- We're suckers for these hip hoppy Reebok sites. There sems to be a new one every month. Which isn't bad. It keeps us busy and it must keep Zugara busy too.
- Pretty sure we've seen this stunt before but it's always fun to witness someone hand their life over to the whims of the Internet.
- One dude doesn't like DDB placing Excedrin aspirin samples on his coffee cup in the AM. We don't mind since the only reason we go buy coffee is to jump start us out of our drunken stupor long enough to bitch about advertising before we return to our drunken stupor.
- If you like weird old vintage ads, there's a collection of them here for you.
Hoping to infuse the industry's less than stellar creativity while adding to the wackiness of it all, Ihaveanidea commissioned an actual witch to come up with a "creativity potion" the will "enhance the creative abilities of advertising professionals around the world." OK, then. Anyone feel the need for a swig?
The tobacco industry was dealt a big blow yesterday in a 1,742 page document by a federal court judge who said tobacco companies have engaged in racketeering and has banned the sale of light and ultralight cigarettes as reported in Advertising Age. Among the edicts in the judgement"
-the use of the terms "low tar," "light," "ultra light," "mild" and "natural" are banned;
-for two years, big tobacco is required to buy full-page corrective advertising monthly in the Sunday editions of more than two dozen major newspapers with the schedule alternated so the ads appear at least weekly;
-major tobacco makers are ordered to run 15-second corrective TV spots once a week during prime time for a year;
-packaging and in-store signs must carry new corrective advertising.
If we ran a tobacco company today, we'd be pretty close to saying, "Fuck it. This sucks. Let's go sell paper clips. That sounds like less of a hassle."
Perhaps thinking he'd suddenly stepped out of a time machine when he saw this Ryanair ad in today's Daily Telegraph, FishNChimps notes this ad's twisted ue of terrorism to promote air flight.
As a follow up to the testicular cancer-focused Notice Your Nuts, the humorously-named London agency Poke London has created another fun little time-waster called Cock-A-Doodle. As the name implies, it does have to to with cocks. Short ones, fat ones, long ones, soft ones, hard ones, hairy ones and one's you can create all by yourself. And yes, it all somehow has do do with helping to end male cancer.
OK. Think Mentos. Think Doublemint Twins. Think Mr. Charmin. OK. Got it? In the right mood? Now you're ready to view this new cheese-fest campaign from Duval Guillaume celebrating the return of Bazooka Bubble Gum. It comes complete with TV commercials (which you can see on the website), a music video by Brooklyn-based music group Tha Heights, a website, online, events and viral marketing. The campaign centers on the song, originally called "Choo'n Gum" recored by Teresa Brewster in the fifties, which has, for years, been popular with summer camp girls who changed the lyrics to "Bazooka-Bazooka Bubblegum." Since we never went to a girls summer camp - other than to sneak in once to visit that cute girl we wished we'd had the nerve to ask out when camp was over - we've never heard the original song and we have no idea how cool or uncool it was and, well, is. Any camper girls out there? Let us know.
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Our long time buddy Tony Pierce, now writing over at the LAist, has caught yet another studio in yet another fake quote promotional stunt. This time, it's for the movie Accepted and the critic in question is Paul Fischer. Who? Exactly. These positive quote manufacturers do their thing to hype horrible movies because no respectable film critic would bother touching these movies. You can check out Tony's stop motion TiVo analysis of the whole thing here.
There's nothing more powerful that a Firefox lover. OK, maybe an Apple lover but they're both freaks anyway. Ariel tells us a bunch of Firefox lovers in Oregon went out an created a crop circle in the shape of the Firefox logo. A team of 12 people did it in 24 ours and it's 220 feet in diameter. If you want all the nitty gritty details on how they accomplished the task, it's all here ad-nauseam.
As we've done semi-hypocritically several times before, we've both celebrated and called into question the use of sexual imagery in advertising but we've always done it from our perspective: a guy's perspective. One the one hand, we'd love to see every ad feature a sexy woman. On the other, it becomes numbing, research says it doesn't work and we know it's less than kind to the portrayal of women. None of that matters. Well, it does but guys aren't the only ones viewing advertising and our opinion is only one half of the story. For true insight on how sexually laced advertising, much of it using racy female imagery to target females, affects the other half, women, give this Business Week article a read. It's written by those who are at the center of this issue: teens and young woman. It's their take on this that's more insightful than the drooling's of male ad slut.
If you happen to work as a grocery or retail store clerk you might find yourself checking into a hospital for dizziness or a mental institution for insanity all caused by being forced to revolving ads on the conveyor belt in front of you. In what is certainly one of the more blatantly disgusting forms of ad creep, EnVision Marketing Group, which patented the idea, is rolling out ads on the conveyor belts of 52 Cincinnati-based Kroger grocery stores.
Like a kid gleefully plastering every square inch of his bedroom wall with posters of Kelli Garner, EnVision CEO Frank Cox gushed, "Conveyor belts have never been on anybody's radar screen for marketing. But a store with eight to 10 checkout lanes, well, you're talking about 100 square feet of wasted ad real estate." Indeed. But what about all that food covering up the ads, Mr. Cox? Perhaps Cox should start calling hospitals to place ads on the ceilings of patient's room. Now there's a captive audience.
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