A Hooters billboard, for a West Covina, CA Hooters, placed aside the San Bernadino Freeway in Baldwin Park has caused complaints from employees of Kaiser Permanente Baldwin Park Medical Center which is located beneath the billboard. Oddly, the complaints have nothing to do with images of scantily clad Hooters waitress, of which there are none on the board, but with a tagline that reads, "Only a rooster gets a better piece of chicken." Apparently, the Medical Center employees and Councilwoman Marlen Garcia, who brought the complaint to a city council meeting and said the board was "indecent or obscene," think there's something wrong with the natural act of a rooster co-habitating with a chicken. Either that or this is some sort of clandestine attempt to rid the world of scrambled eggs as a breakfast item.
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Joey deVilla, a Technical Community Development Coordinator for back office software company Tucows, Inc., publishes a personal weblog on which he recently recounted an experience he had with moving company Quick Boys, mentioned in the comment section of a post he had made about Toronto movers. One of the commenters to the post, who deVilla knew, shared a bad experience with Quick Boys and recommended others steer clear of the company.
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Premium Network Inc., an online advertising and promotions firm, has announced the introduction of a new 300x250 in-page and pop-up full-motion sound and video ad unit allowing marketers to use standard broadcast commercials online. By converting standard AVI files to 15 second video ad spots, marketing ads can be deployed on individual sites or across the entire network of websites in the Premium Network. In addition, in-page or pop-up ads can have a click-through URL or, in some cases, can open an advertiser’s website in the background.
Currently, Premium Networks is using the ad unit to promote the Bantam Books release of Blind Alley on the Crimescene .
Peeking out from the elegant archway of New York's Lord & Taylor on 425 Fifth Avenue are racy, stylized video images promoting the fashions available within. The juxtaposition between the elegance of the building's architecture and the giant cleavage peering outward caused our famed fashionista Bucky Turco, riding through Fifth Avenue traffic, to stop and shoot a couple pictures for us.
The Next Wave points to a story about Vienna's Leopold Museum, which, in a move very unlike most staid art museums, promoted it's "The Naked Truth" art exhibit by offering free entry to anyone wearing just a swimsuit or no clothes at all. Many people took the museum up on its offer including 52-year-old Bettina Huth who visited the museum topless.
Nudity being just an excuse to create a media circus, Huth didn't understand what all the fuss was about saying, "I go into the steam bath every week, so I'm used to being naked."
The Leopold Museum's Director Peter Weinhaeupl said the goal was to offer people a means to beat the sweltering heat and to create a mini-scandal the way the exhibited works of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and others did a century ago.
OK, do guys really need to have a massive pair of breasts right in front of their eyes when all that's being attempted is to remain relaxed in order to calmly relieve the previous few hours of liquid intake?
Obviously not a commercial running in the hyper-PC U.S., this spot promoting a Marriott All You Can Eat Buffet makes no apologizes for fat people being difficult to kidnap.
In a hilarious video that encompasses both the possibilities and the pointless stupidity of podcasts, The New York Times columnist, David Pogue, explains what a podcast is, where they can be found, how to listen to them and how to create one. That's the possibility part. Pointing out the pointlessness of podcasting, Pogue lip sychs actual podcasts and pays homage to their creators by donning appropriate attire.
Hoping the proliferation of citizen's media, other wise know as weblogs, phone cams, video cameras and podcasts, coBRANDiT, formerly OBTTV, has launched as an agency where individuals can submit branded content where "commercial content should be about real people in real places." coBRANDiT defines itself as an open-source agency specializing in documentary advertising and branded content. coBRANDiT is paying $50 to what it deems "acceptable submissions" defined as "slice of life. Stylized, silly, serious...it's up to you. Keep it real, and keep it clean."
Confirming the well known fact that there are no more new ideas and that the sincerest form of flattery in advertising is to copy another's work, Starbucks is the second company, after Netscape, to copy the office cubicle microsite thing, apparently originated by Hostway in April. Now, for those who like to snoop, yes, Starbuck's version of the office cubicle site, called DoubleShot, resides on a site that was registered way back in 1998 but an informant tell us the cubicle creative was recently launched. No doubt, Adrants readers will correct any errors in this assumption.
The site itself has all the usual stuff from a lame video to a picture of parents that say "hello" to a gadget sweepstakes to voice mail messages to a ceiling darts to a number you can call to reach "Hank" who, of course, isn't answering. It's all been done before. Done. Done. Done. But, why is it that we spent so much time on the site engaging in "brand immersion" as those account management types like to call it? maybe the office cubicle is the new :30. Hey, the :30 worked forever. Why not the office cubicle?
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