Ford, which is sponsoring the singer's summer tour, has aligned itself with Kelly Clarkson and is using her new song, Go, in a JWT Detroit-created :60. The campaign marks the switch from the company's old tagline. "Built for the road ahead" to the new and relatively meaningless tagline, "Bold moves."
There ought to be a rule for taglines. They ought to actually mean something and not be so bland they can be slapped on any brand interchangeably. "Bold moves"? I mean WTF? Are we talking about Bold detergent moving stains out of a shirt? OK, maybe Ford is makming some bold moves here but this tagline is about as descriptive as Intel's lame switch to "Leap Ahead" which sounds like some descriptor for a kangaroo daylight savings time convention. Seems Ford and JWT caught the boardroom brand blather disease.
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In what would surely be called plagiarism in any other kind of book, an art director is selling his spec book to any aspiring creative to use in getting a job. Midwest creative Craig Ferrence has placed his book up on eBay and is offering it to anyone outside the U.S. Ferrence has posted a bit of the work on the eBay site which might cause anyone who happened to see it and then see it again while interviewing a potential candidate to wonder what's up. So if you're hiring in the near future and didn't happen to see the eBay auction, we have all the work here for you to check if you think you are looking at a suspect book while interviewing someone.
Aside from that and with no need for the work, Ferrence is just out to make a buck or two from some lazy ass creative who can't muster enough creativity to build their own body of work. Of course, the whole thing could just be some weird stunt.
In really important news today, WOMMA's Andy Sernovitz has, reportedly, called BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter a dick. Read all about it here. It seems Sernovitz is miffed by all the publicity BzzAgent gets but Balter says that is no fault of his. It's just lazy journalists who hold BzzAgent up as the only practitioner in the space which, of course, is not true and Balter acknowledges that.. Ever since buzz marketing and word of mouth marketing started and back to the days of Justin Kirby (who seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet) there have been these in explicable tiffs among people in this space. I don't know if it's a young industry trying to define itself or the personalities of the people involved but I do know it's dumb and unproductive.
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Aren't we tired of Brokeback Mountain parodies and rip offs yet? Apparently, the folks at McCann Lisbon aren't and have created this Brokeback Mountain-themed commercial to promote the Lisbon appearance of CowParade, an art tour that features fiberglass cows painted by artist, designers, advertising creatives, students and the public.
Philips/Norelco is marketing its new Bodygroom razor by focusing on what all men want: a bigger dick. Yes, following what the porn industry has known for years, the company is promoting the razor's ability to add an "optical inch" to one's manhood by making the trimming of that area simple, painless and rewarding size-wise. Forget five bladed razors. Gillette's beat that one to death. Now, it's all about removing body hair from hard to reach places and catering to men's obsession with size. Hey, woman want cleavage enhancing bras. Men ought to have a similar weapon at their disposal as well.
Apple has just launched a new ad campaign that, once again, pits the Mac against the PC. This time, it does it with human characters who take on the mythical qualities of the PC versus Mac argument - PCs always crash, macs never do. PCs freeze all the time. PCs get viruses, Macs don't. PCs have terrible software, Macs don't. Macs are all about plug and play, PCs aren't. It's a nice campaign but if you've used both a PC and a Mac, you know full well, this is all bullshit. Each platform has its benefits and its downfalls. The campaign, though, does continue Apple's brand goal of positioning itself as the hipper alternative to the PC's staid, mass image. Apple will always be the cooler choice. It just might not always be the more popular one.
Angered as we are with the blandness of Microsoft advertising and its recent mean-nothing positioning of itself as "people ready" and its knack for portrating fake companies and fake people in its ads, Copyranter decided to edit the ad a bit and bring some reality to the models standing in for real people in the ad. See the full sized ad here.
Improv Everywhere, a New York City group that likes to have "organized fun" recently gathered together eighty people, all dressed like Best Buy employees and entered, at 15 second intervals, the Best Buy on 23rd Street. The purpose of the "mission" and all of the group's missions was simply to create an event that would make for good story telling. As you read the mission here, you'll begin to realize different reactions people had and how a group of harmless people dressed alike can raise unwarranted alarm. What does this have to do with advertising? Not much but it is interesting to see how a big brand can can be so fearful of a bunch of people who happen to be dressed like the brand's employees.
The international Clio Awards has named the 12 participants from around the world who will compete in the 2006 Future Gold: Young Creatives Program, one of the organization's key initiatives in support of the next generation of advertising creatives. Now in its third year, this global competition calls for the dozen Future Gold participants to be paired into six teams and asked to respond within 24 hours to a creative brief, this year coming from the United Nations refugee agency.
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Madeleine Begun Kane has created song parody lyrics for a tune called Webmaster's SEO Lament which should be sung to the tune of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music. If you work in search engine marketing, you'll find this amusing.
The recent Crispin Porter + Bogusky-created Volkwagen Jetta ads in which two Jettas are involved in real accidents filmed in one shot with stunt drivers are reported to have generated positive results. The ads, which began April 10 and carry the tagline "Safe Happens," have, according to Volkswagen as reported in USA Today, increased online dealer quote requests by 58 percent and increased brochure requests though call centers 37 percent and 56 percent through the web. Results happen. Now, maybe, we can all give CP+B a break and realize they do actually create good work. View the ads here and here.
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