An Anheuser-Busch Bud Light spot poking fun at last year's wardrobe malfunction, set to air during the Super Bowl, will not be seen after FOX and Anheuser-Busch execs met to discuss the potential backlash. In the spot, a man, backstage at last year's half time show, uses Jackson's dress, hanging over a chair, to get a better grip opening his bottle of Bud Light. This apparently damages the dress. No doubt, this spot will be released on the web anyway for all to see.
Anyone over at DDB Worldwide that wants to get that ball rolling, feel free.
Recently, Dennis Publishing's Maxim launched a site called Endangered Man which highlights some of men's traits and why man must be added to the Endangered Species list. The kitschy, tongue-in-cheek site contains a petition addressed to United States Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and Director of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Steve Williams arguing why man should be added to the list. The site is filled with humorous man references including mans' favorite tools: The Sanity Retention device (satellite dish), The Veal Chunk Transfer Device (fork), The Freestyle Landscaping Device (motorbike), The Rent Money Acquisition Machine (foosball table) and the Cheerleader Viewing Device (arena scoreboard.
The site is quite involving following the style of documentary-like, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom-style references to man's habits and lifestyle and why they should not be left to extinction. Ironically, it's Maxim's circulation that's in greater danger of extinction.
Marketers and those that work for them continue to under estimate the resourcefulness of inquiring minds. Either that or they are just lazy when it comes to covering their tracks. Earlier this month, a strange site called Two Headed Dog launched with images, games and videos, all "two headed dog" themed. We, and others, eventually surmised it was related to MTV2. We were right.
Today, an email pointed us to an Animated Republic message board posting by "Daikun" who picks up on how another poster "Albright" saw a promotion for the Two Headed Dog site on GameSpot's On the Spot. "Daikun" then looked at source code of the promo - just as someone who recently cracked a GM online promotion did - and, whadda ya know, right there in the code was reference to MTV2. We may never know whether this was the result of sloppy project management or whether the code was "leaked" intentionally. Either way, MTV2 is up to something.
Seemingly unable to learn from their mistakes, Pepsi has relaunched its Pepsi iTunes Music Promotion using the same code-under-the-bottle-cap tactic which, early last year, people cracked and have again, this year, cracked. The promotion calls for people to use the winning code found under the bottle caps of 20 oz. and liter sized Pepsi products to redeem songs from Apple's iTunes Music Store.
200 million songs will be given away. Last year, people only bothered to download 5 million due to lack of interest and Pepsi shipping "problems."
Without the promotion having launched yet, websites are already abuzz with tips and tricks to scam the promotion. With a simple tilt of the bottle or a flashlight/tilt/reflect trick, the code under the bottle cap can, apparently, be seen allowing the person to get the redeemable code without having to buy any Pepsi product. Perhaps a good ol' cash register-produced, code-containing coupon would solve the whole mess.
