Darn Skippy

Unilever bans super skinny models. All very well and good, but I have a feeling that no one takes their fashion cues from peanut butter ads.

Why not outlaw cigarettes completely?

It's a lot more honest--not to mention efficient--than targeting cigarette advertising campaigns.

Fishel says sales have been strong since Camel No. 9 debuted in February. But while that's encouraging news for R.J. Reynolds, it alarms some health advocates and government leaders. The product hit store shelves just as Congress began debating legislation to sharply restrict tobacco marketing and give the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate cigarettes.

At a Senate hearing last month, Ohio Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown held up a Camel No. 9 ad that was mailed to smokers' homes.

"It strains the imagination to think this campaign is aimed at anybody other than 15, 16, 17-year-old girls — something that's pretty morally repugnant," Brown said.

R.J. Reynolds denies its ads target teenagers. The company says it markets only to adult smokers. At Tampa's Amphitheater, customers were required to present proof of age before they were admitted, and again before they received their sample cigarettes.

Still, some tobacco-industry critics remain concerned. Greg Connelly of the Harvard School of Public Health takes issue with R.J. Reynolds courting female smokers — especially the young adults who would be likely to read fashion magazines or go to a loud party at a bar.

Of course tobacco companies want to attract new customers, whether heretofore non-smokers or no, to their brand. And as long as cigarettes are legal, why shouldn't they? In the meantime can we cease this faux speculation about their intent?

RELATED: "Is smoking a cigarette enough to give a movie an R rating?"

You're smelling very bloggy today

There's a top note of freshly laundered pajamas, along with a hint of stale pizza and compressed air. Calvin Klein launches perfume geared to "technosexuals."

The CK in2u bottle, designed by Stephen Burks, is made from the same materials — white plastic and glass — recognizable in an iPod. (Fabien Baron designed the original bottle.) The name is written in the shorthand of an instant message, a casual invitation to sex so immediate as to imply there was no time to spell it out: “in to you.”

“We have envisioned this as the first fragrance for the technosexual generation,” said Mr. Murry, using a term the company made up to describe its intended audience of thumb-texting young people whose romantic lives are defined in part by the casual hookup.

Last year, the company went so far as to trademark “technosexual,” anticipating it could become a buzzword for marketing to millennials, the roughly 80 million Americans born from 1982 to 1995. A typical line from the press materials for CK in2u goes like this: “She likes how he blogs, her texts turn him on. It’s intense. For right now.”

Valleywag creates an ad using actual bloggers.

Clothing brand emphasizes the upside of global warming

Diesel's spring ad campaign labels the company's clothes "Global Warming Ready."

n print ads promoting its spring/summer collection, the Italian-based clothing company depicts landscapes that have been transformed by environmental disaster. The proud buildings of Manhattan and the presidential faces of Mount Rushmore are half-submerged in water from melted glaciers. Paris is a steamy jungle. Life looks pretty awesome, though. Diesel's models are dressed fashionably if barely (to accommodate the weather) and they lounge amid this hip dystopia in glamorous unconcern, fanning themselves or applying suntan lotion to one another's tawny backs.

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These ads are tongue in cheek, but that may not be apparent to anyone but Diesel customers, who've come to expect this sort of thing. In the past, Diesel has run ads advocating the smoking of 145 cigarettes a day (for that "sexy cough") and the drinking of urine to stay young. The company has also attempted to "sponsor" happiness. The irony is of the dark, European sort, best consumed in the company of Gauloises and knowing laughter.

That global warming is being spoofed by a retailer in the pages of Vogue and Esquire suggests that the issue is sufficiently widespread and accepted to have reached the irony tipping-point. It also speaks to the saturation of cause marketing, now part of the advertising ploys of everything from rubber gloves to skis to Hummel figurines. It was perhaps only a matter of time before a company like Diesel upended this with a perspective that is either humorous or insulting, depending on how you take it.

I'll take humorous, thank you very much.

And they're not any cheaper

The Hatemongers go after the Geico lizard and other commercial spokespeople.

I always found the gecko rather tiring myself, but I contacted Geico anyway when I moved to Maryland and needed new car insurance. I mean, cheap is cheap, and who wants to pay more for insurance? But when I found out that not only would I not save 15 percent with Geico but that it indeed charged more than other carriers, I truly began to despise the little lizard with the cockney accent.

And that's the problem with advertising spokespeople: No one would ever buy a product strictly because they fell in love with the advertising icon and many such icons are annoying in the extreme.

My current bete noire is a woman who's featured on commercials for the RoomStore, a small chain that I'd never heard of until I moved here. Her tagline is something about fancy schmancy furniture stores and every time she says it, I want to reach into the TV and throttle her. Even if I were in the market for a hideous 8-piece living room suite featuring an overstuffed sectional couch and matching coffee and end tables, I wouldn't buy it there. I wouldn't take it for free.