Hmm. We wonder how effective an ad campaign is if you have to read the agencies description of it on their website to figure out what that little blue ball of fur is they placed in a campaign for a cookie seller. JWT in Kuwait (yes, we cover advertising news from all over the world) created a print campaign for their client Choowy Goowy, a cookie retailer that delivers cookies in jars to homes and offices.
We suppose we can't complain too much. If they used the actual Cookie Monster, they'd have to get into all that nasty licensing and royalty fee crap. Still, a ball of blue fur as a stand in for the Cookie Monster? A stretch to say the least. Oh wait, it's just a piece of his fur that fell off while he was chowing down the cookies. OK. Now we get it. Silly us. And ho long did we ave to stare at the ads to get that? Hopefully, our explanation will spare all of you the embarrassment of idiocy we just went through.
Back in our heady days of diapers, drool and a band known as Jefferson Airplane, Windows Vista was but an inactive brain cell in a small boy named Bill Gates. Today, Windows Vista is all the rage and Jefferson Airplane is now known (has been for a long time) as Jefferson Starship. We have to wonder if back in the good old days of Jefferson Airplane, anyone in the band could have conceived of being an integral component of one of the biggest marketing campaigns of all time. With all those drugs, we highly doubt it but today, what's not to like about a classic (the time, not the style) rock band headlining a concert tour to promote software. A lot but that's beside the point.
The agency with our favorite name, Wexley School for Girls, developed a free lunch concert series featuring Jefferson Airplane, a cosmonaut street team, wild postings, a teaser video and a website filled with galactic goodies all to promote Windows Vista and its partnership with T-Mobile. It's kind of fun. Check it out.
Christina Ricci is hot. Christina Ricci is short denim cut offs is really hot. Christina Ricci in short denim cut offs, a tiny belly shirt and cowgirl boots is flaming hot. Christina Ricci in short denim cut offs, tiny belly shirt, cowgirl boots and chained like some kind of sex-slave by Samuel L. Jackson...now that's more than a guy can take! Can't you see, we're trying to get some work done around here? How can we with all this distraction?
Anyway, she's in a movie, coming out next month, called Black Snake Moan with Samuel L. Jackson. As part of the movie's promotion, there's a send-to-a-friend feature that lets you place your head on either Ricci's or Jackson' head for some silliness. We don't know why anyone would want to put their head over Christina's (although she does have an odd one), but, hey, this is online marketing and we do it because we can.
You can't buy publicity like the kind that comes with an appearance in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue or on the publication's Swimsuit 2007 site. We never thought of the iPod and a piece of clothing but we rather like how model Marisa Miller wears it in this photo. Can you imagine a Zune here instead of an iPod? We thought not.
In a new commercial for the newly designed Cherry Coke, Los Angeles-based 72andSunny invents a new kind of downpour that isn't cats or dogs or frogs or anything else we've seen fall from the sky but cherries. Lots and lots of cherries. OK, most of them are digital cherries but still. We think it's kind of humorous an agency called 72andSunny made a commercial that's all about cloudy skies and rain
Whether this goes anywhere or not is anyone's guess but no one thought the online ad banner would become what it is today either. A new online magazine, Dormant Forces, has launched and will be supported by what it calls an AdFrame designed to elicit "curiosity clicks." The Adframe consists of small, subtle squares with nothing but the advertisers name or tagline. Clicking the square takes the visitor to the advertiser's site. The publisher plans to do a similar thing in the printed version of the magazine. Anyone care to predict the future of this venture?
We're never quite sure whether we like Truth's tongue-in-cheek, sometimes confrontational way of driving its anti-smoking points home, but they generally get our attention. Knowing nobody can fully reject a singing cowboy, and nobody can ever turn away from an exhibitionist with a hole in his neck, Truth brings us the laryngect-o-gram.
Show somebody you love them by sending one over. Friends will be amused. Lovers will be stunned. Family members will give you that sick look and shake their heads. It's a total win-win.
In much the same way they've set out to revolutionize TV, HBO turned a portion of their New York lobby into an uber gift shop of cinematic proportions. With the help of Gensler and Imaginary Forces the aim is not merely for the consumer to buy shit but to immerse the consumer in a magical mystical sitcom universe. Check out the storefront, and a sliver of the Sopranos, Sex and the City and Rome sections.
That stuff's all nice but we'd really like to see a special space for Oz. Come on, HBO. We can have Italian mobsters and neurotic 40-somethings any day. Where's our prison universe?
Any campaign with the tagline "it's always big" generally finds us paying a bit more attention to it than others and this new Colle+McVoy-created Minnesota State Lottery television campaign has us very interested. But, not for the sick reasons dancing around in your head right now. No. We like this campaign because it's a game. And it's game, called What's the Difference, that starts on the tube and ends online. In the ads, the viewer is asked to find the six differences between two images in the ad that represent a $20 million jackpot winner and a $200 million winner. Winners of the game are entered into a drawing to win cash and prizes.
With everyone in the industry latching onto the latest and greatest ad babble term of the day, engagement, it's nice to see something real come out of board room blather. We're giving props to Colle+McVoy on this one. See the ads here, here and here.
We reported Auntie Anne's V-day viral blast once already but we just noticed She's So Twisted for the first time and thought, how awesome would it be to hang out with someone who was bent out of shape all the time?
Not very. But this chick seems good-natured enough and we like how her little friend drags her around on a little rollie-board. Having a pretzel friend must be way funner than having a puppy or a ferret. We'd try being pretzels for a day but our drunker companions might eat us.
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