Fiat is an Italian company that makes cars, mostly really small cars. Their TV commercial pretends to show Jennifer Lopez returning to her old Bronx neighborhood while spouting nonsense about her deep connection to these mean streets. She shot the spot in LA, of course. The notion that Lopez would drive one of these circus clown cars is an insult to viewers. In print, Fiat has a full page ad glorifying the smallness of the car with a photo and the headline “Bigger isn’t better. It’s just harder to park.” No body copy. Bigger isn’t better is an idiotic claim for a lot of reasons, the main one being that it’s not true. This is an ad for small cars, not Fiats. There are plenty of small cars, the even smaller Smart Car for instance. We can only hope that readers will compare Ease of parking to Death in a head on collision.

Volkswagen has been running an elaborate commercial wrapped around Elton John’s old hit “Rocket Man”. The commercial is about the available Fender sound system, which, apparently, helps you decipher the lyrics of Rocket Man. The actual car isn’t even an afterthought. Expensive sound system, no?

Dr. Pepper has a commercial about a product they call “Ten”. No clue why the name. The spot mocks the imagined macho sensibilities of men, showing them in terrifyingly stupid vignettes and then announcing that Ten is not for women. Only men. Sort of like Dennis the Menace’s tree house with its No Girls Allowed sign. In a way, it’s a stroke of genius; it manages to insult men and women at the same time.

Jaguar’s latest spot is a mock animal documentary entitled “Jaguar at Play”. The conceit is that the car is like the real wild cat and there’s a secret and gritty urban environment where the Jaguar plays in its time off. We sneak up on a lot of differently colored Jaguar cars racing around, perhaps hunting for Jennifer Lopez and her Fiat. The implication is that there are no humans involved. The singular subject in “Jaguar at Play” is odd because there are a lot of cars. A real documentary would, of course, say “Jaguars”, plural, but we can’t be messing with the brand, can we? Too late. This brand has been messed with for years, first by bad design then by calling it Jag-you-are. The combination of upper class twit Brit nonsense, implied wildness and inner city hipness is hilarious.

The Droid Razr, a smart phone is “too powerful to fall into the wrong hands.” The right hands being people with enough money to pay for it.

In a nod to the warm sentimentality of the Christmas season, Best Buy decided on a series of commercials that pit mothers against Santa Claus. The mothers buy better stuff at Best Buy and, unlike Santa’s, their gifts can be returned. The Moms confront Santa on Christmas Eve to one-up the old dude, not with humor or charm but with smugness and a nasty sneer. Santa is suitably chagrined. The tag line is “Game on, Santa.” Chico Marx was right, there is no sanity clause.

Macy’s sneaks up on Christmas with a full page ad in the New York Post today for a line of “scents” – cologne, perfume and such – called “Villain” from tattoo “artist” Ed Hardy. More thuggery. Charming.

These advertisers wouldn’t spend all the money they have invested in this crap if they didn’t think it would work. That’s kind of sad. There’s something seriously amiss in America’s collective brain and soul if it does work.