Entering the same room in which I sat somewhere around 1998 or 1999 when then head of Leo Burnett promised "not on my watch" will Leo Burnett ever go public, I thought, "my how times have changed." The room, however, is exactly the same; dark and lit like a carnival ride.
As ad:tech Chair Drew Ianni took the stage to introduce Wired Magazine Editor in Chief Chris Anderson who was the keynote speaker at ad:tech Chicago, he introduced something else, ad:tech's new working tagline "The Event for Modern Marketing" and gave an overview of ad:tech's expansion into other overseas markets as well as the growth of the online marketing space in general to its current level $20B.
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- If you care, Facebook's heretofore "non-existent" ad rates have been leaked.
- Pepsi's Alan Pottash, the man behind many successful campiagns such as Pepsi Generation, Pepsi Challenge and all those celbu-commercials, died July 27 in LA at the age of 79.
- Toto's Times Square bare asses have been covered - quite creatively - following complaints from Reverend Neil Rhodes of the Times Square Church.
- This is what happens when an ad agency with just ten people and three accounts has too much time on their hands.
With not so subtle environmental and political commentary, this new JWT London-created commercial for Smirnoff - sent to us by Adrants reader Scamp - just blows away any recent liquor ad - or any ad, for that matter - we've seen in a long time. With amazing special effects and bone-chilling Soviet-style music, the sea rebels against man's carelessness and penchant for war mongering by eradicating itself of human byproduct to illustrate Smirnoff's "extraordinary purification" and deliver its "Clearly Smirnoff" tagline.
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When politics and pop culture meet, it's always a little fun to watch the synergy. Adverlab points us to this spot for Louis Vuitton, which slid from the Lolita-esque Scarlett Johanssen series to a celebrity survey that includes Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's first (and last) president.
The New York Times observes that Gorbachev "appears the last comfortable [...] holding on to a door handle, as if the bag contained polonium 210."
Upon examining Gorbachev's expression, and then the bag, we've concluded there's definitely not a bowling ball in it. (Although it may well be perestroika.)
Here's an ad that's generating a bunch of icky reactions. Rekindling It phobias and sparking court jester jokes, apparently Pepsi will add a little (too much) color to lives that would otherwise fade into grayscale.
How in hell did this get past the pitch room? Maybe somebody thought lips in brand-colored trappings would be a natural nod to the distinctive Pepsi logo. And because we know somebody's going to step forward and go, "Hey, guys, obviously it worked because people are talking about it," we're going to roll our eyes in advance and STFU.
This guerilla campaign, in which a cup of coffee is stirred by an invisible hand or clairvoyant effort, drew eyes to the book sitting alongside it. We'll let you guess which it was for.
Beware: the quality of the video is grainy, and the content itself is very long and very boring. And we don't know why it is that people, drawn to the stirring cup, touch the book and not the spoon. Is this psychological? Do they imagine there's some recipe locked deep in the hundreds of pages that will help them create their own vicarious stirring effects?
Because if we were curious enough to stop, we would have reached for the spoon (it would be cool if, for those reasons, the spoon also had a bit of an electrical charge - like, you know, a disembodied wrist-slap).
Thanks disruption for the lead.
We got a promising email dubbed "New web 2.0 art project" and arrived at the Art Initials website, a place where you can buy initials in all the combinations you can think of (about 676) and hope some wealthy sap 20 years down the line will go, "By Gad, I've been looking for that AN all over the place! I'll give you a thousand times what you paid for it."
The pressie soothingly states you are not obliged to buy your own initials, but popular ones do go for more money. Plus there's a nifty feature where, via Wikipedia, the website tells you what your chosen initials mean in contemporary life.
The hope is that by pushing a limited selection of initials, and selling popular ones at a higher rate, a "community" will flourish that outlasts the actual service. We can see that happening. Friendships are made over shared acts of stupidity all the time.
Initial art comes in midnight black, navy blue and Kashmir beige.
Knowing full well we can't imagine anything funner than a conga line or a naked jacuzzi stint with our grandparents, Volkswagen tries to push the point with its Caddy Love campaign, which seats seven fun-loving senior citizens instead of the standard five.
You have DDB, Paris to thank for this.
This ad for the Microsoft Zune (you must be like, Why are they making new commercials for that?), which AdFreak has dubbed the indie Peter Pan tribute, is a pretty but otherwise fairly pointless experience.
Moonlit ET-style silhouettes aside, the ad would probably suit better for Polaroid, considering there's actually an insta-cam featured between the lovebirds. But considering how hard Polaroid's rolling these days, the spot may ring too sappy for the hard-partying camera execs.
Perhaps sick of playing with other people's hands, HP rips a page out of Apple's playbook and tries taking the back door into widespread popularity: by appealing to graphic designers.
Toyrama, created by Arc Worldwide Singapore, is jammed with all the tiresome but stock aspects of an animated world, including theatrical, urban and comical elements, with a Willy Wonka twist: the best animated director to join the Toyrama contest gets to visit Dreamworks.
Don't forget to return your Everlasting Gobstopper on the way out.
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