John Brock sent us this Snopes analysis of the latest Powerade commercial showing Lebron James making four full court, 80 foot slam dunks. While Snopes goes into lengthy detail on how the commercial has been digitally manipulated to make it appear James is actually making those 80 footers, they forget to mention the obvious: in every shot, the ball leaves the frame then comes back making fakery very easy here. Then again, who really care? It's just a stupid Powerade commercial.
John Brock sent us this Snopes analysis of the latest Powerade commercial showing Lebron James making four full court, 80 foot slam dunks. While Snopes goes into lengthy detail on how the commercial has been digitally manipulated to make it appear James is actually making those 80 footers, they forget to mention the obvious: in every shot, the ball leaves the frame then comes back making fakery very easy here. Then again, who really care? It's just a stupid Powerade commercial.
One day after randomly finding XiaXue's weblog upon seeing it linked from Tony Pierce's busblog during one of our routine visits, we read she's now spokesmodel for LocalBrand, a Singapore-based T-shirt maker. Back in December, Wendy was shopping at a store in Singapore that carried LocalBrand t-shirts and bumped into LocalBrand founder Turodrique Fuad. Faud struck up a conversation with Wendy (who wouldn't try to converse with this beauty?) and told her he read weblogs, she said she wrote one and boom, the two struck a deal. Wendy's face is now all over the LocalBrand website along with pictures of her modeling the product. Catch her story here.
While a show would have to be an absolute horror to fail following Desperate Housewives, gen Y ER-like medical show Grey's Anatomy did quite well. It retained 67 percent of Housewives' numbers and delivered 16.2 million viewers. Not bad considering the show's slot it took temporarily, Boston Legal, averages 12.6 million.
Creatively, the show's not bad. The angst-ridden voice over might get tired though as well as the cleanly defined, neatly categorized characters. Starring 80's icon Patrick Dempsey, Sideways' Sandra Oh, hottie Katherine Heigl and intriguingly cute Ellen Pompeo, the show has some promise as long as it doesn't become too self absorbed with itself. Hopefully, as the show grows, the characters will as well. There's potential here but the premiere was no blockbuster.
PVRblog via engadget reports TiVo is testing a program they eluded to earlier where banner-like ads appear on the screen as users fast forward through ads. Making matter worse, the banner ads are so big, the user can't really see when the ads have stopped and the programming has started again. Chock up another for corporate buffoonery here. engadget, being the geek blog it is, offers readers a link to the TiVo tweak that reprograms the buttons on the TiVo remote so the units jumps forward 30 seconds rather than fast forwarding, thereby avoiding both the ads and the new banner unit.
We're all for easy, efficient access to information about marketing and advertising. There's nothing more satisfying than finding a website that contains every single tidbit of relevant news you could every want - except when that site steals the content in full and does not link back to the original source. One Massachusetts based company has just launched such a monster.
Here's how the service is described in their press release, "Massachusetts based advertising agency Mass Reach Interactive has built a free peer to peer (Linux/PHP) database allowing advertising executives to share content and creative with one another. http://www.thebriefcase.org contains content offered by Mediapost, emarketer, ClickZ, Business Wire, iMediaConnection, Ad Rants, Reuters and many more free of charge. You could just go to each site and look for the right article, but it may no longer be available. Often you would have to search 50 sites to find the article you need. We aren’t reinventing the wheel here, just trying to make the life of road warriors a bit easier."
So there you have it. Because "the Briefcase" is a repository for articles cut and pasted from other sources without proper attribution, Mass Reach Interactive is stealing not just content but advertising revenue from all the news sources it contains on its site. Oh, they do list sources but the links, while the site says they must link to the original source, just circle back to the full text of the article on "the Briefcase" site. In fact, here isn't even a field to enter a source on the submission page. We found no links on the site's articles to original sources.
We're no lawyer but this sure sounds like the blatant breaking of some kind of copyright law. Or at least a high degree of idiotic stupidity.
UPDATE: It appears Mass Reach Interactive has read this article. They've made some changes to the site. The link to the original article is now included and, rather than pasting the entire article onto the site, they've wisely included an excerpt, albeit, a long one, of the original atticle.
Capitalizing on the arrival of Daylight Saving Time, Old Navy has launched Flip Ahead, a site full of all things Spring. From the history of Daylight Savings Time to flip flop wearing dos and don'ts to a make-your-own flip flop music mixer to a contest to win 365 pairs of flip flops, the site engages and does so in that necessary hippy dippy style so important to today's youth marketers. Huh? Did we just write that? Well, anyway, check it out. It'll subtract ten minutes from your day.
Sometimes a commercial is so creative, so inventive, so amusing, it has to be viewed over and over again not because it's so brilliant but because its brilliance outshines the product being promoted. That's the case with this new commercial by TBWA/Chiat/Day for Skittles Smoothie Mix. We viewed it and were enthralled by the two talking sheep with human heads but we're not sure what the spot was promoting. Hold on a sec - we'll watch it again for you and let you know. OK, now we get it. Funny. Unusual combinations. Get it? Odd flavors combined to form new Skittles flavors aligned with the odd combination of sheep and human head. OK, we're cool with it now. But Skittles shouldn't worry. We're slow and we're sure everyone else will get it the first time.
Alrighty then, other fascinating spots this week, as featured in Ad Age's TV Spots of the Week include those dang Chipotle commercials on PBS; Unicel, who, unlike all other cell carriers who think cell phone-based video, mp3 capability, camera and IM are the only things cell phones are good for, illustrates a far more practical, utilitarian use; a spot for Sony's new PSP shot in typical music video style; an absolutely hilarious Japanese spot promoting Ajinomoto Stadium with girls that talk like old men; a spot from Cellular South that has something to do with old land-line phones, an Anheuser-Busch spot that has the Clydsdales, in a very un-post 911 like moment and a spot from Dad's Dog Food with doggie angels and devils.
Like a flesh eating virus, advertising continues to devour every last morsel of media content forgetting that, one day, it will stand alone, left to consume itself like a black hole nearing a food-induced orgasm as its hunger ravenously overtakes its lifeblood of available content. PBS and Chipotle Mexican Grill are speeding that process with PBS' airing of three, very commercial ad units that intertwine the message with the network's content by spoofing it.
The three spots; one which shows a pledge drive MC drowned out by the sound of ringing telephones as operators gorge on burritos, one which shows an Alistaire Cook look-a-like sign language woman signing incorrectly due to her burrito eating and one which shows a newscast interrupted as the newscaster slips out of frame because the cameraman is, you guessed it, eating a burrito, are the surest sign that public television - already on a long downward spiral into commercialism - has taken one monstrously historic jump over the shark.
Like we wrote years ago, it won't be long before a brand paints a homeowner's house for free as long as the brand can paint a gigantic logo on the front of the house. View the spot here. That is, of course, after you view the TV Guide commercial sponsoring the Chipotle commercial. Is that a sick joke, Ad Age?
Agenda Inc. sends us this little piece of bad logo design. Hard to believe but this is the actual logo for the Arlington Pediatric Center, an outpatient medical facility for children. At first look, we were sure it was the the Arlington Pedophile Center. Obviously, no one took a good look at this logo before it was approved.
|
|
