Erin Petersen
ADversary

Really, Lindsay?

By - Mar 12th, 2010 04:00 am
Santa Monica Police Department mugshot of Lindsay Lohan taken after her arrest on July 24, 2007.

Santa Monica Police Department mugshot of Lindsay Lohan taken after her arrest on July 24, 2007.

If you’re even remotely connected to any social network on the interwebs, then you may have seen this pop up in a thread or two.

On Wednesday, tangerine hued child-star-gone-bad Lindsay Lohan filed a lawsuit against E-Trade for an ad that aired during the Super Bowl on Feb. 5. LiLo claims that the ad invades her privacy by blatantly using her likeness, causing her extreme pain and suffering.  She wants $100 million from the financial services firm.

She must be back on drugs. Or out of work. Or both.

I don’t particularly care for E-Trade’s Baby ad campaign, designed by Grey Group, that first launched during Super Bowl XLII. I’m not what you’d call a “babies” person, so the idea of a talking infant isn’t so much cute as it is terrifying. Plus, there’s something very creepy about  the whole baby-using-a-webcam thing that seems inappropriate in the age of Internet predators. I get it, the idea that E-Trade is so user-friendly that even a baby can navigate it. But … just sayin’.

E-Trade’s spot in this year’s Super Bowl ups the gross-out ante by featuring a toddler love triangle. In the ad, the inexplicably finance-savvy baby is being interrogated via webcam by his “girlfriend” baby (eew) about his whereabouts the night before. Baby boy insists that he was diversifying his portfolio. Girlfriend baby then finds out that he spent the night with someone else, a now-infamous “milk-a-holic” (there are so many reasons why this term is absolutely vile) toddler named Lindsay.

What does this have to do with LiLo? In a word: nothing. Now that she’s back from her vacation in rehab , she’s suddenly taking offense to an ad that aired over a month ago. Why? She claims that baby number three— aka “that milk-a-holic Lindsay,” the boyfriend-thieving toddler with an unhealthy thirst for dairy— is a direct reference to her own scandalous and highly publicized antics.

She’s even got her mom defending her to the press and comparing her to legendary first-name-only divas like Cher, Oprah and Madonna. These women are part of the pop culture elite (whether we like it or not), having built empires out of their decade-spanning careers. Apparently, Mother Lohan thinks that Lindsay belongs to the club. Maybe to the tween crowd and pseudo-celebrity barnacle Perez Hilton she’s know simply as Lindsay, but I’d venture a guess that E-Trade doesn’t market to tweens… or Perez Hilton.

LiLo insists that she’s trying to make a point—basically, she’s tired of being picked on. You’d be hard pressed to find a glowing review of her “work” anywhere—seriously, Google her and you’ll be buried in pages of snark before you ever see an IMDB profile. So, she’s drawing the proverbial line in the sand over this benign and from all accounts completely unrelated ad. E-Trade hasn’t released any official statements yet, but a comment from Grey Group in a New York Post article denies any connection between “baby Lindsay” and Lindsay Lohan, and even mentions that in addition to the fact that Lindsay is a common baby name, it was also the name of someone on the ad’s account team.

So why the steep price tag when you’ve got little more than empirical evidence to back you up, Linds? And why start now? You’d think that after enduring smarmy dad Michael Lohan’s stunts and about a billion re-posts of some highly unflattering photos and comments, she would have sued everyone by now. Sheesh, at least TMZ.

But this is beside the point. We all saw the ad on Super Bowl Sunday, just one in a long string of expensive and over-hyped adverts that  rolled out that evening. Now try to remember whether you made the connection between “milk-a-holic” Lindsay and child star Lohan before news of this bunk lawsuit hit the web. I bet you didn’t. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Lohan’s lawyer is already trying to have the ad pulled, but no one by Lindsay and Dina Lohan seems to be taking this seriously. Meanwhile, how much do you think E-Trade’s traffic increased over the past 48 hours?

Categories: Commentary, Pop Culture

0 thoughts on “ADversary: Really, Lindsay?”

  1. Anonymous says:

    Until this issue arose I felt Ms. Lohan had been rather unfairly targeted and exploited by Hollywood blood lust; I hoped she would get past her problems and succeed. Now, she just flat-out deserves being dumped on. Apparently LL is a bad-press-a-holic being exploited by her legal counsel.

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