Never cross a Linux lover. Especially if you're Microsoft touting a new operating system called Vista. Linux lovers eschew Microsoft and many other companies claiming there way of computing life is far better than the rest of the world's which uses Microsoft...oh and Apple too. It seems some Linux lovers don't appreciate Microsoft's recent plastering of the world with its Vista marketing launch and took a blade to one of the campaign's posters cutting the word "Linux" into the board. Vandalism? Consumer Generated Marketing? Geeks on a rampage? You decide.
Apparently, commercials now cause suicide. You've heard us rail against those cause groups for every conceivable issue and ailment before and we're going to do it again. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has asked GM to yank its Deutsch LA-created Robot commercial in which a dejected robot is fired and commits suicide...in a fucking dream! For fuck's sake. When will this idiocy end? When will people realize we're talking about advertising here and not brain surgery? When will people get their head out of their asses and laugh when a piece of humor is placed in front of them? It's a robot...in a commercial. Hello?
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- Copyranter saw Dakota Fanning in Vogue ad for Marc Jacobs and marvels at the intriguing coincidence between her recent movie in which she gets raped and the ad in which she, according to Copyranter, looks like she's about to be raped.
- In preparation for its Year of the Pig, China has banned from the country's state-run CCTV all ads that show pigs.
- Even while mocking conversational marketing, Amanda Chapel offers up five reasons why the public relations industry has no place in the space.
- Despite not winning over critics with its Super Bowl ad, GoDaddy reports a 70 percent revenue increase and 37 percent new customer growth on Monday, the day after the Super Bowl as compared to the same Monday last year. Dismissing critics, Bob Parsons said, "This is not about winning an Oscar - it's about growing business." He's right.
- Penn of Penn & Teller is appearing in a Chinese Viagra ad.
- DTACK tape is lifting faces and saggy breasts in a unique campaign for a boring, commodity product.
- The World Association of Newspapers says the newspaper business is doing just fine and reports circulation of newspapers worldwide has increased 1o percent between 2001 and 2005 to 479 million copies.
Now that we've spent the better part of a week pointlessly bitching about which Super Bowl spot was the best, we might consider giving the honor to an ad that, though intended, never appeared during the game. You might remember the guy, now revealed to be Rand Fishkin of Seattle, behind MySuperProposal who was attempting to raise money to buy a Super Bowl ad in which he had planned to ask his girlfriend, Geraldine DeRuiter, to marry him. Well, he wasn't able to raise the $2.6 million needed to purchase a Super Bowl spot and began talking to advertisers to support his effort as well as to CBS who were considering running the spot.
Unfortunately when half time rolled around CBS called to say the spot would not, in fact, air. Undeterred and with a $3,000 gift from his mother, Fishkin bought a local spot on Seattle's KSTW Tuesday night during Geraldine's favorite show, Veronica Mars.
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Here's a little game. Adrants reader John Brock sent us a link to a story about a product called Brief Safe. It's a way to hide valuable in plain site but deter anyone and everyone from going near them. what is it? It's a pair of underwear with a hidden pocket and...yes...disgusting skid marks on the back. Just hang these babies anywhere and you're guaranteed no one will go near them.
John wonders how a product like this would be marketed so let's have fun. How would you do it? What would you do? Tells us in comments and we'll publish the best answer right here on the front page.
Apparently a sex tape phase is something you go through when you become Paris Hilton's latest elbow buddy. And while we thought Paris was genuinely pissed when her sex tape found its way into public hands, we have trouble believing the same about Kim Kardashian, whose non-career can only improve by proof of coitus with co-star Ray J, who himself is really only famous by association to sister Brandy.
A spokesperson for Kim says she's been caught "completely off-guard" by the forced release, and he vigilantly promises she'll take legal action. After seeing the stylized images and the way she plays up the camera on the badly-named Kim K Superstar, it's easy to imagine she probably prepped for the role in front of her bedroom mirror months in advance. Half-conscious gropes in the dark these ain't.
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This series of ads by JWT, Bogota promotes CityTV at the expense of beauty queens. The text reads "A beauty contest is about beauty, but you've got to draw the line somewhere."
Well, a pretty girl is a dime a dozen, and pageant girls know that to win a beauty contest they have to seem spotless on the inside too. So they come up with the most robotic, naive responses imaginable, which happen to be really awesome fodder for ads. The quote at left is a response to the question, "Where would you like to travel and why?" And one ad about the pope and Mother Theresa just killed us. Adverbox has more.
In a twist on the usual interpretation of "friends with benefits," currently getting play on Boston Legal and because Pontiac says it's on the forefront of social networking (their words, not ours), the company is launching a Leo Burnett Detroit-created Friends With Benefits MySpace site which promises to offer awards to friends of those who buy Pontiac G5s. Pontiac tells us the promotion works as follows: - MySpace users buy a Pontiac G5.
- They register their purchase on the "Friends With Benefits" profile page.
- They start getting cash benefits through their "Friends With Benefits" debit card, all the way up to $1,000.
Umm, buying an entire car just to join a promotion? Oh sure, we can understand the post-purchase, down-the-line benefits but, whoa, that's some price of entry. Getting a free. Oh but hey, if your gonna buy a G5 anyway and get up to $1,000, what's to complain about? Oh but wait. You have to bribe your friends to get a G5 too in order to earn the dough.
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Child TEMA enlists Istanbul-based Alaaddin Adworks to raise awareness among children about its program, a smaller division of TEMA, The Turkish Foundation for Combating Soil Erosion for Reforestation and the Protection of Natural Habitats. (We can't believe all those words managed to fit in that little acronym.) The result is a series of posters made of playdoh, which will appear in primary schools and magazines so young planeteers in the make know where to pledge their allegiance.
The copy on this ad reads, "If there is no soil there is no tree. If there is no tree there is no life. If there is no life there is no game. Soil is life. Come and join to Child TEMA and let life and game continue."
The English could use some work but it's commendable that Turkey gets kids started early on complex global concerns. We're still trying to get our kids to stop littering.
We've seen plenty of domestic violence ads, but this campaign actually makes us cringe. For Women's Aid, agency Grey London paints bruises onto celebrity faces and plasters them far and wide, hoping people would look, recognize, gasp in horror and decide to get comfortable with talking about their own secret bruises.
Granted there are some conversations that started out taboo and are now part of the public tell-all, like routine plastic surgery. But domestic violence is a deeply personal, humiliating affair, almost always entangled in feelings of love, loyalty and fear of stigma. We doubt any one series of visually traumatizing campaigns will help start a casual discourse about it in a public space. And in the States, you actually do need to have a bruise before you can even report anything. Kind of defeats the purpose, right?
AdPunch has more images if you want to take a look.
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