My pal Jim Williams asked me a while back why I'm not adding new ad reviews to this page, and I told him nothing was inspiring me. While that's still basically true, there are some ads that are worth mentioning for the sake of pointing out their failures - some more prominent than others.

I say this while maintaining still the position that ads succeed simply by making us make sense of them. To call an ad a failure means the ad defies us to make sense of it, but in that case no ad entirely fails (my Theory of Knowledge students understand).

Some of what follows relates to ads I've already reviewed - or at least campaigns I've already discussed. Ad campaigns are strange things, viewed from the external standpoint of viewers. The worst of them seem to drag on forever, hapless losers careening from one to another egregious faux pas. My guess is we notice that ad campaigns are long drawn-out affairs more when the ads are terrible or the premise of the campaign is obviously stupid. In fact, major ad campaigns are expensive to produce, involve serious and legally binding commitments between groups of people - advertising executives and marketing executives - who are professionally geared for hypocrisy and deceit, and in general don't meet expectations. And you thought you had problems.

So instead of looking to new campaigns, which have been few lately (not like the 90s, when corporations changed ad agencies faster than you can say Saatchi & Saatchi), here I'm revisiting some noteworthy continuing campaigns and bestowing on them my personal revulsion.

Worst of Show

Two campaigns stand out in my opinion as overwhelmingly worthy of misapprobation: Domino's "Bad Andy" and Intel Pentium's "Blue Guys" (as I continue to refer to it; Intel - or the guys - have since begun to admit that they are in fact the Blue Man Group).

The "Bad Andy" campaign features a muppet knockoff of indeterminate species engaging in what seem to be meant to be perceived as impish pranks. The main problem of these ads is, in my view, that Bad Andy is distractingly ugly and unshaped. It's not specifically anything, it's just a critter. Interestingly, whereas on Sesame Street this appears amusing, in the Bad Andy ads it looks thoughtless.

Even worse is that the ads are inconsistent. Somehow, ad designers have missed out on Aristotle's unities, and have decided that plot, character, and setting can be arbitrarily shifted. Bad Andy appeared in the first ads as a menace to the Domino's crew, chuckling somewhat ominously. Now all it does is flip over a little sign that says "Free" onto a mock billboard advertising whatever Cinnastix are supposed to be (I'm guessing pizza dough covered in cinnamon and sugar - clearly the perfect complement to pizza). Then it giggles and chirps "bye-bye." What was originally designed to be an antagonistic sprite is now meant to be charming and cute. It never was sufficiently taunting, and it ain't adorable.

I give it double "PLPLPLBH!"

Possibly even worse than the Bad Andy campaign is Intel's Blue Guys ads. There must be something I don't understand about entertainment, or art, because I see nothing interesting, amusing, wondrous, or aesthetically pleasing about these groups of choreographed noise-makers that have been popping up every couple years. Maybe I'm too high-concept, but the notion of paying money to go see a stageful of people pounding on things for a couple hours in no way connotes "fun" to me.

So maybe I'm biased against Blue Man Group. So sue me.

But you can't say I'm wrong about the ads. The first batch, selling the Pentium III processor, consisted of two of the blue guys making noises while a third attempts unsuccessfully to do so. Eventually, the third blue guy took extreme measures (leaping onto the long flat piano-key Roman numeral 1, e.g.), finally did produce a sound (one of the notes in the trademark Intel Pentium chime), and befell some unpleasant consequence (falling underneath the Roman numeral 1, having it flip 180 degrees, landing on the blue guy's head). These ads suggested, if they suggested anything, that the Pentium III might randomly smack you in the face or fall on top of you. I think that was the message.

The new ads for the Pentium 4 are now appearing, with a change in the conceptualization of the ads. The Pentium 4 is fast. Yes, the Pentium III is fast, but the Pentium 4 is fast too. A Pentium III with the proper system set up can run around 800 MHz, and the Pentium 4 can run around 1.3 GHz. Do you need that extra speed?

Regardless, the new blue guys ads represent that speed with a fast drum beat pounded onto a big tubular Arabic numeral 4, which has the timbre of a cardboard mailing tube. The speed is also represented by the frenetic movement of one of the blue guys, who has nothing else to do in the ad.

So I take it all those blows to the head in the Pentium III ads have taken their toll. Or else the Pentium 4 causes fits. Speed kills.

I score it three "PLPLPLBH!"s.