i agree. i can't imagine how this ad could be seen as effective. and to call this "the best ad ever?" the best ad ever is one that more effectively sells the product than any pre-existing or competing ads. or when a product isn't for sale, creates or exceeds the intended level of brand/message awareness.

and when it comes to marijuana ads, "best" shouldn't be determined by whether one writer liked its quirky execution, but rather, how likely are teens who saw this ad vs. teens who didn't see this ad vs. teens who saw the previous marijuana ads to smoke marijuana? this ad hasn't even been in circulation long enough to determine how it compared to other ads' effectiveness in reducing teen marijuana smoking. the market ultimately determines the best ad ever. perhaps this is the writer's "favorite" marijuana ad ever, which is how i think the article should have been titled.

but linguistic complaints aside, this quirky, muted little ad looks like something Miranda July would've created and that that type of creation seems likely to be appreciated more by a late 20s early 30s ad writer for Slate than by a 13-18 year old high school kid.

this article would've been better written if it explored the dilemma of sending mixed messages to kids by drastically changing "brand messaging." think about it. one year ago, an anti-marijuana ad tells kids they're going to get high and kill a toddler, and the next year, an ad tells them they'll be uninteresting. if i were a teen and i'd seen both sets of ads, i'd dismiss both, b/c i'd see through the fact that a thinking man on the other end of the ad is trying to tell me why something is bad but can't figure out why exactly it is bad. This is the "fundamental mistake" this writer made in writing this article, dismissing the fact that those old ads do exist, and have impacted teens. Failing to consider that no matter how effective these ads appear, they must be considered as inconsistent in the larger framework of the anti-marijuana ad context.

Brands can reinvent themselves, and do so all the time, (Marlboro and Zima are two notorious examples from two different eras), but always those new ads are pondered in the context of "how will the audience respond to this given the previous ads that promoted this product?"

The best soft-pedal approach could prove entirely meaningless if the residue of the government's previous scare-tactics lingers in teens' bongs...er, brains.

this writer draws broad conclusions about an ad from a sample size of "one," ultimately relying on his own personal experience w/ the drug and his feelings about the drug, rather than asking contemporary american teens, how they responded to the ad. which would definitely help mixing in some real-world credibility when judging these ads in articles that ad agencies are probably using to further their business street cred.

clios aside, ads cannot merely be analyzed like an art, and reading this column makes me feel like i'm trusting the business guidance of an Art History major from Oberlin, not an Econ major from Wharton. so if this writer is going to declare something the "best ad ever" we readers must remember it's just as subjective as a suburban white woman proclaiming that her church is the best one in all of Stamford, Ct.

whether this writer went to Oberlin or Wharton or anywhere in between, this article's credibility would skyrocket if he combined his artistic interpretation with hard data that confirmed or negated what he "declared" to be true. or at least revisited his articles down the road, once that data was available.