And, suddenly, after more than two decades in the national spotlight as also-ran, sidekick and star-crossed silver medalist, Al Gore is A-list, with high-tech moguls and Hollywood stars flocking to his live appearances. Once considered so wooden that his embrace of environmental issues was sometimes chalked up to the possibility that he actually might be part tree, he's now described in messianic terms. Wired speaks of his "resurrection." Hipster designer Marc Jacobs has cast him as a rebel icon in the tradition of Che Guevera on a line of T-shirts, tote bags and trucker hats. DraftGore.com wants to conscript him for a presidential run in 2008, and, indeed, he just may be the most viable candidate the Democratic party has to offer.
Provided, of course, that Angelina Jolie doesn't run. Or Garfield. Which is no knock on Al Gore, mind you, just an acknowledgement that it's hard to capture the public's attention these days. The North Pole's turning into a giant, penguin-flavored Slurpee, but we're too preoccupied with a cartoon cat who peaked in the '80s to notice.
But maybe the hens of the world can save us. At first, egg-vertising, a new service offered by a company called EggFusion that etches advertisements onto egg shells via laser beam, seems like an excellent idea—if your company aims to target Denny's line cooks. Other than them, though, who actually uses whole eggs anymore in these cholesterol-wary, instant-oatmeal times? Apparently more people than suspected. "More than 50 billion eggs are distributed through retail stores per year," EggFusion reports, with the primary market being "middle-class mothers, aged 22-54."
Advertising on food isn't a new idea, of course. God has been doing it for years—imprinting grilled cheese sandwiches with images of the Virgin Mary, slipping a subtle silhouette of Jesus onto random potato chips. In the late 1990s, Universal Pictures, ABC and a few other companies experimented with fruit-based advertising but it never really took off; apparently, people still spend more time watching their TV than their refrigerator crisper.
But the egg seems different, more promising. With its sensual, curvilinear styling and superminimalist color scheme, it has the aura of high-tech. Sure, it comes out of a chicken's ass, but it looks like it could've been designed by Steve Jobs! In terms of media playback, the egg is admittedly limited—you can only fit a few lines of text or a couple images. But they're cheaper than an iPod and tastier, too.
And for some advertisers, the content constraints are a bonus. Al Gore has been honing his climate-crisis message—with its reasonably brief running time of 100 minutes, An Inconvenient Truth reached a much bigger audience than Gore's 432-page book on the same subject, 1992's Earth in the Balance. But he's still barely tapped the mass market, and he still tends to go on for too long. Egg-vertising would force him to distill his message into protein-rich soundbites even the most ecologically indifferent omelette lover could digest, and it would free up scarce EW cover space, too.