The Hispanic Got Milk campaign which has focused on "family, love and milk" and has run for nine years has just received a quirky boot in the ass with the launch of three new spots entitled, Contortionist, Amazon Hair Goddesses and Teeth Town. All three are set to air January 30 and reinforce milk as a kind of "wonder tonic." Created by Long Beach-based Grupo Gallegos and directed by Andy Fogwill, each of the three spots uses humorous exaggeration to illustrate how milk offers various benefits, odd as they may be. The new tagline is, simply, "Drink Milk."
Now here's a way to market a boring product like dog treats. Rather than try to espouse the tastiness of the treat - which is clearly a lie - just couple the product with dog treat launch gun called Snackshotz as you laugh your way to the bank while your dog treat competitors utter a collective, "Huh?", as your sales skyrockets past theirs.
Sort of like explaining the definition of "diffusion" or dissipation" to a kid using the fart metaphor, this image does a very respectable job of explaining the word "juxtapose." Netherlands fashion label G-Star Raw has a billboard with a model offering herself up in front of, apparently, a church. Flickr user MatthijsB was there to properly "juxtapose" the two images.
While we didn't loose our hair, we know just what's going through the minds of this woman and child in these ads.
Stunting the Johnnie Walker walking man campaign is this anti-drinking ad which clearly indicates if you walk and drive with Johnnie more than you should.
With a news European ad, AOL is painting a dark, 1884 1984-ish view of the Internet pointing out all its negative aspects all while positioning itself as the wonderful access point and provider of Internet content it, apparently is. Stupid.
UPDATE: It is perhaps we, that are the stupid ones. Apparently, this spot is paired with a good Internet version and the two together are supposed to generate a good versus bad discussion.
Hoping to help men who seek Russian brides for their apparent adherence to the "promise to obey" wedding vow, English/Russian translation company Russian Gal Translations has launched SmokingHotKova, a site which features obedient Russian dolls called matrioshkas. The work, cheeky as it may be, was created by that Hawaiian/Irish tag team, Hawiirish.
Ever the guy's guide to being a guy, Maxim is unhinging itself once again to the Super Bowl hoards with its Maxim Rock City Super Bowl party. Coors Lite will have the beer. Cadillac will have the cars to drool over. Absolut will get you drunk with The Who's Tommy and Reebok will clothe you with tee's, roller skates and sneakers.
Today, Commercial Alert launched StopDrugAds.org, a site devoted to ending direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising in the United States. Commercial Alert says the purpose of the website is to educate the public about the dangers of prescription drug advertising, and to recruit Americans to voice their opposition to the ads.
The Internet has done many wonderful things but it's also enabled some elaborate, not completely above board marketing efforts such is the insertion of geographically targeted Subway ads into an online game without the knowledge of Valve, the game's creator. Read the convoluted story and the intricate chain of agencies and vendors involved in this campaign which, while Valve wasn't happy about it, was an admirable effort, legal issues aside.
Portland, Boston and New York-based Via has put together a nice Year in Review site that highlights the agency's achievements, the work it did for its clients and the people on the agency that did the work. It's taken the typically boring Case Study section of most agency websites and turned it into a piece of entertainment one would actually enjoy viewing.
As if you didn't already realize, we're certainly no expert on all things Nielsen but we do know when reading a MediaPost article about Nielsen ratings declining after DVR viewership is added to live and Nielsen blather such as this is uttered, "With time shifted data, there have been occurrences when demographic projections (in units) for 'live plus same day' are lower than for 'live' projections (units). This difference can be attributed to the imputed VCR record activity which is calculated from household tuning activity that includes VCR record and household tuning that excludes VCR record. The VCR adjustment factor is applied to each building block demographic at the quarter-hour level for both programs and time periods," and we feel like a first grader listening to a college physics lecture, something is very wrong.
Does anyone else feel like Nielsen is going to implode upon itself finally giving way to more effective and realistic metrics?
BlueLithium, TribalFusion, Casale, Tacoda, Claria. To those outside the ad industry, and to some within, these names would lead one to believe we're talking about some new form of drug therapy intervention. In actuality, they are the names of ad serving companies, those wonderful, if difficult to define, operations that help deliver marketers online ads to websites that make sense for the advertiser. With all the buzz words these companies insist upon using, it's a wonder any of us in the industry have a clue as to the real modus operandi of these companies.
With the help of iMediaCommection's Jim Meskauskus, you need not feel like a clueless buffoon any longer. Jim has queried 14 of these companies with a series of questions geared towards helping us all understand just what these companies do, how big they are, who they target, why they're different from their competitors and what kind of ads they serve. So dig in and become an expert on ad serving. Or, at least become an expert at knowing what these companies want you to know versus what you might really want to know.
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