As reported in Ethics Crisis, Tampa Ad Agency Cheap TV Spots is putting its moral and political views into play and has refused to do business with any client in areas that, according to agency spokesman Jeffrey Hilton, "seek to weaken the nation with these ignorant and ultimately counterproductive attitudes." The areas the agency will not serve are South Dakota, Omaha, NE and Black Jack, MO.
The agency feels recent legislation in these areas "cast aside American values." The South Dakota legislature recently approved a bill to prohibit abortions in that state. Nebraska legislators passed laws segregating Omaha schools into black, Hispanic and white districts. Black Jack, Missouri city council members rejected a measure allowing unmarried couples with multiple children to live together, resulting in the possible eviction of such families from their homes.
Everyone's entitled to an opinion. Aside from that, in this business, it's admirable when an agency turns down business for any reason.
While it seems the entire world is caught up in one gigantic World Cup Football frenzy, not everyone is a fan of the sport. In light of that fact, Belgium's Channel Two promises to provide some alternative entertainment and this ad gets that point across very clearly. Duval Guillaume created the campaign.
Coolzor points to a MobuzzTV report that explains all those weird websites on which two guys with green hats promise multiple countries they'll support their football team rather than their own. Of course, something this silly always turns out to be a viral marketing campaign and, in fact this is just that. Heineken built all these sites and then unveiled the whole thing last month in a video in which everyone wore a green hat to a game. Mirroring the strict Olympic-style brand police attendees slipped by security with the hat only to, en mass, remove the hats from their heads and transofrm the thing into a branded Heineken megaphone. Now this is some cool marketing.
Amnesty International is running a powerful outdoor campaign in Switzerland calling attention to the horrific events that occur in our world on a daily basis. With the tagline, "It's not happening here but it's happening now," the posters show images of starvation, brutality, torture, child warfare and other less than pleasant avtivities. Adland has the entire series here.
Last year Young and Rubicam CEO Ann Fudge stepped down as CEO of the agency after a rough patch. While Fudge hasn't completely packed and will retain Chairman-CEO of Y&R Brands, Hamish McClennan has been tapped to step in as CEO of Y&R Advertising. McClennan has a tough job ahead as the agency works to right itself.
New Philadelphia agency Stick and Move converted two MINI Coopers into giant Bumper cars to drive around NYC and Philly to promote the Jersey Shore. The work was done for independent tourism group the Jersey Shore Alliance. The effort is part of a larger Play Therapy campaign,
Gapingvoid's Hugh Macleod worked with South African winery Stormhoek to create a blog-based campaign for the small vintner which involved the creation of a blog and a tasting campaign with wine being sent to other bloggers. The campaign was awarded "The Best Consumer Campaign" by the 2006 "The Drinks Business Awards" at the London Wine and Spirits Fair. The winery bested the big guys including Chivas Regal, Campari and Mateus Rose. It was all done with a $400 piece of blogging software. And, we assume, Macloed got a little green stuff too but it pales in comparison to the millions the competitors spent.
Pokerroom.com has released a couple of videos intended to go viral to promote its services. One illustrates the importance of having a good hand. The other, the sex one (you knew there was going to be at least one of those) speaks to the importance of position. Both are good. The one that talks about having a good hand is the better one though, Yes, we did just say the non-sex one is better than the sex one.
While this outdoor campaign draws attention to HIV, this is one outdoor campaign you probobly don't want to be standing next to lest you enjoy tepid smirks from passers by.
And while we thought we had spies in all places, George Parker, once again, digs a little deeper into his network spies and finds Steve Blamer, who headed FCB for less than a year before it recently merged with Draft, scored a $7 million golden parachute. The deal was made between Blamer and IPG CEO Michael Roth earlier this week. Unsurprisingly, these exit deals occur all the time but it's always a bit annoying to see this level of payout when the money could, oh, fund a third world country for an entire year. Of course, our bitching about it just makes us look envious and morally bankrupt because, if we were in Blamer's shoes, we'd probably the $7 million with a giant smile on our face, hire someone else to run Adrants and go travel the world. So, lest we incur the wrath those who like to dish it out, we'll just shut up about the whole thing right now.
Thursday evening as YouTube added new features to its site, replaced the usual homepage contents with just its logo and the phrase, "All your video are belong to us" which, for a while, had people wondering if the site had, indeed, been hacked. As it turned out, that was not the case as a second message appeared a while later saying, "No, we haven't been hacked. Get a sense of humor."
Ever so insightfully intelligent, YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan said of the stunt, "This is what the engineers do, they have fun with our users. They're all cracking up right now. You have to remember who are fan base is. They don't want some dry message." Julie, you are so right. That's why we have the Bloglines plumber too. It'd be nice if more companies did things like this. It shows the humanity behind a corporation and that an entity such as a corporation can, and should be allowed to, have fun just like normal people do. Thanks to Owen for the screen shot.
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