Should be part of the Modern Crap post below. I am starting to believe my old boss that Advertisers are evil incarnate!

I could almost believe that the layout is just a veeerryy unfortunate coincidence. You know 2 flavors/2 cups side by side. It's a fruity flavor so lets go ahed and put some nature and bugs in the photo. Maybe.... But the slogan.... Puleeeese... Ads don't just get thrown together and randomly distributed. They are reviewed by many people. Some of them even college grads. Some of them even own TV's and occasionally read the newspaper. They should ALL be fired! I'm going to sell my SBX stock right now!

What the $^&(*^ were they thinking???

Gosh, do you think this campaign was cooked up to mollify the Arab boycott?[/not necessarily sarcasm]

I suspect someone inside Starbucks ad agency hates them with a passion.

F'r'chrissakes, it's an ad campaign for a cold drink with a happy little summer motif.

This is ridiculous... you guys need a break. Had there been two dragonflies, would that've sealed the deal?

I'm willing to give them a pass on the actual visual, since it IS summer-y and all that. But "Collapse into cool"? That's weird, weird language for a post-9/11 ad campaign. Normally I'm a big fan of Starbucks for the simple fact that their existance pisses off the Michael Moore anticapitalist crowd, but this is just strange.

"Reading too much into it."

Years ago, there was "take the Nestea Plunge". Same thing. People falling into something cool and refreshing. The image that comes to my Northern Plains mind is of people falling backwards into cool summer grass, not of twin towers falling in on themselves.

Sometimes a dragonfly really is a dragonfly.

Could this have come from the same folks who brought us this?

I never would have made the connection in a million years.

I buy the innocent explanation here.

The collapse into cool legends is incriminating, but what seals the deal for me is the square "blades of grass." Maybe it's because a week or so ago I was looking down on a vista very much like those square blades from the top of the Empire State Building, but I'm pretty sure that $Bux intended to do exactly what it looks like they did.

Sometimes two fruity drinks are just two fruity drinks. I wouldn't believe that this was a Twin Towers image even if Caribou Coffee was doing it. But Starbucks? No way.

File this one with the same people who are finding ways to fold dollar bills into 9/11 symbols and discovering references by typing the flight numbers with the "Wingdings" font face.

I suppose those four butterflies are the horsemen of the apocalypse?

OTOH, Stabucks pays an advertising department that presumably hires college graduates, so they should have flagged this one before it got out the door.

I wouldn't have thought of September 11 before hearing about the controversy. That "collapse into cool" headline just might have thrown me for a loop, though, I dunno. I wonder who the ad agency for this was. Whatever the case, it reminds me how many clueless people there are in corporate marketing departments.

Much ado about nothing if you ask me. I don't think a company like Starbucks, that is already attacked all the time for any number of things, would actually think this was a good idea. This isn't exactly "Paula Zahn is a little bit sexy."

Hey, ripping on that Paula Zahn thing was one of my very first posts here at VP:

Last Call -- Final Words for the Night

The square blades of grass is an unnatural addition to what I suppose is meant as a natural scene. Two cups of fruity pap sitting in a meadow and attracting bugs is, I suppose, Starbuck's idea of natural.

I was in Starbucks the other day. The barrista had a staple stapled into her right eyebrow. "How long did the doctor say you had to keep that in?" was my question.

And my low-fat decaf caramel double latte with extra foam? It didn't have the extra foam.

I agree with Bill. Everything else can be explained away, by the square "blades of grass" are jarring and unnatural. Callous jerks.

Everyone seems sold by the square blades of grass.

They're not square:

http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/cool.htm

"The poster depicts product shots of the two beverages sitting on a field of green 'grass' made with Starbucks signature green straws."

The enlarged photo on the snopes site clearly shows they are round. Of course, grass is neither round or square. Welcome to the advertising business.

And it would appear this controversy was kick started by Bill Maher.