Every once in a while as you finish shopping, pass through the check out area and glance at your receipt for accuracy, you'll find an error in your favor. The situation then becomes one of moral contemplation. Do you turn around and point out the error or do you just call it luck and run? IKEA's Winter Sale seems to be causing a lot of that contemplation as indicated in it's new commercial created by ZIG and produced by Reginald Pike.
UPDATE: Seer of all things commercial, Adland notes IKEA is rehashing old ideas from Volkswagen and Toyota.
AquaCell Media has expanded its water cooler advertising program beyond retail stores to hair salons and law offices. AquaCell provides free water cooler to establishments and earns revenue from the ads it places on the water coolers. Currently, the hair salons are carrying ads for the new CBS comedy "Courting Alex," while Esquire Deposition Service, a Hobart West company, will be advertising on the coolers installed in law offices.
To appeal to men, many soft drink makers have dropped the word "diet" from the name of their products or introduced newly named products. In Coke's case, there's Coke Zero. A clandestine element of the campaign urging men to consume Coke Zero is a weblog, with no mention of Coke's involvement (Note: apparently in reaction to negativity about this effort, the page is now clearly branded with a Coke Zero bottle), named The Zero Movement on which a guy rants about why life is so full of stuff to do and how it would be so much nicer if there was, well, zero to do. It's written in typical character blog prose, devoid of personality and full of whiny banter which comes off like it's a product of a creative brief. There's even fake, supportive comments to go along with it.
While the blog's archives indicate the site's been up since June, 2005, Whois information tells a very different story. Not only does the information reveal the site is a product of Coke, it clearly states the domain for the site was registered November 21, 2005, a full five months after the site, according to its archives, launched. On top of this, blog monitoring service BlogPulse has little to no information on the blog. Had The Zero Movement blog been pumping out posts since June 2005, BlogPulse would have had a sizeable profile for the site. Blog search engine Technorati, aside from some recent referrals, doesn't have much either. In creating The Zero Movement, Coke has lied, misled and misrepresented. Some would call this reprehensible and irresponsible. We'll just call it stupid.
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Perhaps unable to afford overpriced super models or, as the company chooses to explain it, handbag maker SAK along artist Sloane Tanen will borrow from Tannen's work and use chicks (the bird kind, you lech!) in its upcoming ad campaign. Beginning in March, ads will appear in Lucky, InStyle, Marie Claire, Glamour and Teen Vogue.
Jason Kottke, New York blogger extraordinaire, purchased a new Apple Powerbook three weeks ago and,according to Kottke, three weeks too soon. When he watched Steve Jobs reveal the new MacBook at CES MacWorld last week, tears rolled down his eyes, onto the keyboard of his Powerbook as he wrote Apple a disheartening letter wondering, humorously, if his Powerbook, victim of his grief, was covered under warranty.
For brands looking to extend their awareness to the ad-averse generation, Adland points us to user bars, graphic images which people can add to their forum signature or other online presence. User bars, which have been around for some time and are available all over the place, and are grouped into categories such as hobbies, cars, games, TV, movies, sports and, yes, brands. Adidas, Coke, Converse, Corona, Nokia, Nike, Snickers, Sony, Playboy, Pepsi, Reebok, and yes, cigarette makes such as lucky Strike and Marlboro since its about the last place they can advertise. Many users create their own user bars along with those that have been created by forum owners. User bars are a great way to reinforce a brand to those who are forum addicted and advertising averse.
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