading out to pick up his girl at her place.

The second photo will be shown while he’s driving to the girl’s house. He’ll point at it, and then say “that’s my girl!”

Pretty cute execution, interactive, and obviously, effective. What could possibly go wrong with this, right?

A lot, apparently. Almost predictably, someone made an explicit version of the commercial, since there weren't any means of screening the images uploaded. Folks, welcome to the internet.

For a while, you would’ve seen on this link a very not safe for work tour de force bastardization of the commercial. Man, what an incorrigible bastich that person really was, whoever he or she is. ;)


All praise be to Aljur for saving our eyes and sanity from the horror!

What was intended to be a cheesy but awesome way to market Maybelline products almost ended up being a massive disaster, if the news about it didn’t get to the people behind the campaign quickly enough. True, the video still exists, but at least, now that the people behind this have now been properly introduced to the 34th Rule of the Internet, I suppose a little foresight would be helpful from this point on, right?

That’s my girl - or maybe not.

I guess when you’re marketing something, you really have to cover all avenues, no matter how mundane that may seem to do. Don’t really want to condemn anyone here, as it’s clearly just an oversight, but I guess this will serve as a harsh but useful lesson for future reference.

Needless to say, shortly after this whole mess was exposed, the site was quickly taken down. I’m sure they’d want to put it back up after a while, but by then, they’d be more stringent with screening images, I’m guessing. We ended up having fun with the whole story on the air in the Disenchanted Kingdom last Friday, though (Without mentioning the brand in question, obviously.).

In the end, though, is it really horrible of me that I just had to chuckle over the whole affair? It was just such an obvious, albeit horrible, joke to pull. You gotta admit, if you've been on the internet long enough, you kinda begin to expect this stuff would happen at the drop of a hat.

.:The Unfortunate Implications Of Supot.ph:.

I think with medical science being how it is today, it’s pretty much been made clear that circumcision has more to do with cultural and societal pressure than actual medical benefits, given the inherent medical risks of performing circumcision as opposed to the limited scientific benefits that circumcision provides.

That being said, those very cultural and societal forces at work still make the Filipino word for uncut, su-pot’, pretty damned funny on the surface. I for one wouldn’t use the word as a slur against anyone’s manhood, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see it still used to this very day, unfortunately.


Oh, come off it. Pinoys are smart enough to know which supot we mean. Right? Right?!?

Which leads me to the unfortunately-named Supot.ph. While I’m sure they meant su’-pot, or the local word for a plastic bag, the lack of accent marks on the site conjures only the other meaning for the word, which makes you look at this fledgling e-classifieds website in a whole different (I’m tempted to say “uncut,” but that’s too easy.), unfortunate light.

Neither does it help when the people behind this website are known collectively as “Team Supot,” which just makes people wonder if they’re secretly a lobby group against an apparently barbaric Jewish and Islamic tradition. Sorta like Russel Crowe, I guess.

I got nothing, really. The jokes just write themselves at this point, and I’m afraid of making one that would be deemed “too easy,” like another joke about “your mom” or something (See what I did there?).

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey where is the video of this? can you give me the link? I listened to disenchantedkingdom and I laughed about this while I am on the bus. So I thought the video will be posted.

Kel Fabie said...

I'm pretty su the DK has a copy of it. Bug Marf to upload!