Ha, everybody watches Mad Men and assumes that advertising must be some kind of glamorous industry. Forget it! The best thing agency big shots can hope for these days: "Create affordable meals and boost the cheese-single business" for Kraft. Wow, that's a "panty-dropper" account for sure! Seriously, most ad people are now stuck touting things like money-saving strategies at JCPenney. Try impressing girls with that. The last available prestige account in these trying times: sucking the blood of the poor more effectively with jingles for the state lottery! Facebook pages. Scratch-and-sniff lottery tickets. Gas discounts. Partnering with Indiana Jones and Deal or No Deal. Lotteries are doing all these things (and more!) to attract the dwindling dollars of desperate Americans into their swollen coffers.
"There has been a general increase in lottery sales," said Gary Kubo, a director at Independent Lottery Research, a consultancy that specializes in lottery marketing and research. "You are starting to see people migrate to the lottery not out of necessity but as a way to earn a little extra cash."
My, how morally bankrupt! Lotteries, remember, are essentially taxes on the poor. Ads that succeed in increasing lottery spending are inherently making poor people poorer. Ed McMahon is only doing the ads because he's broke himself. Low cost index funds, people!