So...I get lots of mail. Sometimes in the darkness of newslists, sheep and spam, there glimmers a nice mail that makes me smile that evil grin in a joint sadistic laugh at it all. Like this one.

This arrived from David in .dk.

"The idea of substituting real fruit for fruit flavored product at fruit shop/fruit bowl/orchard/whatever must be one of the oldest in the book. I've seen it used for chocolate bars, fruit flavored yoghurt, cordial, you name it. So I'm surprised that ARCHIVE magazine allowed this pile of derivative rubbish advertising Miranda in their magazine. What made me absolutely astonished was that a few pages later in the same issue was exactly the same idea again, this time for Hero Jam."

Ok, so maybe my concept of a "nice mail" is different to yours.. ;) Boy did I laugh at this one - check them out! It's a great pair.

The Miranda ad was created by Golden guys Goodby Silverstein and Partners, proving to those who doubt that even the coolest agencies make crap ads occasionally. And no, the agency has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it ended up in Archive. You'd be a sarcastic B'stard and a commie if you though that. ;-)

AD: Stefan Capiz CW: Tom Kraemer (?) Archive Vol 4-2001 Fruitbowl with fruit-juice. Aha. Gotcha. fruit-juice & fruit-baskets with fruit-juice. Very clever.

Matter and Partners Zürich. AD: Philipp Skrabal and Sasha Fanetti (yes I can see that they must have needed two Art directors on this complicated set here..) CW: John Leuppi (Yaknow, I bet it was his idea too) Fruitbowl with fruitjam. Aha. Gotcha.Fruit-baskets with fruitjam. Very clever.Archive Vol 4-2001

The fact that both of these campaigns made it to the same issue of Archive is just astonishing. Archive which used to be the ultimate drool tool, not faded by the industry whims of who's cool or not, showing us neat creative campaigns from all corners of the planet (ok, so half of them were scam ads but at least they were GOOD).. Now this? Tut tut tut. Shape up. And for the creatives behind these two? Well, guys, I'm sure you had better ideas that were rejected by the client, didn't you? Y'all must have known this was old? If you didn't, you must have shared brain-waves somewhere - the idea-god is messing with your heads!

What do you think about it?