"Hello, Thoroughbred Owners of California? This is Vegas calling. We want our tagline back!"
"Vegas, this is Thoroughbred Owners of California calling. We didn't steal your tagline, we just had fun with it. Come on. Can't you take a joke?"
"Thoroughbred Owners of California, we're casinos. We never joke. Besides, every one knows 'what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.' You can't tell people 'sometimes things don't stay in Vegas.' It's just not right."
"Vegas, what - are you some sort Bermuda Triangle where things enter and never leave?"
"Well, yes, Thoroughbred Owners of California. We do have a lot of dead bodies buried in the desert here but since corporate America bought everything, the body count seems to have dropped. Besides, our only claim to fame now is NBC's Las Vegas and that damn tagline you're fucking with!"
"OK, fine, Vegas. After we let the commercials run a few times so RPA creatives, with help from Tool, can enter them into 2,387 award shows, we'll pull the spots. Fair?"
"Agreed, horse lovers. Otherwise James Caan will be knocking on your door."
- The Junior Committee, a group of young planners at Mediaedge:cia, have convinced a bunch of media outlets including USA Today, Fox News, CNN Money, CBS, New York Magazine, TV Guide, Reader's Digest and others, to donate close to 18 million impressions on behalf of the New York City-based charity, Safe Space.
- MLB and XM Radio make phone calls.
- Atlanta-based agency Fletcher Martin says Our Industry is Broken and offers up a quiz to test whether you realize it or not.
- Nokia's got a fun game of memory to play while waiting for the bus in London.
Cynopsis reports, "ABC Family will launch a new social networking site on May 14 to support its newest original series Greek, a dramedy about fraternity/sorority life. Virtualrush.com is a Facebook-like platform centered around the fictional Cyprus-Rhodes University Greek system, allowing users to create personal profiles, upload content, and virtually "rush" a fraternity or sorority of the character they most resemble on the show."
- The One Club has launched One Show TV, a "showcase that offers the public the unique opportunity to vote for their favorite television advertising of the year."
On April 25th, the second day of the ad:tech Conference in San Francisco at 9:00 AM, demonstrators from the No More Landing Pages revolution will be gathered in front of the Moscone Center to protest the senseless creation of generic, dead-end landing pages. We are so down with that!
- Oh, if only gasoline fumes smelled as nice as these candy-coated BP ads look. Meet the trippy A Little Better campaign, the result of possibly too much inhalation.
- MySpace doesn't work for everybody's agenda, and apparently the people you're trying to reach may judge your business by your personal social network. Who'd've guessed. Well, life on MySpace (if you can call it that) is still going swimmingly if you're Obama.
- A Bucharest-based Sicilian started a website service called Babalucio. Sound fishy? Wait until you find out what it's for. We hate to be spoilers but we can't help it: they sell alibis.
- Germany's Getty Images brings us to where ideas go to die. We're not sure what the idea cemetery is selling, but the dedicated website has a handy function for picking grave markers, selecting an idea to bury (photo upload included! YES) and then e-mailing it out and about.
We thought of shooting some over to an agency or two but it's too close to ad:tech to do that safely.
Where tech toys are concerned, it's generally granted that thinner is better. Consider the flat screen and the Razr. Bowing to this convention, this print ad demonstrates the Olympus Mju 700 is so slim you can't even see it in profile.
Now would be a good time to toss in a Nicole Ritchie joke but we don't feel sufficiently motivated. We'd hate to belittle the seriousness of appliance anorexia.
Tourism campaigns are all over the map. While W. Virginia is busy hustling humans out, New Mexico's literally ushering aliens in. This is part of New Mexico, Earth, a campaign meant to position the state as the best place in the universe. Guess that's better than trying to get by on a winning personality.
The spot brings Geico's caveman to mind. Both efforts take characters from outside our range of realism and bestow upon them a swingy white-collar vibe, coupled with a good healthy dose of middle class ennui.
One alien even seems to be verging on a caveman-esque nervous breakdown. Hey, great spin-off opportunity.
We thought the Karl Rove ordeal was just a freak incident but apparently menacing music is part of an orchestrated campaign by the Republican party to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Hey, if our ship was sinking we'd probably sing too.
We can't believe we're saying this, but we wish they'd stuck with rap and not dived into the Beach Boys, which is what John McCain did last Wednesday Really, John McCain. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran? That's not how the song goes.
MoveOn.org, torchbearers of the don't-fuck-with-Iran movement, is naturally a bit upset and raising money to air an anti-McCain campaign ad. Seems like everybody's in a righteous rage these days.
Ad-love is fickle. Shortly after dropping the slanderous Imus, advertisers decide they want him back.
That is, with the exception of Nike, which happens to be a major sponsor of the Rutgers' men and women's basketball teams. Duncans has an exclusive interview with the talking heads that matter, but essentially what happened is Nike released a print ad thanking Imus for reminding us we've still go a long way to go before ignorance is dead.
Typically the tastemakers for victory, postivisim, etc., Nike demonstrates they do even righteous rage better than most. Nice.
Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, put this bad-boy together.
AdPunch points us to this campaign launched a couple years ago for Centreforce by agency Better World Advertising. It ran in San Francisco and Oakland.
Seeking to humanize inmates and fellow prison alum, ads feature friends and family members who really want their dads/sisters/husbands back and are asking for community support as they reintegrate.
We're sort of reminded of Benetton's We, On Death Row campaign. Boy oh boy did Benetton get hell for that - a possible reason why they devolved from provocation to potato-pushing.
Granted, Death Row inmates deserve all the flak they can get considering they aren't really people.
...or are they?
Scavenging snippets of nostalgia, scribble, arbitrary Flash and profound gibberish, Game, Game, Game and Again Game is a strange visit to what life must be like at the intersection between broadcasting airwaves and media-laced stream-of-thought.
Created by evil genius Jason Nelson of Hermeticon, the sensory digital plaything leverages a player's ability to pick knowledge up quickly and put it together. And while little makes sense, the collective information keeps you moving from level to level and may even spark inexplicable emotional reactions. The format and your feelings are all about as logical as identity construction via media consumption, a strange occupation that may drive whole cities to commercial bulimia.
We showed the game to a few friends who later told us we were psychotic media-tards. But several small children got it right away and laughed out loud in all the appropriate places (there aren't any). We think that means the game is good.
The ending is a sight worth seeing. It might just change your life. Or not. Go play already! (And make sure your sound is up.)
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