March 03, 2005

• methinks those folks are over-reacting a bit.. is it a dumb ad? yep. is it poorly done? yep. should we get our panties all bunched up over it? I guess if you've got nothing else to do and all the rest of the world's problems are solved.... (is the war over, do we have world peace, is everyone fed and happy, are the rain forests saved, are the dolphins OK, how about the baby seals, discrimination taken care of.......???)
• Well, first I'd like to see some proof that it's real, rather than just endorsements to that effect. I'd be more convinced if the ad was sitting at doubleclick.net or akamai.net rather than http://www.herownroom.com/nasty_bell_ad.jpeg .
• Ha ha, Canadian internets don't want the vagina.
• It's a leaflet, not an Internet ad.
• With holes in it, so you can see the next page.
• Phwoar...look at the pancreas on that
• This print ad is a spin-off of sorts from a TV ad for Bell Sympatico internet services. In the TV spot, an extremely overprotective (neurotically so) mother is shown hovering over her young son's every move, following him closely when he rides his bike, etc. In one scene, the kid is shown reading a school book that shows the human body, and the page with the female form has been censored by the mother. Then Bell's internet service is shown and the mother says it's one thing she doesn't have to worry about because they have built-in protection from undesirable content. Obviously the mother in the ad is a hyper-extreme example of a protective parent, and Bell is attempting to use this for hyperbole and comedic effect. When the portion with the anatomy book was transferred to the print ad, that effect was lost. If I hadn't seen the TV spot, I wouldn't know what to make of the print version.
• If you'll note, in the upper left corner of the image there is the fragment of another medical image *not* censored by Bell. It clearly shows a cross-section of the anal region. From this I'm going to assume that Bell doesn't have a problem with goatse.
• I bet the first draft of that had some porn star spread out on a bed with her parts cut out, which would have been at least accurate, but totally unprintable. I can't imagine how you'd publish something like that after this (sfw news story). So they sent it back to the designers -- "we like the gimmick with the naughty parts cut out, but we need the image itself to be family-friendly".
• rocket88 has it dead on. This is really a non-issue, imo, even if it's a stupid ad (and was a stupid tv ad too).
• ... right, or what rocket88 said.
• Why, of all the innocent organs they could have chosen to censor, did they feel it was inappropriate for the stomach to be shown? The little squiggly-shaped bit on the lower left that is mostly removed, that's a stomach. I recognize the pyloric sphincter and the beginnings of the duodenum. It's a damn weird thing to censor, 'specially given the aforementioned ass in the top left, and I'm guessing it shows the ad designer doesn't know his or her anatomy all that well to begin with.
• The link is now sending me to a private livejournal entry.