Top 10 Posts of 2011, Part Two

Yesterday, I started my countdown with the the most-read posts from #10 to #6. Here are the top five, based on total visits from Jan 1, 2011, to today.

#5 Interview with FEMEN's founder, Anna Hutsol 

This post wasn't even original, it was a repost from a Facebook interview I did with Anna through her translator/community manager, Eugene Smirnov, on Osocio. It was short and sweet, as she picked and chose the questions she would answer, but any FEMEN post immediately gets the interest and support of their global activist community and associated voyeurs.

And yes, the post contained boobs.


#4 Nude activism continues to take over the internet

No, my posts are not all about nudity and sexuality. But it's a testament to the power of those primal forces, in activism as well as advertising, that my top posts mostly involve naked people.

This one was both interesting and amusing. After Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei's assistant Zhao Zhao was legally harassed for "spreading pornography online" with this picture, supporters started a nude protest blog called "Listen, Chinese Government: Nudity is NOT Pornography".

It's pretty weird. But in the tradition of PETA, FEMEN and "nude photo revolutionary" Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, it certainly gets them noticed.


#3 He's a straight talkin' PETA with a letter for the U of M...

Speaking of PETA, my distaste for their shock-and-eww tactics is a common topic here. But the PETA post that was my third most read of 2011 was neither. It was a personal appeal by one of my personal rock gods, Iggy Pop, to his alma mater to stop using live animals to train students in field medicine for the survival flight course.

It was a very well-written and rational appeal from a man who once described himself as "a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm". He even signed off with "Thanks for your time"!

Iggy has gone on to do more radical stuff for PETA, but to me this was his shining moment of elder statescraft.


#2 Disney's The Little Mermaid's sexual coming-of-age story, as told by her hipster meme

This was something I did on a winter weekend out of boredom. The Hipster Little Mermaid was a thing at the time, and I thought it would be fun to try to make a narrative out of it.

Yes, writers are sick people. But the internet is even sicker, and apparently any content that combines a teenage Disney Princess with the word "sex" is enough to bring them in like fruit flies on red wine. Even if there is no actual sex in the post, just a lot of English Major tomfoolery.

You can read the whole thing here.

#1 NZ church keeps up its irreverent Christian holiday ad tradition

As much as people love a good post about sex or nudity, blasphemy was the draw of the year. Despite being less than two weeks old, this post about the latest Christmas billboard by St Matthews in the City Church in Auckland, NZ, quickly took the lead in pageviews.

It's a beautiful ad, with an important message. According to Vicar Glynn Cardy:

"It's real. Christmas is real. It's about a real pregnancy, a real mother and a real child. It's about real anxiety, courage and hope. This billboard portrays Mary, Jesus' mother, looking at a home pregnancy test kit revealing that she is pregnant.   Regardless of any premonition, that discovery would have been shocking.  Mary was unmarried, young, and poor.  This pregnancy would shape her future.  She was certainly not the first woman in this situation or the last."

The progressive  Anglican church has long been known for its radical Christian messages of questioning tradition and acceptance of all people. What would Jesus do?

He'd probably go to St. Matts.

Happy New Year. I'll be back tomorrow with 2011's most effed ads.

Top 10 Posts of 2011, Part One

It's been a pretty good year on this blog. Started in 2009 as a way to share advertising insights and finds with my friends, colleagues and interested clients, it has picked up a respectable international readership — including many of the mainstream ad bloggers I consider best practisers.

The year's almost done, so I'll share the 2011 posts that generated the most interest online.

#10 Suck it, haters!

One of the cause communities from which I've gotten great support has been the so-called "lactivists". I am a very vocal proponent of breastfeeding as the preferred form on infant nutrition, and I have railed against prudes who find it obscene.

So I was especially pleased when Australian Victoria's Secret model Miranda Kerr and her actor husband Orlando Bloom announced the birth of their first child with a beautifully intimate photo of mother and child.

There was some controversy around the picture, but Ms. Kerr kept up the good work. And to disprove the theory that breastfeeding somehow leads to sag, she recently did a tasteful nude photoshoot for Industrie magazine. After all, motherhood is not the end of a woman's sexuality.

#9 Christina Hendricks celebrates Christmas with a product placement

While Miranda Kerr's personal photo celebrated her motherhood, this more recent shoot shared by Mad Men's Christina Hendricks simply used her enormous boobs to promote whisky.

Ms. Hendricks once told The Daily Mail, "If there’s anything to be learned from me it’s that I’m learning to celebrate what I was born with, even though it’s sometimes been inconvenient."

And intimidating. But as with any post dealing with sex or the female form, this one proved the old adage that anything featuring boobs, bowsers or babies will always draw eyeballs.

#8  1 in 5 teenagers will experiment with art

This refreshingly non-mammary campaign by the Philbrook Museum of Art is one of the great viral successes of the latter part of 2011. It just goes to show that big budgets are not needed when you have a really big idea.

It may not be the first time a campaign has satirized the War on Drugs, but it is certainly one of the better executions.

#7 Egyptian blogger exposes herself for freedom

The keywords I chose to define my content are: "Social, Cause, Marketing, Advertising, Branding, Human Rights, Sex, Sexism, Politics, Activism, Science, Fashion, Media". This post about the Egyptian feminist and atheist Aliaa Magda Elmahdy's nude blog protest probably meets all of those criteria.

At just 20 years old, Ms. Elmahdy is at an age where online exhibitionism, in the west, hardly raises an eyebrow. But in post-Tahir Egypt, where a human rights struggle has turned into a violent conflict over the religious future of the country, she has exposed herself to criticism, abuse, and the possibility of being murdered for her beliefs. I hope she has a safe 2012.

#6 The stupid Skittles porn spoof ad you've already seen

With a blog title like that, you wouldn't expect this to be a top post. But since the internet is for porn, people tune in just to see the sex. The stupid, unsanctioned, Skittles bukkake sex.


Skittles - Newlyweds - Dir. Cousins [Not affiliated with Wrigley or Skittles. Contains explicit content not suitable for minors] from Cousins on Vimeo.


Contrary to popular belief, I post about more than sex. But these are the posts that get the most interest. This particular one was part of my "F'd Ad Fridays" feature, in which I rattle off the weirdest, sickest and stupidest ad campaigns and pop culture memes I've bookmarked throughout the week.

Well, that's it for the first half of the list. I'll post the top five tomorrow.