Sometimes I really want to work in advertising

While many of my friends decry television and commercials as being desperately bourgeois or blue-collar (whichever sect of income level represents the "Them" in their personal "Us & Them" delineation), I realize that the challenges of creating promotional materials, and the rules and boundaries that accompany them often produce the most creative works of art. I am constantly hearing from successful artists that creativity needs structure, and the advertising world provides structure and money, so it is shouldn't really come as a surprise that some of the most creative works are ads.

Often when I watch ads, I think about what makes the ones I like good, and what I would do differently with the ones I hate. I also like to think of analog methods to do the same thing a lot of advertisers are using computer graphics to do, I find myself constantly asking "What would this add looked like 30 years ago?" Sometimes I find I don't understand why they felt they needed computer graphics (such as a tin of soda spilling over) and sometimes there truly is no way to reproduce what they have done without the use of computer animation.