For a while, it didn't seem as if Limitless would have much going for it. It features Robert De Niro listlessly mumbling his way to another paycheque, a trailer that pinches the song from The Social Network's trailer, and a premise – what if there were a pill that could unlock the full potential of your mind? – let down by the deadening revelation that the intellectual pinnacle of mankind is Bradley Cooper at his most insufferably Bradley Cooperish.
But salvation is at hand, in the form of a genuinely clever advertising campaign on the tube. Look above you next time you're travelling on the underground and, nestled between adverts for horrible-sounding breakfast products and those creepy, passive-aggressive TfL posters insisting you obey the mayor, you might see a billboard advertising a product from the film, the clear pill.
Consisting of a picture of Cooper alongside some impressively straight-faced pharmaceutical talk – "Become the perfect version of you (side-effects will include paralysis, psychosis, amnesia, homicidal blackouts and sudden death)" – with just a link to a website to give the game away, the ads have easily become the best thing about Limitless so far. In fact, it's a fair bet the film industry is currently kicking itself stupid for not coming up with the idea earlier. If only it had, we might have all been exposed to more adverts for movie products ...
Quietus, Children of Men: The tube tends to be overrun with all kinds of hokey pseudo-pharmaceutical ads, so at first glance Quietus – the government-distributed suicide kits from Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men – would fit in perfectly. However, given that the average tube journey is a hellish nightmare of rucksacks and elbows and shrieking children and BO and misery, advertising suicide to such a suggestible audience might be morally disadvantageous.
Rekall, Total Recall: What better way to soothe you through a troubling underground commute than to remember a holiday that didn't even exist? Rekall, the memory-implanting service from Total Recall, would find its ideal market on the tube. What's more, the service has a staggeringly high success rate, with only minimal cases of clients discovering that their entire life was a lie and everyone they love is really out to kill them and they have to go to Mars to blow everything up until someone's face explodes.
Fight Club: Let's imagine that the first rule of Fight Club was actually "advertise our affordable and inclusive membership schemes in a number of high-impact, eyeball-dense locations". Advertising on London Underground would be a no-brainer. Keep the bit about plunging the world into a prolonged state of chaos quiet, big up the clean showers and state-of-the-art Power Plate machines and, bingo, Virgin Active will be running for the hills.
Paulie's Robot, Rocky IV: The film may be 26 years old, but the world still yearns for a product as sophisticated as Paulie's Robot from Rocky IV. It can talk, understand words and even express emotion, and yet it's still content simply to trundle backwards and forwards delivering birthday cakes to old men. In many ways, it's the perfect robot. Ads to contain quotes from Paulie himself, like: "I didn't want no walking trashcan!" and "It's creepy! It talks, that thing!"
Mob insurance, various: Basically every advert for insurance you've ever seen, but with the unwritten implication that your kneecaps will be smashed into pieces if you don't maintain payments. Hopefully this campaign can eventually be rolled out to television, because if there's one thing modern audiences want to see, it's Joe Pesci in a fatsuit singing the Go Compare jingle.
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