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Who knew?  Trying to be hip and edgy could get you into so much trouble. The advertising world, that's who didn't.  In this cutthroat industry where it's become so hard to slash through all the stuff that comes our way online and on TV, advertisers have resorted to ads that open our eyes wide, and mouths to complain, according to The New York Times' Stuart Elliott and Tanzina Vega. Take the commercial for Mountain Dew that showed a battered white woman trying to pick her assailant from a lineup that included black men and a goat.  Sounds offensive to me.  (Full disclosure: I haven't seen it.)  Or the one from GM for its sport utility Trax, set in the 1930's and sold in countries including Canada, that uses a "modern remix of a song from that era that included references to Chinese people, using phrases like 'ching ching, chop suey.'" The companies have all done mea culpas and yanked the ads, with their defense being it was the only way ...

Bet you're going to find this as hard to believe as I did, but a new study has supposedly found that teens respond more to food ads than to ones for cellphones.  You heard it here first.  (Well, not really -- it was a story that ran today at a blog called Futurity, authored by Jared Wadley-Michigan.) Wadley-Michigan writes that "watching TV commercials of people munching on French fries or cereal resonates more with teens than advertisements about cellphones or the latest car." Apparently brain activity is higher when teens watch food commercials than when they watch non-food ads. "It appears that food advertising is better at getting into the mind and memory of kids," Ashely Gearhardt, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan told Wadley-Michigan. "This makes sense because our brains are hard-wired to get excited in response to delicious foods." Teens watched a video of 20 food and 20 non-food commercials, including thos...