A few years back, when I was living in France for the first time, an American friend and I would play a game while waiting for the bus: we'd rate the bus ads. France gave us plenty of material to criticize.

I'm not the first American to come to this country and just be amazed by how awful their advertising is compared to ours. They don't really seem to get basic marketing concepts like branding, not crowding their ads to death with information, or making their product seem, you know, desirable. Pretty much everything we saw got a bad rating except for McDonald's and beer.

So when I showed up again in St. Etienne back in October (I'm living in Paris right now), and I saw these ads all over, I couldn't stop laughing. I pointed them out to a straight male American friend, I said something like, oh my God, there's furry porn all over this city, and he said something like, yeah, well, I'd still do the cactus.

On one level, I'm surprised that the AFA doesn't have a stick up their collective ass over this ad campaign. I guess as long as it's man-on-female-dog sex, Rick Santorum wouldn't have had a reason to complain.

All the ads are "women" except for a bear, which I saw once in a gaystream magazine out here. Jeez, a bear is the gay one? How uncreative. I wanna see what a bullfrog would look like as a hot boy!

Not that I just said that....

You can check out the rest of the Orangina furry porn ads on their site.

Update: OK, I just took the train out to Germany, and the train station in Paris was plastered with these ads. Alberto pointed it out and all he could muster was "Oh, c'est space!" (Literally "Oh, that's space!") We also saw the new jellyfish and lavender ladies.