A new series of M&M ads asks “What is it about the green ones?”, providing a picture of M&Ms spilled on the floor with the green ones spelling out “SEXY” or “DESIRE”. Companies have responded to urban legends about their products before (Proctor & Gamble’s campaign to dispel rumors about their Satan-worship, for example) and Nabisco, Pizza Hut and Hershey all made recent commercials that ostensibly responded to spontaneously-arising traditions about using Oreos, stuffed-crust pizza and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups respectively. However, M&M/Mars have become the only example I can think of where a consumer myth was deemed to be *beneficial* and then incorporated into advertising. No doubt this is because few consumer myths reflect well on products unless you count myths invented by the companies themselves, but I like to think that they’re also tapping into a vein of nostalgia — not for any particular era, but for everyone’s grade school years, which is when everyone first hears that green M&Ms make you horny. It can’t be long before the Mayo Clinic runs ads saying “Did you know that if your hand is bigger than your face, you might have cancer?”