Ad of the Week: Nuva Ring It took me about ten views of the synchronized swimming Nuva Ring ad to understand its true genius. On the first appearance, a bunch of girls wearing bikinis that say days of the week do a routine in a pool but become increasingly disenchanted with swimming and singing the days of the week. A couple girls leave the pool, ripping the date off of their swimsuit and revealing their midriffs. They walk to a different, smaller pool where other cooler, mellower-looking girls are hanging out and are given a drink by a waiter. That interpretation gets across the basic point: taking birth control pills is no longer a revolution for women and a simple way to have pre-marital sex. It has become a bore, and is so totally unoriginal, not to mention restrictive. The Nuva Ring is where the party is at. But the semiology of the ad goes deeper than that. The pool is actually meant to resemble a pack of birth control pills, and each swimmer is literally in her place that month, dates written and all. (It also kind of looks like an iris.) When each day/girl of the pack leaves, she walks into a small, simple pool that is supposed to resemble the Nuva Ring itself. Kind of creepy, considering the pills crawl into the ring, which is a more, um, interior type of device. But you gotta commend them for interpreting the change so literally, and thinking of synchronized swimming of all things.