If you felt particularly jipped after falling for Apple's April Fools joke, rest assured you weren't a total ass and space is indeed the final frontier for marketing.
That's right: for $5000 a pop, which is less than some TV and radio ad spots, convey your logo 20 miles up. We don't know how demographically sound that would be but at the very least a handful of geeky people will think you are cool.
This service comes courtesy of JP Aerospace, whose dream it is to give everybody a taste of space travel.
For their snazzy new Halo videoconferencing tool, DreamWorks and HP commission Goodby, Silverstein and Partners (who, by the way, just won US Agency of the Year courtesy of Adweek) to help make magic.
To illustrate the medium's visual benefits and the idea that people can work together without actually being together, the agency called on The Ebeling Group to create a series of vignettes meant to be played on HDTV split-screens at events and such.
The spots, directed and conceptualized by Tennant, are esoteric but pretty, which is what they were shooting for so we suppose they succeed. They also get that complex "work together without being together" idea out nicely. We haven't added the Halo videoconferencing system to our nighttime prayers, though.
One of the spots can be seen on The Ebeling Group's website. They're fun both to watch and listen to, and we can only imagine what it must be like trying to watch the ads in entirety when they're playing 20 feet above you on either side of your face. They must blow the mind. At the very least we figure people will stop, stare and do that awkward back-and-forth foot pivot for a second or two. That weird reaction on its own is almost worth putting ads up high and splitting them apart.
For client Vitae, the largest homeless shelter in the EU, McCann Portugal runs a rather unsettling holiday campaign in which people find a hollow-eyed homeless man in their trash bins with the appeal, "Help. So that no one have to come here for food."
Coming from a country in which passing change to the homeless is discouraged, we're hard-pressed to work out the call-to-action here. Do you give them a potted plant? Drive them to Vitae? Bake them a pie?
An ad for the Mitsubishi Endeavor, in which a snowman melts when the hulking SUV drives by, was placed beside an article about whether climate change threatens polar bear habits on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website. This kind of awkward placement always makes us feel a little squeamish.
Larry Futers, Mitsubishi's national marketing director in Canada, defends the Mindblossom-produced ad: "It was the right campaign for us at the time," he explains. Though why a marketer has to practically apologize about the crappy placement of his ad on an affiliate's page is beyond us. Shouldn't CBC be firing an intern right now?
More about the dramatic developments on Radar Online.
To promote their new laser-engineered series of Airmax sneaks, Nike uses laser-pierced metal as a print ad medium. Interesting idea even if the final product looks kind of like cave paintings. At least it lights up. We're in favour of anything, really, that lights up. Series credited to DDB Paris.
C'est So Paris is a marketing effort aimed at making Parisian quirks more charming to the outside world, which Paris is notorious for shunning.
The site gets an A for effort but is occasionally a painful experience. Humour ads like this one feel a bit contrived. But there's a whole section on Parisian attitudes that we think is helpful if you happen to need lessons on how to pout, snarl at tourists and almost effortlessly tell someone to shut up in the most condescending way imaginable. Prizes can be won by users who send in their best imitation of a Parisian.
We're not sure why the long fog of Parisian obsolescence lifted but we suspect it might be because the country's air is a bit clearer now that the no-smoking ban has been passed. Though we suspect if the campaign does succeed Parisians still won't be good sports about the deluge of tourists monkeying their mannerisms and giving them infanticizing head-pats for that adorable self-entitled air.
Russian Orthodox Christmas happened last Sunday. To help Orthodox Russians celebrate, True ran a holiday campaign inviting men to meet Holly, who's apparently three different women. Copyranter notes it's stupid to 1) use non-member nameless bimbettes in a dating site ad, 2) give said fake bimbettes names, and 3) use the same name for multiple bimbettes in an ad series.
We got stuck on point 1 and can't seem to move forward. You mean True's ad models aren't actually members?! Think of all this time we've been sitting around planning what exactly we'd say to Holly when we finally meet her this season. (Considering there are at least three, we just figured it would help improve our odds.)
