Just Start the F'ing Movie!
Check out this week's Mediapost Out to Launch column by Amy Coor and find out what Regal Entertainment is doing to make your pre-movie experience even more painful than it already is. The company has developed a long form piece of advertainment that will replace the usual pre-movie slide show (a good thing) with a 20 minute show with entertainment from NBC, TBS, Vivendi and Convex as well as made for cinema ads (hopefully a good thing). The show, called "The 2wenty" , features a superhero who's really a projectionist but as superhero can do really cool things with light. (snooze)
Other new campaigns this week include Kmart for Martha Stewart, a new campaign from Shopping.com, a logo-mercial from Talbots and a campaign from Cheerios illustrating how the cereal can help children move from soft to solid food.
What's This Commercial For?
Acknowledging all originals ideas are taken, brands are now turing to other brands to help there own brands. The Pillsbury doughboy is now appearing in Sprint commercials. The Maytag repairman was in a GM commercial last year and the Taco Bell dog has been in Geico ads. Sure, this is temporarily funny but as Leo Burnett's Chief Creative Officer Cheryl Berman asks, "Am I supposed to make a phone call or am I supposed to buy some biscuits?", it's a risky move for brands.
Marketers have been messing brands and their icons for the past ten to fifteen years that trying to figure out what the original brand stands for is not as easy as it once was. This brand dance approach to advertising is just another lame attempt at being creative at the long term expense of a brands worth and meaning to the consumer.
Dribbleglass has put a fine collection of spoof billboards together which really puts the truth back in advertising. View more here.
Give Us A Lick Not A Tick
This Canadian Timex commercial, one of the first to use the horrible new 'Life is Ticking' tagline, is humorous in its own right but falls flat because of the tagline. Just imagine how much better this spot would be if it made a play on the girls taking an ass licking as the reason they keep ticking in the bimbo-like manner in which they do.
