[I'm participating in Gwen Bell's Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, in case you're all like, what's with the theme?]

Ad. What advertisement made you think this year?

Look, I realize this sounds disingenuous, since so many of my other blog-challenge posts say something similar. But nearly every advertisement I see makes me think. Ads are an obsession. I analyze them ad nauseam (well, to the ad nauseam of others; I never actually tire of it–half the time I’m unaware that I’m doing it, to be honest); take them apart, process their individual components, imagine the conversations, even, between client and agency, leading to the end product.

It’s not a sickness, I say. It’s…I don’t know. Something else.  I can’t do it with all ads. Rather, I can, but I end up feeling unwell. These I try to avoid. They cause a reaction, a sort of unpleasant buzzing in me, that is very uncomfortable.

[This is part of the reason why I am so fanatical about the William Gibson book Pattern Recognition, and its protagonist Cayce Pollard:

...if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a "sensitive" of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing. Though the truth...is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace.

I get that. That allergy, that sometimes-violent reactivity. And in spite of or because of it, it's something I can never leave alone or stop analyzing.]

All that said: the ad that made me stop and think more than any other in 2009 is this one.

The text translates as: By hiring a prostitute, you’re financing human trafficking.

At first glance, the ad seemed coarse and shrill to me. It smacked of the early 1990s in some ugly way; perhaps in its attempt to be outrageous. Then the obvious sank in: it’s spotlighting something outrageous that we either don’t think about, or only do so in vague, veiled ways.  This puts the concepts of human trafficking right up our noses in a way that makes our brains scramble to match up the images in the ad with the images in our internal databases. What better way to call attention to the systematic packaging and cheapening of human life?

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