David LaChapelle is all about color and excess, so it's not surprising that he and Christmas make a great fit. This commercial, produced for British TV, is a great example of his staggering ability to create high fashion out of our most mundane activities -- especially holiday preparations.

By reimagining the common housewife as a self-interested supermodel, LaChapelle drags the focus of the holiday season away from adolescent fantasies of toys and repositions it onto adult desires, sex appeal, and the singularity of a runway model. 'Tis the season for vain materialism anyways, so why the hell not.

Commercials have always been the place for visual effects wizards to try out new techniques. But in the years since the 1998 Gap ad that froze swing dancers in mid-step, we've all gotten a little blase about what a skilled artist can do with 3-D imaging. The wonder is gone, leaving us with a "hey, cool, whatever" attitude.

So if you sent this European ad for Miller beer back in a time machine to the year 1997, those primitive monkeys would be dazzled -- but they're blissfully ignorant of ten years of digital evolution. As for us advanced spacemen, this is a clever enough commercial with a great deal of charm (most of which is not found in the FX, but in the gesticulating eyebrows of its star) that nonetheless barely bothers to make a point.

Thanks to the hipster fashions and spiffy visuals, this is a great example of an ad that sells by projecting an aura of cool. It never bothers to make the obvious connection between peeling away things you don't like and peeling the labels of beer you're not really enjoying. Perhaps we're just supposed to learn that beer is cool? Not that we needed CGI to teach us that.

Microsoft's shiny new Zune music player isn't finding the success some anticipated, despite its technological superiority and wireless capability. Sure, any attempt to challenge a cultural icon like the iPod is bound to have a rocky start, but its attempts to penetrate the marketplace are failing like crazy. So where falls the blame?

These adorable ads, working the claymation style to create a menagerie of adorable creatures sharing joy and happiness via wireless communication, are without a doubt visually stunning. Our favorite, in which a little girl pacifies a killer robot with a dove and then teams up with him to spread some block rockin' beats, is especially charming and witty (not to mention a useful guide to the handling of killer robots). However, none of these adorable creations ever actually use a Zune: the hurdle that keeps these ads from effectively reaching their audence. The iPod is an icon for a reason, after all -- for one thing, people know what it looks like. Do you know what a Zune looks like? Neither do we. Neither does this killer robot. And what good does that do anyone?

The genius behind the Wii is that by creating an entirely new system of gameplay, Nintendo has made a third-generation console that puts new and old gamers on the same level. But how best to explain the herky-jerky movements the new controller demands? Clearly, by showing adorable bunny rabbits play the game that stars them.

This European ad for the game Rayman Raving Rabidds is totally devoid of context, but watching adorable bunny rabbits run and disco dance is enough to sell the Wii to even the totally clueless consumer. All they have to do is hunt one down before Christmas. Maybe the bunnies could show us how to do that, too.