Fertilizer

I should go into advertising, I care so much about it.

Today's rant is another lobby ad placed in the Metro. First, none of us are farmers, we don't care about fertilizer, and second, the ad was so smarmy and overbearing as to be irritating, who would actually believe anything that organization is saying?

The ad consisted of a large photo (the entire left half) of little girl eating pasta, very cute, and on the right in beautiful retro font 'Every recipe begins with the same essential ingredient,' then a blurb about fertilizer, and towards the bottom as large as can be 'Fertilizer.' Juxtaposing a word like fertilizer with the image of a cute little girl eating pasta was clearly intended to stick in the mind as a contradiction, but I found the whole ad grating, especially the slick expensive look of it, as though it were done by a very expensive firm charging expensive amounts of dollars.

There's no other information about who is pushing fertilizer, except in the blurb (the fine print, if you will) the web address nutrients(nospace)forlife.org. Not only is a .org listed, but we have no idea what org might be behind this ad, although one can instantly assume it's a lobby.

1) What a waste of money
2) What do they hope to gain?

I can only guess that the lobby has loads of cash it knows not what to do with, so it spends it on a slick ad campaign/website, per agreements with interested parties of course, but seriously, what do they hope to gain? If they were lucky, maybe one person riding the metro out of the thousands each day would have any influence on the fate of fertilizer. Is it in the hope that public opinion is swayed for when related issues are being voted on? I guess that's the whole point of PR, but I still think it's a waste of resources.