Poking fun at TiVo and shopping mags and advocating content that is just ads within ads within ads as well as calling the political process and most other "content" a waste of time and a hinderence to getting rich, is this snarky take on where advertising is headed:
"It�s a shopping lad mag. Seventeen for grown men, if you can still call them that. It�s ads surrounded by ads, with ads placed in the ads. It�s fucking beautiful. I�ll give you an example of content. They have this feature in there that�s called, �Honey, does this make me look gay?� Now, a reasonable person would deduce that, if you made it to page 72 of Cargo, that question is already moot. But, fortunately, people aren�t reasonable. So you get this great thing where it�s a whole book full of ads that the guy flips through, only to come to the �content,� which is basically, �Buy this or you�re a fucking queer.� It doesn�t get much better than that. That�s where tv is going. Hell, that�s where politics are going. Buy or you�re queer. Buy or you�re queer.
Thanks to Adrants reader Brian Diedrick for pointing this out.
From January through February, Honda, Warner Brothers, AT&T Pepsi and Vonage ran full length television style commercial on such web sites as about.com. ESPN.com and others. A follow up survey of 1,700 Internet users found only 28 percent deemed these commercials annoying, far less than was originally expected and less that the 38 percent who find actual television commercials annoying.
Carat Interactive Online Campaign Manager Judy Gern who managed the Vonage campaign said, "I was astounded by the results. There's absolutely no question we'll be doing this again."
Therein lies the problem. These ad units are new. They are novel. People are curious about them. Tread lightly, marketers, or webmercials will go the way of the dreaded pop up.
Ad agency Zugara has created a new website for Reebok's RBK brand called RBK Sound & Rhythm. On the site, visitors can make their own music mix by sliding the sneakers left or right. Also, there are profile of Reebok wearing basketball stars to check out.
Way back in the seventies, there were these stickers called Wacky Packages that made fun of popular brands in the day such as Bazooka Bubble Gum which was called Gadzooka and Jello which was called Jail-O. In the mid-seventies, every kid had them plastered on their school locker or notebook (that's paper notebook for you young kids reading this). Well, they're back. Will they take off and become as successful as they were in the seventies? Will they become the next greatest viral marketing scheme? In our highly jaded society, it's difficult for anything to succeed before it is labeled a lame attempt at commercialism. Hopefully, they'll last longer than Trucker Hats.
A survey of the Association of National Advertisers released yesterday reveals many advertisers will level fund television budgets next year and shift more money to the Internet, branded entertainment and direct marketing.
Ad agency glueLondon has created a collection of web sites that resemble the many cheesy web ring type sites on the web that take you on a circular journey from one bad site to another. The set of sites incorporates deliberately tacky design, dead links, DIY photo galleries and silly animations. Visitors and commune with other Pot Noodle fanatics, slurp noodles off a geisha (that was fun) , take lessons in Pot Noodle smuggling from Seedy Sanchez, or,if it all becomes a noodle overdose, you can learn how to free yourself from your all-consuming Pot Noodle obsession with a visit to Eldoon Hall, a noodle de-tox center where counselors humorously attempt to talk you down while getting sucked in themselves.
