“What do you think of the letterbox?” the guests ask each other as they feast on a folksy repast of chili and barbecue. “Doesn’t it arrest your attention?” A whimsical TBWA-Chiat Day spot for Pets.Com provokes widespread guffaws. “All those titles in the left-hand corner!” marvels a Fallon design director. “What a fuck-up!”

It soon becomes clear that this is a tough crowd. Westbrook’s party, not surprisingly, tends to be a Fallon-centric affair. And, within the industry, Fallon is considered forbiddingly chic — Helmut Lang to Ogilvy’s J.C Penney. “It seems casual, but it’s pretty political,” whispers a copywriter. “You have to know when to laugh, and what to slag.”

As they recline on leather couches, feasting their eyes on Westbrook’s 58-inch TV, the brand mavens resemble jaded fashionistas at a disastrous runway show, all crossed arms and indulgent smiles. “Light on concept, big on execution,” scoffs one guest of Autotrader.com’s 30-second spot.

“How did they sell that to the client?” giggles his friend. “‘OK, so then all these cars are going to come into the frame!’”

“Maybe they made a diorama,” someone else says.

A Budweiser ad provokes more slagging. “The old talking-dog gag.” “Everyone loves a talking dog!” “And it even looks real!”

Many companies, particularly the ubiquitous dot-com rookies, seem a mite ambitious in their estimation of what the average Super Bowl watcher could grasp. Microstrategy’s 30-second spot features the following plot line:

1) A harried business traveler gets a message on his cell phone, informing him that his flight has been canceled. 2) He reschedules, and runs to a new gate. 3) In the chaos, someone steals his credit card. 4) The credit card is triumphantly recovered when the thief tries to use it to buy a plane ticket.

The convoluted spot provokes widespread groans. “That’s more than happened on tonight’s episode of ‘The Sopranos,’” chuckles Michael Fanuele, director of account planning at Bozell Worldwide. “It’s got to be incredibly simple,” agrees Judith Grey, an art director at Fallon. “The creative director should have said, ‘Out, out, out. I need a three-line super that explains the whole thing.’ As much as we want to perceive ourselves as artists, you’ve got to keep in mind that these ads are being seen by drunk people in noisy bars. They have to work like billboards.”

A parody of a Gap ad, in which gyrating dancers are mowed down by a gleaming Oldsmobile, is pronounced a waste of a good idea. “The payoff at the end should have been better,” carps Neil Powell, creative director and managing partner at Fallon. “They should have somehow kept it straight. It would have been more effective if it had kept you wondering: Was it a Gap ad? Or was it a car ad? I hate to see such an obvious cut to a hard product payoff.”

Some ads go over big. The group is impressed by a first-quarter Mountain Dew spot, which features a Dew drinker cycling manically across an African plain to reclaim his soda from a cheetah. “Does Mountain Dew really make you bike that fast?” “All I can say is, anyone who isn’t drinking Mountain Dew is an idiot.” “Fire up the Dews!”

Someone else volunteers that “cheetahs are really expensive to rent.” Nods of agreement all around.

Dew’s third-quarter spot, a complex parody of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” goes over less well.

“Too many ornaments on that Christmas tree,” says Powell. “That one just merged too many ideas,” agrees Judith Gray. “It’s what you call a long walk for a short drink.”

The endless procession of inscrutable dot-com ads — actually only 17, but it seems like twice that many — provoke much head-scratching. “Is it a purchasing portal, or a commerce network?” someone asks of Computer.com. “It’s a purchasing portal that aggregates content across a vertical commerce network.” “No, that’s Epidemic.com.” “I thought that was a real-time, cross-platform purchasing portal.”

Suddenly — “Hey, isn’t that our BMW commercial?” Shushes all around. The 30-second spot features a woman skiing down a steep slope. The only sound is the whoosh of her skis slicing through the snow. The spot ends with the written tag line: “It’s not a feeling you can get every day — or is it?”

Loud whoops all around. “Yeah. Go Fallon. Love the letterbox.” But amid the cheering, there are a few discreet rumbles of dissent. “The set-up was way too mundane,” whispers one creative, who is seeing the ad for the first time. “If you’ve got to have the tried-and-true structure, why not do something that will shock viewers? The skier should have been nude or something.”

“We had a lot of ideas originally,” confides a creative who worked on the account. “I think the skier actually was nude. But BMW is a really conservative client. They said, we love it — but the skiers have got to wear comfortable ski clothing.”

The room grows quiet again. Another Fallon spot is coming on. This one tugs with both hands at the heartstrings. The ad, for the bond company John Nuveen & Company, has been digitally composed to show Christopher Reeve rising from a chair and walking across a stage. As the music soars, a tag line flashes across the screen: “Leave your mark,” it reads. Even the most hysterical disciple of Ayn Rand might find the equation of a soul-stirring medical miracle and the profits generated by bond trading a bit of a stretch, but the group breaks out into wild applause. Brian Murphy, Fallon’s design director, is pink with pride. He leans over and asks me if I noticed Nuveen’s “new identity.” “New identity?” I ask. “Yes,” he whispers. “Nuveen has a whole new approach to identity. A new logo. New typography. Before, it was a hard ’70s look. Very geometric. Now, it’s much softer. It’s classy, simple, sophisticated.” Ah.

Late in the third quarter, we hear the twang of country-Western music. “Here we go!” someone screams. “Herdin’ cats!” The Fallon spot, for Electronic Data Systems, is the funniest ad I’ve seen all night. It parodies an old-style western, with grumpy cowbows herding thousands of house cats across an open range. “Being a cat herder is probably the toughest thing I’ve ever done,” one of the craggy-faced cowboys says in his best John Ford, brushing cat hair off his jacket. The three-line super informs viewers that “in a sense,” this is what EDS does: “We bring together information, ideas and technologies, and make them go where you want.”

That “in a sense” epitomizes the challenges the money-burning dot-coms have in crafting effective ads. What they’re selling is so abstract that almost any narrative, no matter how clever, feels disconnected. EDS might as well have shown a bunch of screaming Japanese soldiers emerging from a pillbox, or a photo of a galaxy exploding. How far can you pull a metaphor before it snaps? EDS — for all your cat-herding needs! People will remember the clever ad, but will anyone remember which one of the 8 zillion dot-coms made it?

The Fallonites are proud of themselves. “High fives for cats!” “Go, Fallon!” The conversation turns to just how the production people were able to create the illusion of thousands of cats paddling across a river. “How’d you pull that off?” someone asks. “Cats don’t swim.” “Mirrors and wires,” one of the creatives says cryptically. Another volunteers that it was “catnip in the water.”

I never do find out exactly how they did it. My attention turns to another part of the room, where a Bozell executive is worriedly telephoning his account director. It seems one of Bozell’s clients, the National Fluid Milk Processors’ Board, has filmed two ads, starring quarterbacks from both St. Louis and Tennessee. The plan was to show the ad featuring whichever quarterback was ahead in the fourth quarter. “They were going to choose one of them to steal the milk,” he tells me. “But one of them just got injured. It would be really strange for the ad to show a quarterback who got hurt.” The executive hops about frantically until someone takes pity on him and informs him that Blaine Bishop, the injured player, is actually not a quarterback, but a defensive back.

After the game, I walk home with Dan Rollman, an earnest young copywriter fresh out of creative school. Rollman and I talk about how the most noteworthy characteristic of Super Bowl XXXIV was not the blur of rookie dot-coms, but the rise of meta-advertising — a spurt of advertising about advertising, and about Super Bowl advertising in particular. There was the Oldsmobile ad about the Gap ad. There was the E-Trade ad with a dancing monkey and the tag line: “We just wasted 2 million bucks.” There was the low-budget Lifeminders ad proclaiming itself “the worst commercial on the Super Bowl.”

What to make of Madison Avenue’s increasing self-obsession? “Where do advertisers draw their inspiration from?” Rollman asks rhetorically. “Other ads. You saw what we were like tonight. We’re obsessed with ads. It’s a little disturbing.”

Rollman sighs. “Maybe there’s a point where you need to take a timeout and reconnect yourself to the real world,” he says. “You need to remind yourself of all the brilliant ideas you could derive from other places … Maybe we shouldn’t have sat there watching all these Super Bowl ads. Maybe going out and watching a movie tonight would have been better inspiration.”

Or hey, maybe even the game itself.

Examples of vintage Burma-Shave road signs, including a blue South Dakota version. (Ray Crockett photo)

These red ads (one state, South Dakota, insisted that they be dark blue to keep them from conflicting with the red reserved for warning notices) usually consisted of five signs. For example: “DON’T PASS CARS/ON CURVE OR HILL/IF THE COPS DON’T GET YOU/ MORTICIANS WILL/BURMA-SHAVE.”

Some slogans touted Burma-Shave as a pre-aerosol “brushless” shaving cream—a cream you could scoop out of a jar and lather onto your face without relying on an old-fashioned brush and moistened soap in a mug.

("Thoroly"? I guess if the word doesn't fit the composition, change the spelling. . .)

In 1925, Clinton Odell, a Minneapolis lawyer, took the liniment his father created and transformed it into a brushless shaving cream. He named his company Burma-Vita—Burma, because most of the essential oils in the liniment were from the Burmese portion of the Malay Peninsula, and Vita from the Latin for “life”: “Life from Burma.”

Some of Burma-Shave’s primary “brushless shaving cream” competitors were Barbasol and Noxema.

The company was sold to Philip Morris in 1963, and all the signs were removed soon thereafter. As a testament to the campaign’s cultural significance, a set of signs was donated to the Smithsonian, where it still resides. But the brand eventually petered out. After being sold yet again (this time to the American Safety Razor Company) and then reintroduced in 1997, it never regained a hold in the market.

A history of the Burma-Vita Company, written by Frank Rowsome Jr. and illustrated by Carl Rose, was published by the Stephen Greene Press in 1963.

By the early 1960's, the rising costs of road-sign maintenance (as well as new and more effective ways of advertising) sounded the death knell for the Burma-Shave signs.

The following pages from Frank Rowsome Jr.’s book list all the road-sign Burma-Shave phrases produced from 1927 to 1963.

The soft drink that would be known as 7Up was created in 1929 by Charles Leiper Grigg in St.Louis as part of his “Howdy” line of sodas and was originally called “Bib-Label Lithiated (it contained the mood stabilizer lithium citrate until 1950) Lemon-Lime Soda.” It was almost immediately re-labeled “7 (7 natural flavors) Up Lithiated Lemon-Lime,” and then finally just “7Up”.

The first 7Up logo from 1929.

In terms of logos, an original winged trademark soon gave way to the red squared logo that lasted until the late 1960s that coincided with that period’s brilliant “Uncola” re-branding campaign. I always felt they had GOLD in that Uncola moniker. . .

A 1935 7Up label before the Howdy Company's name was changed to 7Up in 1936, followed by two Howdy beverage labels.

By the late 1940s 7Up was the third most popular soft drink in the United States. By the time the 1950s rolled around, the company had employed extensive branding techniques to keep the momentum going. The following three binders contain examples of what was offered to the bottlers and distributors to reinforce the product’s presence.

A catalog of 7Up sales/marketing items circa 1954.

This page includes tipped-in glossy paint chips.

These next three pages would NEVER fly with the HR Dept in 2012. . .

Before everyone had TV's in their home, it was common to go out to watch television.

7Up Sales & Promotion Merchandise Catalog circa 1954 - 59.

(would love to have those binders. . .)

Actual cloth swatches included.

More swatches.

1959 "Salesmakers" Catalogue

2 actual decals using the older logo with the woman reaching for bubbles- love the way the color is broken down into separate shapes and levels.

Actual booklet attached.

"Fresh Up Freddie" was the 7Up mascot created in 1957 by ad agency Leo Burnett and Walt Disney to help sponsor the Disney "Zorro" TV series.

Here’s a link to more info on “Freddie”: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/fresh-up-freddy.html

Remember, it's from 1959. . .

Ditto. . .

2 mid-1930's 7Up bottles.

Left: 1940's bottle with 8 bubbles on label. Right: 1950's bottle 7 bubbles.

"Like" was introduced in 1963 as a diet version of 7Up. It contained Calcium Cyclamate which was determined to be a carcinogen in 1969. "Like" was discontinued in that same year and Diet 7Up was introduced in 1970 sans the Cyclamates. This bottle is dated 1964.

Late 1960's/early 1970's can.

"The Uncola".

As a final footnote, I was lucky enough to work on spots for 7Up International using the Susan Rose/Joanna Ferrone character “Fido Dido”! Here’s one of my favorites done while I was at the Ink Tank Studio in N.Y.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JpHjeGXyw8

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

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Even dead, Jackson is a massive draw. He’s currently the subject of a global Cirque du Soleil tour with the horror movie title “Immortal.”  And Pepsi knows that overseas – especially in markets like Asia — his brand is as ubiquitous and American as well, cola.

Bringing back the dead is a peculiar – if increasingly common – gambit. Now that the earth has run out of living celebrities, they’ve had to revive Tupac to perform at Coachella  and Grace Kelly to make kissy face with Charlize Theron to sell perfume.  They even had to dig up Martin Luther King Jr., to pitch for Mercedes-Benz.

There comes a time when a celebrity passes into our iconography. Today, seeing the images of Elvis and Marilyn and James Dean in different pop culture contexts barely seems any stranger than fake Abraham Lincolns selling cars in February. And why wouldn’t Jackson’s people wring a few more opportunities out of his incredibly lucrative image? Somebody’s got to pay for all those $10 million mansions.

Senior PepsiCo marketing executive Frank Cooper told the WSJ that the new campaign will be both “respectful” and “forward looking.” It may be respectful. But there’s nothing “forward” about the dead. Jackson’s image survives as an easy symbol of pop music, but the man whose life ended from propofol intoxication three years ago, whose doctor is currently serving time for involuntary manslaughter, couldn’t seem less like the right spokesman for the notion of “living for now.”

Shockaroonie, some people found this offensive. The ad went the wrong kind of viral, with a social media explosion of negative feedback. It’s not that comedy with a racial element is always wrong wrong wrong. The Jewish Hank Azaria is currently in his third decade of playing the Indian Apu Nahasapeemapetilon on “The Simpsons,” and nobody seems to be outraged about this. Kutcher’s incredibly unnuanced performance isn’t that, though. On his blog, writer Anil Dash explains it perfectly –  “a fake-Indian outfit and voice” constitute “the entire punchline” of the clip. And, as he eloquently put it, “I can’t imagine I have to explain this to anyone in 2012, but if you find yourself putting brown makeup on a white person in 2012 so they can do a bad ‘funny’ accent in order to sell potato chips, you are on the wrong course. Make some different decisions.”

And so that’s what Popchips is trying to do. On Wednesday, in a “message from Keith” on the company’s website, its founder, CEO and foe of proper capitalization Keith Belling wrote, “we received a lot feedback about the dating campaign parody we launched today and appreciate everyone who took the time to share their point of view. our team worked hard to create a light-hearted parody featuring a variety of characters that was meant to provide a few laughs. we did not intend to offend anyone. i take full responsibility and apologize to anyone we offended.” That’s a constructive, self-aware response to a potential public relations disaster. (Kutcher, who in recent months has been tainted by his hasty Twitter support for Penn State coach Joe Paterno and a divorce that featured rumors of unprotected extramarital sex, has so far had no comment on the problematic ad campaign.)

It’s a positive thing that Popchips understood its mistake and made an immediate effort to rectify it by pulling the ad. That step forward is mitigated somewhat, though, by the a large number of “get over yourself” responses on Anil Dash’s blog. We’ve still got much work we need to do in this country around issues of stereotypes and sensitivity, folks.

You don’t have to look any further than the entire Popchips campaign to see what I mean. Its remaining “World Wide Lovers” include the stoner Brit “Nigel,” who’s “seeking higher planes of consciousness” (GET IT????), the effeminate German “Darl” — a swishy riff on openly gay designer Karl Lagerfeld — and the dumb redneck “Swordfish.” In the end, there’s also regular old, newly single Kutcher, who describes the other guys in the club as a “freak show.” Hey, geniuses at Popchips – you’re still perpetuating gross generalizations. Also: They’re not funny. It’s a great big snack-loving country. Being cool about brown people – and gay people, and people others would call “white trash” – shouldn’t be such a crunch.

The FCC rejected a push by the industry to water down the measure. But the rule as passed also has serious limits. For example, the data will not be searchable or uploaded in a common format.

The rule will first apply to affiliates of the four major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) in the top 50 TV markets. All other stations will have until July 2014 to come into compliance.

“[L]arge areas of some swing states, like Virginia, Missouri, Wisconsin and Michigan, could see an influx of advertising in markets outside of the top 50,” the Sunlight Foundation noted in an analysis today. It was also not immediately clear exactly when the rule will go into effect for the top 50 markets.

Then there’s the crucial question of the format in which the files will be available. FCC spokeswoman Janice Wise told ProPublica that the commission is not creating a searchable database of the political ad files.

“We’ll accept whatever [file] format they provide,” she said in an email.

That will make it much more difficult to analyze the information.

Wise said there are no specific plans to make the database searchable.

By opting to allow stations to submit political data in any format, the commission departed from a recommendation made last year by in an FCC working group report.  The report called for the political file to be put online and that “as much data as possible [be] in a standardized, machine-readable format” that “could also enhance the usefulness and accessibility of the data.”

Also not clear is how the broadcast industry, which vigorously lobbied against the rule, will react.

“[W]e will be seeking guidance from our Board of Directors regarding our options,” the National Association of Broadcasters said in a statement decrying the vote.

In March, the industry group submitted a filing with the commission raising “serious questions about the FCC’s authority” to require stations to put political ad data online.

“That was written as a legal memorandum, which is code for, ‘We’ve lawyered up and we’re ready to sue over this,’” says Andrew Schwartzman, a longtime FCC watcher at the Media Access Project.

The broadcasters’ group declined to comment beyond its statement.

On a Thursday earnings call for Belo Corp., one of the companies that has been fighting the disclosure measure, CEO Dunia Shive suggested that broadcasters would continue to fight the new disclosure rule.

“I don’t think the conversation is over with respect to being able to continue talking about if we will ultimately have to include ad rates online,” she said, Broadcasting & Cable reported.

Belo spokesman R. Paul Fry told ProPublica that the company merely “want[s] to continue the dialogue on this subject.”

The FCC also said today it would review the new rule after a year to see if any changes need to be made before all stations will be required to come into compliance in July 2014.