Last week in his monologue, late night host Craig Ferguson went on and on and on and, yea, on about youth and advertising and how marketers all got together in the 50's and 60's to "deify" youth, put it up on a pedestal and focus all their advertising on that particular age group.
He goes on to explain how youth became the most important thing, how everyone wants to be young and how stupid that is because, well, the young are inexperience and, therefore, stupid. And how that deification of youth made being young fashionable which, of course, resulted in a bunch of idiots running around doing anything and every thing to be young no matter how old they were.
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Our girl is back. Well, actually she's been back for a while but just this second, her latest commercial for Candie's was released and we really, really like it. Why? It's classic Britney. All pomp and strut.
Of course the full length video is a bit racier but we're talking television here, people. There's only so much bare midriff the television viewing audience can take before someone calls the cause group police.
While everyone's all a Twitter over EA's Act of Lust booth babe stunt, consider this: If the Booth babes were Booth Dudes and the rules were the same, would anyone care?
Of course, encouraging people to "commit acts of lust" and then photograph it in order to get a chance to win "dinner and a sinful night with two hot girls, a limo service, paparazzi and a chest full of booty" isn't going to win any prizes at a church fund raising competition but let's break this one down a bit.
The "booty" referred to in the promotion is not the ass of the "two hot girls." It's a swag bag full of geeky goodness any fanboy would lust over as much as he might lust over a booth babe. The encouraged "act of lust" is most certainly not meant to get people to do anything rude, crude or disrespectful to a woman hired to play the role of booth babe. Anyone who might actually do that is just a loser and in need of castration.
While this promotion can certainly be seen as crossing the ever-moving, hard-to-define line of decency, it's not encouraging rape, prostitution or other unseemly (and illegal) behavior. It's simply using a time-tested - if not tired and lame - marketing strategy to get people to do what a marketer wants.
The "two hot girls" are obviously paid for their participation in this promotion and while we're sure they'd rather spend a night with some hot dude - not to mention their own boyfriends - they knowingly took this job and the money and knew what they'd be getting into.
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Oh this one's near and dear to our hearts. Dumb Dads in Advertising. We love them because, for the most part, they make for amusingly funny ads. We hate them because, for the most part, all they do is mirror the "refrigerator mom" ads of the fifties and sixties. It's like a giant game of tit for tat.
Our fave has always been the Verizon Dumb Dad. The classic, clueless idiot trying to help his daughter like he's never heard of the internet before. MSNBC via AdFreak (which pulled a few of the best ads) has a round up.
Damn! If we had Robinsons Juice in elementary school like the kids in the commercial do, we're quite sure we'd doing something a bit more accomplished and grand than writing an ad blog. OK, it is a pretty successful blog and a lot of people read it. It's got a well known brand name and people like to stop us at conferences and tell us how much they enjoy reading it. People send us stuff. We get to travel a lot and hang with a lot of cool people. And we get to be our own boss.
Yea, yea. So who needs Robinson's Juice Anyway
- If you drink and drive, speed or don't wear your seat belt in Tennessee, you will get nailed.
- And now we have hamster milking from KGB.
- It's like Annette Funicello. Except with lots of trash.
- MIT Advertising Lab wonders if the verification system CAPTCHA couldn't be used as an ad medium by showing paid brand names instead of made up words. Hey, why not?
Remember the Where the Hell is Matt guy, Matt Harding? He was the guy that made goofy videos of himself doing a goofy dance in different places all over the world. The videos became a viral sensation and Stride gum eventually sponsored his videos.
The videos were heavily in the "feel good" category and simply by dancing with people in different countries all over the world, he made it seem like all the worlds problems could easily be erased if we all just danced with Matt.
Well, Matt's out with a book now that focuses on his travels, his videos, who he met on his travels and how the whole thing started.
Well this is pretty lame. And strange. And stupid. And weird. And oh...kind of funny too...in that retro disco, we're-trying-really-hard-to-be-lame-on-purpose sort of way. Yea, it's an ad for coffee. That alone makes it worthy of consideration.
The commercial, for Weaver's Coffee, is based on an old television show called Dance Party which, similar the American Bandstand, featured people dressed in silly 60's and 70's garb (well, it wasn't silly at the time since it was the 60's and 70's) dancing to silly (well, they weren't silly at the time because, well, they were new) disco songs.
The commercial's theme? It's like the Butabe brothers from Night at the Roxbury trying to get into a club. But somehow this guy makes it in because, well, he has really cool coffee. Or whatever.
Weaver's Coffee Founder John Weaver was even on the show. The commercial is running locally on KOFY.
We love this Cramer-Krasselt-created airtran campaign AdFreak points to. Probably because we're old enough to remember the pre-Tom Cruise Mission Impossible television series which starred Peter Graves who, more recently, also starred in the Airplane! movies as a pedophilic pilot.
He's dead-pan perfect in a series of commercials touting the airline's gogo internet service which is now on all planes. Awesome. Too bad it's not free.
But the campiagn is funny. Check it out here.
As Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wrote in a letter (below in full as well) to employees following the announcement Amazon would (from the press release) "acquire all of the outstanding shares and assume all outstanding options and warrants of Zappos in exchange for approximately 10 million shares of Amazon common stock, equal to approximately $807 million based on the average closing price for the 45 trading days ending July 17, 2009," it's really about the two companies sitting together in a tree like two lovebirds starting a relationship.
Yes, Amazon will now own the Las Vegas-based apparel and footwear retailer.
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