This is a short post today because if everything goes as planned, I’m flying back from an all-too-rare, all-too-short family vacation at my sister’s home where I got to see my daughter and spend time with the whole family together.  With the son off to college in a few weeks, and daughter off a few years ago, these times are special.

So obviously I wrote this post last week.  And when I did, I was still on my weight loss advertising rant.

This time, I’m targeting the ad that talks about how if you use a certain weight loss program, you’ll “have the power to change how people look at you.”

Ugh.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

So if I lose weight, everyone will look at me differently?  May be true, but what a — pardon me here, I don’t usually like to use this word, but — stupid thing to say in a national ad campaign for a weight loss program.

Help me out here.  What do you think about an ad campaign that reinforces low self-esteem among people whom the company is supposedly helping?  Is it deliberate or do you think they just don’t get it? But how could they not — they’ve been in the weight loss business for decades.

There’s nothing irresponsible about the advertising in the picture above, but according to Las Valley 702, from whom I got the picture via flickr, it’s a great example of “an utterly stupid advertising campaign.”  Says the cereal was great but the ad campaign killed it.  We could only hope….

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