MediaLife takes a look at the continued success of ABC's '8 Simple Rules' and how Katey Sagal and, importantly, the addition of James Garner have played key roles in maintaining the show's popularity. Many thought Sagel could not carry the show and in many ways, partly due to her "Married With Children" success, she has. Garner, whose popularity spans three generations provides and important anchor to the show. While the show is not regularly in the top 20, it continues to do well in its Friday time slot.
If you can't get enough Donald Trump on Thursday nights, now you can have him with you every minute. Stevenson Entertainment has introduced the Donald Trump Talking Doll.
The 12" Donald J. Trump doll features 17 phrases that include advice from Mr. Trump as well as his trademark boardroom dismissals. Among the 17 sayings are, "I should fire myself just for having you around", "This one's easy for me...you're fired", "That was a tough one", "Think big and live large", and "I have no choice but to tell you, you're fired".
It's a great gift for that pompous ass down the hall from you who needs his puffed up image of himself put down. Who better than the man himself to do it. So go ahead. Buy one. Put it in your bosses office.
Better yet, bring it to a meeting, hide it under the conference room table, and let The Donald rip when the meeting becomes dominated by that PowerPoint loving, white board dominating, ass kissing, self important windbag. Sort of like Maria who got the boot last night.
Catering to the likes of screaming girls at a Jojo concert, Nokia has launched a design-a-phone site to promote its new Nokia 3220. On the site, a custom phone back can be created. Called Nokia Express It!, five finalists with the best designs will be selected by the editors of Seventeen and CosmoGIRL based on the impossible to define metrics "originality and creativity." Visitors to the two publication's websites will then vote for the winner who will receive a new Nokia 3220 along with accessories. Everyone scream now.
While we're sure Vodaphone intended this image to convey the shock a woman might feel after having a snowball land on her face, others feel it's an expression of joy following receipt of a certain climactically delivered thrust of Christmas excitement. And who are we to disagree with such a brilliant assessment? In fact, advertising imagery should always be this attention getting.
The ad appeared in several UK papers Tuesday and The Register offered it's suggestion for a better tagline, "Free video messaging phone: because Santa comes just once a year." Nod to Rick for this.
Now that everyone has a camera phone, the next big thing is the video phone. Italian company TIM is promoting VideoMessagio, an application that provides a mobile phone up to one minute of video and sound. There's an ad floating around the web promoting this product with a woman taking a cam video of her hot body for her boyfriend - or at least that's what our non-existent Italian language skills deduced.
If you've spent any time in a chat room and viewed people's profile pics, you begin to wonder why you are the only one without a hot body, 36DD breasts or a foot long hanging between your legs. A new mobile phone company is capitalizing on this virtual persona trend with a new ad for its mobile phone video product which records up to a minute of video with sound. In the ad, a woman, dressed in nothing but white panties and a bra, is seen cooing into her phone recording a cam tease for the lucky recipient. But, as with most chat profiles, things are not always what they seem.
Mercifully killing the ill-advised Mr. Wendy, Wendy's is bringing back founder and long time spokesman Dave Thomas. No, he wasn't found hanging out with Elvis in a nursing home, he really is dead. But, in an equally ill-advised and questionable effort, the chain will feature pictures of Dave Thomas in a new campaign, to debut Friday, touting the burger joint's 35th anniversary. With slumping sales, Wendy's needs all the help it can get. Who knows, maybe dead Dave can help.
As we mentioned before, the attractiveness of Sarah Jessica Parker eludes us but that hasn't stopped the Gap from continuing their relationship wit the Sex and the City star in a holiday campaign debuting today. Parker will appear in three spots along with Josh Duhamel, Mary J. Blige, Will Kemp, J.C.
Chasez, Frankie Rayder, Joy Bryant, Kelis, and Van Hunt. Other featured campaigns in this week's MediaPost Out to Launch column by Amy Corr are the humorous CNN campaign featuring on air personalities joking around, a street campaign for the bank HSBC offers free cab/subway/bus rides to New Yorkers who correctly answer two Big Apple trivia questions, more free (by invite) cab rides from UK-based Interoute who is promoting their communications network with a video in the cab and an in-cab meeting with a company representative, a TV campaign for Hachette Filipacchi's For Me lifestyle magazine launch, a Tweeter campaign which promise to untangle home entertainment, a promotional campaign for BET and yes, a Smokey Bear campaign. The dude is old. He's celebrating his 60th birthday.
The Sporanos star James Gandolphini has lent his likeness to the Kobold watch company to promote its new Soarway Diver SEAL diving watch. Visitors to the promotional site can pre-order the product at a discounted price prior to December 14. Just in time to swim through the sea of dreaded office parties around the corner.
The Viral Awards, a new organizations that celebrates worldwide viral advertising is bringing its award show to New York February 15. The event will be judged by creative executives from around the country. A portion of the event's proceeds will be donated to The Food Bank For New York City, to help provide food to the emergency feeding programs of New York City. The panel will consist of the following: - Kirk Souder, President, Executive Creative Director, Publicis & Hal Riney San Francisco
- Greg Popp, SVP Group Executive Producer, DDB/Chicago
- Fred & Farid, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco
- Brian Beletic, Director, Smuggler
- Roger Camp, Creative Director, Wieden and Kennedy, Portland
- Steve Wax, Executive Producer/Partner, Chelsea Pictures
- Ian Grais, Creative Director, Rethink, Vancouver B.C.
- Teressa Iezzi, Editor, Creativity Magazine
- Matt Vescovo, Founder, www.instructoart.com
- Jim Hanas, Editor, Adcritic
- Philip Detchmendy Executive Producer, Tool of North America
- Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, JibJab
- Jason Gaboriau, Creative Director, Amalgamated, NYC
- Patrick Milling Smith, Executive Producer/Founder, Smuggler
- Paul Lavoie, Chairman, Chief Creative Officer, Taxi
- Mike Monello, Director/Producer, Haxan
- Owen Plotkin, President, the now corporation, NYC
- Jeff Benjamin, Interactive Creative Director, Crispin Porter Bogusky
- Rae Ann Fera, Acting Editor/Associate Editor, Boards Magazine
MediaPost reports on conference held yesterday at the Time Life Building by Fortune and Sappi Fine Paper North America. While Fortune Senior Editor Geoff Colvin kicked off the meeting trying to prove print is still relevant by handing out software for Microsoft's book reader - which came with it's own printed manual, panelists were clear that change is on the way. Pulling out the usual ammunition (TV didn't displace radio), Sandy Alexander Commercial Printing President Roy Grossman said, "Print is not going to be displaced." Well of course it isn't because he would be without a job.
Hachette Publishing President and CEO Jack Kliger says the industry is wasting too much time competing against itself and not enough time promoting print as a medium. And a Starcom study was trotted out which found one third of those in a study, when asked to clip out the defining part of their reading experience, selected ad pages.
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