KickinGreatDeals.com, the culprits responsible for the interactive celeb quiz banners where you can win Paris Hilton's G-string if you guess whose lips are whose, finally give up on that tired idea in favour of a new approach.
These celebrity surgery banners take the usual headline-whores and mash them up, nip/tuck style. We did a whole lot of staring before we even got to the awkwardly-posed question below: "Whos body is this?"
We started a snarky joke about that, then stopped. Hey, adult illiteracy is no laughing matter.
We had high ad hopes for Classmates.com. When they started unrolling the "She married him?!" ads we thought, how cute, they're going to play on cliches. High school is rich with them.
But an otherwise promising direction's lost its luster as Classmates.com failed to give us much more than the same pair of ads and the same cliche, both featuring the bespectacled chick we've come to consider their poster child.
Apparently this darling has stopped bringing in the dosh because Classmates.com is going interactive. Here we find their first effort. In line with the nostalgic yearbook photo theme they bring us ... an image jigsaw.
Unless you're Picasso there are only two moves worth making. If even then you're not clever enough to put the pieces together, just follow the green arrows on each square. Try not to blink; you might miss one.
We seem to have a thing for those fake magazine cover ads and it looks like DDB is using the trick as its last stand for JC Penny before handing over the reigns to Saatch & Saatchi who will give us its "Every Day Matters" love. But, for now, it's still "It's All Inside."
In the March issue of GQ, the cover of another magazine, MANdatory, appears complete with manism headlines such as "There, there. How to tell her what she needs to hear" and "Emotions. Could there be more than two?" It's not terribly creative but it does stand out in a sea of messageless, Dolce & Gabanna-like ads that fill the magazine so we'll give them points for that. It did get us to stop and read it.
Alas, the retailer is due for a squishy Love Marks makeover which, hopefully, doesn't try to make the place more than what it is: a moderately priced department store that sells moderately styled items to moderate people. Everything doesn't need to be high end, ya know.
Pizza Hut has launched a search or a new VP. OK, not really. It's just a marketing stunt to find an Honorary VP of Pizza through a YouTube video promotion in which entrants submit video please as to why they should get the gig. The winner gets $25,000 and free pizza for a year. Hardly proper compensation or a VP level position. Especially from a company that can afford to put Jessica Simpson on th Super Bowl. Anyway, the YouTube submission area is here.
There's only five submissions so far. Aside from one moderately funny joke, there's not much competition if you want to jump in.
This, from FishNChimps, is just funny. Lynx/Axe is at it's silliness again, this time covering an unsuspecting father in law to be with body spray only to result in the oddly uncontrollable attraction from his son's fiance upon re-entering the room.
We love it when people take an old standby and try dabbling in some trend-setting necromancy.
Macaroni and cheese, which only devolved into Easy Mac as time went on, is now Supermac for Chelsea inhabitants in the know. Alongside plain-jane mac and cheese you can get French Onion, Lobster Thermidor or Mykanos-style mac.
And of course you have the option of partaking with or without breadcrumbs and whole-wheat pasta.
What we've got here is a burgeoning industry where a killing can be made transforming old-school foods with natural oils, whole wheat and occasionally seaweed (use your best judgment). Somebody needs to get to work on Top Ramen.
When you're a starving model and you're desperate to appear in a fashion ad, what do you do? You create a fake Gucci ad, get it placed in a newspaper and have the bill sent to Gucci, of course. An unknown man placed a call to Swiss weekly SonntagsZeitung, the paper ran the ad and, yes, sent the $50,000 bill to Gucci. Oops. The paper claims the order "came in too late" to be checked to validity.
The man has previously attempted to dupe once pretending to be Puerto Rican singer Chayanne to book concert venues. Does this man need help or is he the industry's answer to guerrilla marketing? He might want to steer clear of Boston if it's the latter.
This moving spot entitled "Stuck" for the ABC CANADA Literacy Foundation goes out of its way to get serious about adult illiteracy. The piece illustrates a fast-moving world in which a highlighted few seem suspended in time.
Great way to demonstrate that with limited or no reading skills, you can only get so far. Subtlety is indeed king.
Created by ACLC, Toronto.
Man, Ed O'Neill has come a long way since his Married With Children Days. Now he's a spokesman for an AOL effort which urges people to watch videos on AOL video for zero cents a day. Aside from the fact, in order to view the videos, one needs a computer (which costs money) and an Internet connection (which costs money), it all sounds pretty good. Oh, and you have to look at ads too. But those really are free. Nothing like begging for ad impressions. Hmm.
Those Punk Marketing guys really know how to capture attention. In a surprise hijack of our ADHD-afflicted mental states, a bathing Cleo appears for the sultry third installment of the book's twisted "storytime with a stripper" effort. And while arguably more chaste, we like it way better than PETA's striptease state of the union.
"Business people must rise up and take back subtlety," Cleo purrs as she toys with a bar of soap. Interesting point. And we're appalled that we sat through all 4.5 minutes of it. If this is indeed the best way to capture an antsy websurfer's attention, how best to capture a reader's? Does the book come with illustrations?
Catch the first and second vids here.
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