Taken as a whole, the most sickening spots in the world have to be Skittles commercials – which is ironic considering the candy tastes pretty good.

These spots are devoid of human love and kindness, which is not what you’d expect from a candy. “Taste the rainbow” indeed.

Take the Sheep Boys spot with two guys’ heads on sheep bodies eating Skittles off a tree stump. What the heck is this trying to say? That someday, we’re going to raise human-animal hybrids and feed them candy? What would we have them for? Their wool – or their meat too?

One commercial has a sad guy with a Midas-like touch, but instead of gold, everything he touches turns to Skittles. This is the tamest spot I’ve seen of this campaign, since the young man and woman with him seem a little sympathetic at the end.

Most of the ads are creepy, but the latest one is way over the top. In it, a teen in ragged clothes has a tree that grows Skittles coming out of his abdomen. “Mom, do you think after the Skittles harvest, we can call the specialist?” he asks, mentioning his dream of going to college. However, his mother is only concerned with his candy production. “I thought we were done with all that silly dreamer talk,” she tells him.

Annual sales of Skittles are about $150.2 million, according to Business Week, making it among the top 25 selling candies in the U.S. Skittles has nearly 3.8 million fans on its Facebook page and has some wacky videos posted there as well.

I don’t know why the ads bother me so much. Maybe because I can’t get the damn sheep boys out of my head every time I eat Skittles. I don’t want anyone coming after me with shears… or a meat cleaver.

I’d like to start this entry by introducing you to one of my best friends. Pap (otherwise known as my grandfather) is 73 years old. He’s just a small town boy, born and raised in Lykens, PA. He’s an ex-mailman who’s been retired for two years.

We speak via cell phone every day before I leave for work and more often on weekends. Like many posts prior, we know many in Pap’s generation are not digital, they are not tech-savvy and they are certainly not avid smartphone, Twitter or Facebook users, or even computer literate. But there is one advertising medium that Pap enjoys… in his pajamas, feet on the recliner, with a cup of coffee. Yep, you guessed it – the one advertising medium that is on its deathbed.

Pap religiously reads The Patriot-News, where he has obtained information, news, sports statistics, politics, and even weather updates for the past 50+ years. We discussed the decline of print newspapers the other evening over dinner.

“Holy smokes,” he said. “You know that Patriot-News? It’s getting thinner and thinner by the day.”

We all know 2009 was a bumpy road, especially for newspapers:

• 105 newspapers have been shuttered
• 10,000 newspaper jobs have been lost
• Print ad sales fell 30% in Q1 ‘09
• 23 of the top 25 newspapers reported circulation declines between 7% and 20%

These facts prove people would just rather have news at their fingertips, on their smartphone or laptop.

We know the newspaper is close to extinction, but could you really imagine a world without newspapers? No classifieds, no Local & State, no Food section, no ads from local restaurants, no sticker updates from Planet Fitness that their membership is only $1 (not 75 cents), no high school sports, no comics, no letters to the editor, no coupons…

Local newspapers are the complete package. You don’t have to read the whole paper, but it’s all there – from news you may not want to know (but should) to feature stories that touch your heart. You can cut out your wedding announcement, an honor roll list that your baby brother made or a sports story that includes an NFL football player like Jahri Evans, who made it to the Super Bowl and hails from my alma mater, Bloomsburg University. When my great-grandmother, Pap’s mother, passed away, at the age of 103, we cut her obituary out of the newspaper and laminated a copy of it for him.

No future version of Google or Bing is going to give him that!

The Super Bowl is the biggest day of the year for two things: football and advertising. That’s why Pavone created SpotBowl.com, which I’d like to invite everyone to visit if you’re looking for a worthy distraction before, during or after the big game (kickoff is Sunday at 6:28 p.m.).

Many of you are probably already familiar with our annual ode to the ads. Now in its seventh year, SpotBowl is an advertising poll that lets America sound off about what they really thought of the game’s ads. Last year, as it has in many of the past years, SpotBowl registered more than 100,000 votes from fans in all 50 states and several countries around the world.

At its core, SpotBowl is a public survey – polls open as soon as the game starts and remain open until Monday at 3 p.m. – but it’s grown into much more than that. For instance, this year, Pavone has optimized the site to allow mobile voting for the first time ever (I’m pretty sure it’s the first ad poll of any kind to do so). That means Super Bowl viewers can watch the ads and register their votes from their iPhones, Blackberrys and other web-browsing devices from wherever they may be on Super Bowl Sunday.

We’ve also upped the pre-game draw by adding a section of the site that helps fans plan the ultimate commercial-watching party, complete with recipes provided by some of the best food and beverage brands in the nation.

So I invite you to check it out and let me know what you think. I also invite you to vote as often as you’d like. And don’t be afraid to be blunt in your assessment of the ads that fumbled. For $2.8 million per 30-second airing, they deserve nothing but our brutally honest opinions.

May the best ad win! (And it might just be the one below.)

Recently, I curled up with Cosmopolitan, one of my favorite publications.  Bombarded with ads on every other page, I noticed a common theme: weight loss advertisements.  I decided to count each ad containing such messages. The total was 17, including a 4-page foldout from a weight loss supplement called alli, which claims it can stop certain fats from entering your digestive system. As I started plotting what fatty treats I would devour if I were to play into this particular diet scheme, I realized I had become a victim of deceptive yet ingenious advertising.

While societal “norms” influence us to judge our peers based on the outside, advertisers are stepping in to capitalize on the appearance appeal.  It’s not a new strategy, of course, but it seems that marketers are cashing in on our waistlines now than ever before. Weight-loss advertising isn’t “losing” much of anything these days and in fact it has grown into a billion dollar industry.  More than $34 billion was spent on over-the-counter weight-loss supplements in the past decade. On average, 6 out of every 10 Americans are overweight and an estimated 68 million American adults are “trying” to lose weight. To put the facts in perspective, that’s about 10 million less than the estimated 78 million Boomers currently living in America.

A recent study confirms 15 percent of weight loss ads reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission, contained false information. So how does the weight-loss industry turn such a high profit on ads based on lies?

Since obese Americans nearly outnumber Boomers, I can understand how the large (and getting larger) target audience can be profitable, but what I can’t comprehend is why we believe the deception? The scary amounts of money pumped into this competitive industry only make me wonder, what other forms of deceptive advertising I have been victimized by?  Is effective marketing more valuable than honest marketing in today’s society? It certainly seems that way.