Dave's Gourmet Insanity Sauce : Ads to Die For

Dave's Gourmet Insanity Sauce gets a morbidly garish graphic treatment sans the usual product shot, compliments of tiny Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., shop Honest Mechanics (www.honestmechanics.net). "In a category that has been bastardized by every gut-burning pun in the book, we insisted that this campaign wouldn't fall into that wasteland," says Matt McNelis ([email protected]), who's freelancing on this gig, the main Honest Mechanic being Bil Dicks. "Our strategy was easy: no fire extinguishers; no scorched peppers; no slightly overweight men with headbands and shit-eating grins. And above all, no mounds of flaming turds." We think hot sauce fumes may have gone to Matt's head, but maybe he's making up for the ads' relative lack of copy. "We chose a simple visual direction because, quite simply, we didn't want to look like all the other Technicolor puke in this category," he further effuses. "Our client thought the use of red silhouettes was brilliant because it was a deep and meaningful interpretation of heat and fire. We just thought it was cool because it looked like blood. When you eat this sauce, what you're really doing is inflicting a prison-style beating on your mouth. Hence the tagline, 'Self-inflicted pain.' Some people have asked us what made the bottles kill themselves. We just tell them it's because Friends is off the air."