One of the best things about modern advertising is the fine print. This is the craven cover-your-ass verbiage that expensive lawyers advise their clients to put under an ad to limit the advertiser’s liability. Here is a list of things I’ve been advised not to do:

• Drive down a ski slope and do a barrel roll on a big jump.
• Erect an enormous structure with a narrow track and drive through flamethrowers high above the desert floor.
• Eat while lying on my back.
• Pull a trailer.
• Drive on Highway 1 at a reasonable speed on a sunny day.
• Drive in an empty warehouse.
• Drive on a city street at night.

Some of those things would be pretty stupid (and expensive) to attempt. Yet if I were to take all the automotive admonitions seriously, I wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere, ever. The sum of the auto warnings is, “Don’t use our product.”

Last night an ad reminded me not to drive very fast in a straight line on an unused runway, but oddly neglected to admonish me not to release a wild cheetah without taking measures to protect myself.

The ski slope barrel roll warning was actually phrased playfully, with the implied “yeah, we know this is ridiculous, but we’re going to do it anyway.”

People will blame our litigious culture for these silly admonitions, but except for a few well-publicized (and usually misrepresented) cases, I don’t think someone sliding a pickup truck down a ski slope has much hope of suing Toyota, warning or not. I think there’s a culture of fear that makes boardrooms timid, just as parents drive their kids to school despite ample evidence that the kids are better off walking. It’s all about worst-case thinking.

Who benefits from that fear? Some guy on retainer to Mazda who gets paid five thousand bucks to look at the latest ad and say, “Put ‘Professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt.’ at the bottom.” Based on Mazda’s lawyer not altering the text to mention angry carnivores, I wonder if he even watched the ad before submitting his careful analysis. What does Mazda get in return? The VP of marketing can tell the board “we asked a lawyer” if someone gets upset.

My strongest argument for why this is corporate cowardice rather than a reflection of our litigious society lies in Hollywood. There are no disclaimers in movies. Stupid people have died replicating stunts in movies. There was a movie where people lay on the double-yellow in the middle of a road. When a kid died replicating that stunt, the studio was not sued out of existence.

In the face of ample evidence that disclaimers are unnecessary and not even that useful when things do go wrong, advertisers still tell me not to operate my car in any circumstances. Hollywood is simply braver than Madison Avenue, as hard as that is to believe.

The other day I opened the cabinet to grab some cold cereal. I wasn’t sure which specific cereal I was going to have, I just knew that a bowl full of yummy not-too-sweet flakes with some almond milk splashed over them would be tasty. Probably I’d slice a banana over the cereal.

So, surveying the candidates with an open mind, I was confronted with… anonymous boxes. Black-and-white panels of nutrition information. I selected a cereal and resolved to put it away with the other edge showing, so my poor tired eyes could identify that box better the next time.

It turns out the other side was no better, and I realized that all the cereal boxes in the cabinet used the side panels as junk space.

Big mistake, I say. In the case of cereal, all the marketing is on the front of the box, with stuff on the back of the box to keep the kids without TV in the kitchen occupied. The packaging designers are missing an important opportunity.

There are two phases to marketing a box of cereal; first you get it off the store shelf and into the shopping cart. That’s what the front panel does. But the marketing isn’t over then; cereals are still competing to get from the box to the bowl. The winner of that contest empties the box faster. It’s about selling the next box.

That competition is all about the side panels. If I were king of a cereal company, the boring stuff would be on the back, and the side panels would be devoted exclusively to “Hey! Look at me! I’m yummy!”

The Title of this episode commonly appears as fine print in television commercials, where the advertiser wants to make sure no one holds them responsible for someone else being stupid.

I may add to this post, but here’s the one that forced me (yes, forced) to write this little episode:

• Do not attempt an automobile collision while someone is hanging from the side of one of the vehicles, on the side of the collision.
• Do not jump out of an airplane while holding a sphere of electricity and then hurl said sphere into a cloud that you are falling toward, filling it with lightning.

I know you were going to.

As an employee of your favorite fruit-flavored gadget company, I find myself noticing some interesting things about the way my employer promotes itself. For instance, there are the buildings of Infinite Loop. There are signs at the entrances to the campus, but on the buildings there are no logos.

No logos on any of the other buildings Apple occupies. No logos on the big gray busses that glide up and down the freeways, taking workers to and from Cupertino. (The busses have WiFi, of course.) No logos on the shuttles to the railway stations or on the bikes you can check out to travel between buildings.

You’d never know, driving on I-280, that you were passing through a company that has more cash on hand than the Unites States.

So why wouldn’t a company as intent on spreading its brand take advantage of putting their logo on stuff they already own? I think because it would almost become a joke in iCupertino. There would be an apple on every damn thing in the city. HP used to have a big presence here, but now Apple’s new mother ship will be built on their old campus. (Business note: few places in the world will have greater demand for sandwiches and beer than the one-block radius around the new Apple campus.) Seagate’s here, and plenty of other companies, and they put up the signs. Apple just is.

But none of that is why I sat down to write this little episode. I’m watching baseball right now, and an ad for the iPad 2 came on. It’s a nice, friendly ad, and one of the little vignettes it plays is of a very small child writing his first words with his finger.

The camera moves over the iPad (2!) as the child completes the ‘n’ in ‘lion’. His penmanship is pretty good. (I know it’s a ‘he’ because he’s wearing blue.)

Of course, Lion is also the name of the operating system Apple released last week. Coincidence, I’m sure.