Some time in the 1950s, in a Kellogg's laboratory, some scientists eagerly gathered round a bowl.

"They're perfect!" the newest member of the team muttered. "Crispy yet indulgent, luxurious yet fun!"

"Let's just wait until we've added the milk," replied an old hand. "They could still go the way of Malticles."

The others shuddered at the recollection of the research dollars that had been squandered on those apparently delicious roundels – insanely moreish, tantalisingly frosted and loaded with B vitamins – but which, within 15 seconds of contact with lactose, set into a hard grey matter which you could only extract by smashing the bowl. The US military had briefly taken an interest before discovering that the substance – nicknamed Maltrete – was one of the many materials on Earth too hard for human consumption but too soft to repel even the most half-hearted of artillery bombardments.

"Hand me the jug," the chief designer whispered. With trembling hands, he poured. They waited.

"Our friends Snap, Crackle and Pop seem to have been somewhat smothered," quipped the head of the Flake Crispiness Retention team, who had slunk over to see what the fuss was about. No one laughed.

They watched.

And then, disaster! "The colour, it's not binding properly! It's running into the milk!" squealed a frosting risk assessor. He was right. As they watched, deep brown bled sickeningly into the pure white liquid around it. The scientists exhaled in collective despair. The head of FCR slipped tactfully away, this defeat too rich for even his blood. Funereal silence descended.

No one had noticed the head of marketing come in. "We can make this work for us," he said.

That's how I like to imagine that Kellogg's came up with the Coco Pops slogan: "So chocolatey it even turns the milk brown." Hiding a product's weaknesses in plain sight like that really takes balls. You've got to believe that the problem is so bad, so crucial, that your only recourse is to pretend it's deliberate. They never pushed Corn Flakes with the tagline: "So filled with health-giving corn, you can sling it at a wall and it'll stick!"

This sprang to mind when my eye was caught by a billboard advertising the new series of Britain's Next Top Model, the TV show in which young hopefuls compete for modelling contracts. It had a picture of one of the judges, model Elle Macpherson, with the line: "It takes one to find one."

No it doesn't. While a great violinist might be good at judging other people's violining, it doesn't follow that being pretty in a way that is perceived to make the clothes you wear look good will make you skilled at spotting someone else with that attribute; or that someone short, plump or bent-faced shouldn't be equally adept at finding the malnourished and photogenic – in fact, Oxfam photographers are probably best at that.

This slogan isn't like saying that a top chef is a good judge of a souffle but that another souffle is. Still, if you're making a TV show about modelling, it's good to have a famous model in it, rather than just aspirant thinifers of whom no one has ever heard. So, in the spirit of Coco Pops, they've drawn attention to the flaw and made it look like a deliberate feature – the TV format equivalent of a beauty spot.

I like this kind of advertising. The motives may be dishonest but the technique is brazen honesty – to scream: "This is the catch!" so loudly at cynical consumers that they perversely ignore it. Here's a glimpse of how some products may be marketed in future, if this trend continues:

Bendicks Mints: "Nobody would buy them to eat themselves, but they're easy to wrap and pricey enough to make a respectable present."

Nestlé Kit Kat: "Pretend you care about babies in the third world if you want to. Just don't come moaning to us three bites into a Mars when all that caramel really starts to cloy."

Online roulette: "If you're even reading this slogan, it appeals to you slightly, which means you're bound to piss all your money away somehow, so it might as well be on this."

McDonald's: "Ever felt like putting on some elasticated jogging bottoms and really letting go? Why not today? Two years and 15 stone down the line, you can always bounce back via a fat camp documentary on Sky."

Ryanair: "No one is actually going to save the environment so you might as well enjoy it while it lasts."

Payday loans: "If you were the sort of person who was ever going to understand compound interest, you wouldn't be in this mess. We can literally put off the shitstorm until next week. I mean, next week! It'll probably never happen!"

Cancer Research UK: "Don't think of this as chucking your money away altruistically, like with Amnesty. Face it, you're never going to go to North Korea but, with your diet, bowel cancer is a very real possibility."

The Royal Opera House: "For people so cultured they have literally lost the ability to feel bored."

Channel 5: "It can't all be 'appointment to view'. Sometimes you've just got to have something on in the background. And I bet you've still got an inkling that we might show some crafty porn come 3am."

Pimm's: "It may be unrelentingly sugary but you can drink it outdoors without looking like a tramp."

Twiglets: "OK, they're pretty unpleasant, but eat 12 and then tell me you don't want a 13th."

Petrol station coffee: "Of course you're going to have to compromise on flavour! You've been compromising your whole life! You're at Leigh Delamere at 11 o'clock on a Tuesday night, exhaustedly looking for caffeine. Why start trying to live the dream now?"

Conservative party: "Because, deep down, you know that posh people are supposed to be in charge."

Give blood: "Obviously you're not going to and this campaign is wasted on you – just don't go around thinking you're any kind of saint, that's all."

Ferrari: "Drive a Ferrari and most people will think you're a dick – but in an envious way, like they feel about Richard Branson, not a dismissive one, like with the chairman of a pressure group trying to block a wind farm development."

Pate de foie gras: "Admit it, you always knew there was an upside to torture."