What's the downside? Seems no one at Honda asked that question when the automaker decided to hire a team of 19 skydivers to form the word "Honda" in mid-air. In three minutes and 20 seconds. Live. On British national TV. The spot falls under (so to speak) Honda's new ad campaign: " If it's difficult, it's worth doing." If something goes seriously wrong, the Honda ad will test the limits of another, showbiz-oriented strapline "There's no such thing as bad publicity." The Guardian makes no mention of the ad's central lure– the possibility of death. It does, however, reports that Honda's already tested the concept. (So that's alright, then.) "The stunt is a means of gaining publicity for Honda's new multi-million pound ad campaign, which features 45 skydivers promoting the Honda Accord by creating a series of shapes over the Mojave desert to reflect new features on the car." i-VTEC® this! So why risk risking lives to do it live? ""We wanted to create something unmissable and what better way to produce something 'must see' than to stage the first live ad event on TV," Channel 4's sales director, Andy Barnes revealed. "It's about creating talkability on a big scale, managing the risk and being seen as pioneers for it." Let's hope "managing the risk" doesn't turn into paying off someone's widow.

In their latest commercials Subaru tells us that dumping a junk car in the wilderness or driving a car you can't see out of equate to some strange form of love. The first shows some environmentally-challenged dufus driving two days to take his old Forester to "Subaru heaven," which consists of a spot somewhere in an otherwise pristine wilderness area where other Subaru owners have abandoned their worn-out rides. There, apparently, they sit until they rust to pieces, releasing their various petrochemical-based fluids and toxic metals into the environment instead of being responsibly recycled and reused. The other shows someone who must come from the same genetic pool as that guy because he refuses to wash his Outback, claiming it's a "badge of honor" and that he'll "let the universe take care of it." He'd better hope the universe is taking car of him when he pulls out in front of that bus or runs over that motorcycle in the lane next to him because his windows are so nasty he can't see what's around him. And this comes from a company that not long ago bragged about how their factory is a wildlife preserve and how safe their cars are. Maybe they just don't expect their customers to share their "values."

What's with Avis' depiction of a Saab as a jilted [male] lover in this version of "Your Other Car" ad campaign? Any pistonhead worth his TTAC bookmark will immediately clock the cuckold as a "classic" Saab 900, produced from 1978 – 1993. (Anyone recognize the locale?) While that makes the ad's "star" a pre-GM model (in development terms), Avis rents GM products. The old Saab's design is not that different than the current models. And if they aren't similar looking enough for instant identification, they should be; when GM killed the hatch, they killed Saab. I digress. My main point: why didn't Avis choose a more generic, non-GM car for this diss, as they do for the other ads in the series? And why didn't Saab's brand managers protect the brand's heritage? What else have they got?

–

As you probably know, TTAC is an R-rated site. After a discussion with our readers, we decided to allow swearing on both sides of the editorial curtain, subject to existing anti-flaming regs. In this Brave New e-World, the fall-out from our "no bad word left behind" policy has been… non-existent. Even so, you can hardly expect our good friends over at G-rated, AOL-owned Autoblog to allow 'effing and blinding (although flaming and trolling doesn't seem to be an issue). So it's no surprise that John Neff's blog on a swear-laden "That's a Saturn?" ad provides some unavoidable comic relief. "Steve Hall at AdGabber found a different version of the commercial, which we'll call 'That's a f@#$% Saturn!'. It seems after they had gotten the footage that Saturn's ad agency requested, the actors, director and production crew had some fun and made a different, rated R version of the commercial that probably more closely resembles reality than the canned responses in the original commercial." Reality? Aside from the Sky (anyone remember the Sky?), no one's ever done a verbal double take on a Saturn. More importantly. this is not a bunch of bored actors "goofing off." It's an officially-sanctioned viral-ready production (mission accomplished) designed to get slackers to "rethink" Saturn's flag-waving, American-as-apple-pie image. Call me a fucking hypocrite, but I liked "The Different Kind of Car Company's" picnics, honesty and just plain folks approach. The swearing Saturnalia may make industry insiders chuckle, but this will not play well in Peoria.

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

With the release of Grand Theft Auto IV, the internet and nonprofit sector are abuzz about the game's "inappropriate" content. No surprise there; GTA is designed around the commission of felonies. In fact, if there weren't a slew of outraged press releases decrying something about the game being overly-violent, sexist, racist, homophobic, etc., Rockstar Games (owned by the NASDAQ-traded Take-Two Interactive) would have been mightily disappointed. This time 'round, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) has inadvertently aided and abetted Rockstar's PR efforts. Not-so-surprisingly, MADD slams GTA IV for the simulated drunk driving portion of the program. Not to take a shot at MADD's important real life message, but this is a little overboard, isn't it? I'm not going to ask the most obvious question– does driving drunk in a videogame encourage impressionable teens to think drink driving is acceptable– because I trust that TTAC's Best and Brightest aren't morons. So here's the more complex question: could GTA IV have been both anarchic and didactic?