While some say leave well enough alone those who choose to play in the fairyland called Hollywood, others are pretty disturbed over the latest freak show known as Tom Cruise. From acrobatics on Oprah to medical advice for Brooke Shields to grabbing Katie Holmes as his new squeeze, Cruise has got everybody talking. And some of that talk comes in the form of a T-shirt campaign called "Free Katie." McLaughlin Cameron Designs has created a T-shirt designed to help raise awareness of the seemingly difficult plight in which innocent little Katie has found herself. Mid-life crisis? Movie promo? True love? Who really cares?
Once the primary method of achieving higher search engine results placement, hidden links - links which appear as text on a webpage but are invisible because they are the same color as the background - are now used, mostly, by disreputable marketers and are frowned upon by search engines who will punish sites using these links by pushing the site further down the results page. Surprisingly, hidden links have been found on the Financial Times website. Ken McGaffin, while doing some research for a client, found 138 hidden links on the Financial Time website within the first hour of his search.
McGaffin explains why marketers would engage in these shady practices, writing on his blog, "Google will regard a site such as FT.com as a trusted authority and any site that FT.com links to will get a significant boost to its ranking. The site will move towards the top of search engine results, bringing more visitors and more lucrative business as a result."
We don't pretend to know a lot about search engine marketing but we don't have to know much to realize it's practices such as this that undermine the medium, affect consumer trust and make life that much more challenging for marketers who choose to play by the rules. We think it's a shame The Financial Times - and other sites - engage in this clandestine method of money making.
Sometimes regular sized billboards don't do the trick and big ass billboards are required. This big ass billboard, captured by flickr user iconoblast, makes perfect sense for H & M's $9.90 bikini separates. Whether you have a big ass or not, H & M's got a bottom that will fit. And they want to make sure everyone within three miles of this billboard knows it.
Watch Ass, Win Undewear
Somehow tying thongs to increased television viewership (oh, wait, that's brilliant!), Oxygen Network has launched The Great American Underwear Giveaway which consists of a video, called "Peeping Thongs," featuring a bunch of girls walking around in public wearing thongs which ride well above the waistline of their purposely low slung pants all to grab the attention of stunned onlookers. Supposedly, there's a male version coming called, Girls Behaving Badly: Revenge of the Boys. Please, God, use your powers to spare the world from images of men prancing around the streets in thongs causing old ladies to have hearts attacks and the rest of us to publicly puke our guts out. We know men didn't wear much back in the day but for the love of Brad Pitt in a Troy skirt, have mercy on our poor souls.
Not For Kids
P & G has ended its Secret Sparkle Body Spray ad campaign targeting children under 12 following an edict from the Children's Advertising Review Unit which claimed P & G disregarded the organization's guidelines on advertising to children. CARU guidelines state "products inappropriate for children should not be advertised to children. This is especially true for products labeled 'Keep out of reach of children.'" Stretching the boundaries of common sense, P $ G created a product for kids, labeled it "Keep out of reach of children" and then advertised it to kids. Hello? Is there a brain in the house?
Oh. for the love of Clio, The Donny is finally back. Or, at least his agency has caught a break and has, perhaps, put plug in the wound through which clients where hemorrhaging. Last week, Deutsch won a branding assignment from Babies "R" Us after a two month review. While this is tremendous news for the agency, we have to wonder what it was like, during the review, for both Deutsch and Babies "R" Us management to see repeated stories about Deutsch's latest account loss. It had to hurt. We love a comeback. Now, can we just file away that picture of Donny in a Speedo forever and quit making fun of the guy. I mean what advertising news website would ever stoop to such trashy, tabloid-like behavior?
