truth in advertising

the truth hurts. recent ads for a medicine for gout picture a man carrying a big glass container of green liquid with him wherever he goes. he's got gout, caused by high levels of uric acid in his blood. along comes the medicine, uloric, and voila! he is now carrying around a smaller, though still substantial, glass container of green liquid. i'm sorry, but that's not reassuring. it would be like a cancer center ad showing people who added a couple of painful days to their lives instead of years of joyous living.
this truth alongside the 'two bathtubs on a deck' commercials for cialis. seems that cialis makes you go from mowing the yard or changing a lightbulb to having sex in a tent in your (now gorgeous manicured) back yard or a (where did that come from?) waterfall in the woods that just showed up in your living room. not so much truth there, i think.
give me the days of the PF Flyer shoes. they said they made you run faster and jump higher and by golly, i ran faster and jumped higher when i got a new pair, every time, as far as i knew. it sure felt like it. in the movie Sandlot, Benny "the jet" Rodriguez dons a pair of brand new PF Flyers before his monumental battle with/run from 'The Beast'. they worked for him, too. that 'truth' was a little easier to swallow than the previous examples. one is too much truth, the other pure fantasy (get inside and take a shower, you're all sweaty from mowing the yard!).
the most recent addition to the 'too much truth' category is the T mobile ad. and the worst part is, they are marketing the too much truth part and i don't know if they realize it.
in the ad a dad and mom and a kid are carrying huge piles of books, tv's, dvd players and dvds, computers, etc., etc.  they are bowing under the pressure of all that stuff and the pretty T mobile girl wonders why they don't have a phone that could have all that stuff inside it instead of carrying it all with them. well...if they get the phone, sure, no more big physical load of stuff, but still the same pile of junk, only now electronically stored for access whenever they want it. the irony of the whole thing to me is that they don't need to carry around all that junk all the time, even if they can (yes, i carry an iphone 4), and the fact that one can advertise as if being able to cram all that junk into a phone (smart phone is an oxymoron in my book) is a good thing that people should strive for, is an indictment of our culture and one that someday may be our undoing. we seem to think there is, or should be, an app for everything, and that by having that app we can do anything.
they need to make an app for the guy with the glass container of green liquid, maybe then instead of a lesser of two evils type of ad it could be just one more thing the guy has piled up on his junk pile of stuff that he's going to be able to put on his phone.