Hmm. The last two times Lee Clow and Alex Bogusky got together, the results was mindless puffery. This third video outing, an AdCritic interview video series, actually contains some meat. Of course there was a bit of puffery from Clow who talked about advertisers being cultural artists versus ad guys and how he decorated the city of LA during the 1984 Olympics for Nike but Bogusky brought it all back to Earth. Bogusky mentioned how he had initially modeled CP+B after Clow's agency attempting to mirror Clow's success but then said "it was a really bad idea." Bogusky correctly posits the future of the ad agency business shouldn't be the result of agencies banding together to create a new, similar model because that would simply put the industry back in the same bad place. The message is be different. Do your own thing. Acknowledge and learn from the successes of other but don't copy them.
So now there's Ratvertising. 1-800-Got Junk, a junk removal service, has hired a bunch of rats to scare the crap out of people and the crap out of people's houses by unleashing the varmints which, of course, make people scream, which, of course, make people pick up the phone and dial 1-800-Got-Junk. Well, sort of. They don't actually release the rats, they just act out this scenario in a couple commercials created by Vancouver-based Rethink, produced by the always excellent Reginald Pike. See the ads here.
On the heels of Chevy Apprentice, Kodak is joining the consumer-created commercial club with Your Kodak Commercial letting people upload five of their favorite pictures which then get turned into a :60. The promotion riffs of the company's commercial which did the whole kid, historical image emotional weepy thing. Now the company wants everyone to make their own weepy commercial. We' d love to tell you what we think of the promotion but after three attempts at uploading images and being presented with "The connection was reset," we figured it wasn't worth it and moved on. Fell free to try yourselves.
UPDATE: It now works for us. Apparently, it was entirely our fault as we tried to load images that were either too large or gifs instead of jpegs (guess we didn't read the instructions too well...our bad). We'd like to commend Kodak's David Kassnoff who emailed us immediately after we published this to help us get it to work. David and Kodak, we apologize for our idiocy. You can view our submission here which we are absolutely positive Kodak will not like:-)
A couple days ago when we offered our insight on the Chevy Apprentice make your own ad site and wrote, "We think there are some voices inside G.M. that understand social media very well and knew this would happen," we felt strongly, we were right. "This" being the collection of anti-GM, anti-SUV ads people created. In today's New York Times, our assessment was proved correct when Chevrolet's Milisa Tezanos was quoted as saying, "We anticipated that there would be critical submissions. You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space." Exactly. This space is very different from old, ordered, one-way traditional media spaces of yesteryear and to expect new spaces to behave the same was is just plain dumb. Rock on GM. Now just makes some cars people want to buy and you'll be all set.
On this week's episode of The Apprentice, Donald Trump, with his usual "listen to me speak because I don't give a sit what you say" style, fired home builder Bryce, pretty much the most level-headed, well-grounded apprentice in the bunch. His team lost a challenge in which they had to develop a jingle for Arby's new like or natural chicken sandwiches. While we're not so sure why that's such a differentiating factor since we've never met an unnatural chicken - except perhaps in a bucket of fried KFC, the Arby's execs wanted to drive home the point their chain is the only place to get natural chicken. I wonder if they's ever heard on Boston Market or any other restaurant that serves chicken. Now, if they mean organic, hormone-free chicken that isn't slammed against a wall to kill it like PETA so loves to show us in its videos, that might be something to hang the "only" strategy on.
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Apparently, we're the only ones that don't like this Freddy Kruger Fonzies commercial. Every ad blog has this thing up. It was sent to us. We watched it. We said "whatever" and thought we'd move onto something more clever. Nope. Apparently Freddy Kruger has died so many times and been "so over" for so many years it's OK for some horror-hipster creative team to whip up this overly predictable slop. Some like to call it foreshadowing. We like to call it a bad concept. We can just hear the copywriter during the concepting meeting. "Dude, the AE says these Fonzie chips are, like, finger licking good. Check this - we should get that Freddy Kruger dude to lick his fingers in the spot an then have him scream and shit. That would rock!" Not.
Before there was Adrants or AdJab or AdPulp or Adverblog or Advertsing for Peanuts of AdFreak or AdHurl or AdPunch or AdScam or Adverbox or American Copywriter or Beyond Madison Avenue or Copyranter or creative Criminal or Jaffe Juice or Madison Avenue Journal or MediaBuyer Planner or MarketingVOX or The Media Drop or MIT Advertising Lab or all the countless other weblogs, there was Adland, the site/weblog that came before any of the rest of us even had the twinkle of a blog in our eyes.
Today is Adland's 10th anniversary. Yes, 10th. We thought four years was commendable but that's nothing compared to Dabitch's achievements over at Adland so congratulations Ask (sorry, I don't know how to do that "oomlot" whatever thingy).Great job. Keep going. You are an inspiration to us all.
Bucky Turco, roving recorder of all things New York, found this marvelous marketing misalignment. If you're going to co-op the New York City-ism "The City That Never Sleeps," in your advertising, you really shouldn't be a mattress company.
This one does not appear to be an April Fool's joke as was, supposedly, the giant iPod in Australia. To celebrate its 100th issue with Hot 100 winner Eva Longoria on its cover, Maxim, along with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, has constructed a 75 X 110 foot replica of the cover and placed it in the Las Vegas Desert near the Primm Valley Casino Resorts, 35 minutes south of Las Vegas near the Nevada/California state line. The stunt is tied to Maxim's 100th issue celebration at the Wyn Las Vegas Resort and Country Club April 7-9
Copyranter pulled an ad out of this week's AdWeek promoting the upcoming ANDY Awards & Show April 25. We had to look at the ad twice before we realized it wasn't for some new ass-licking, fart-fest fetish but a demonstration of the ass kissers of which the ad industry has so many. We like it though. You can't fault the simple truth of it.
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