Here's Something Novel - a Book of Ad Websites!
Here's a jewel in TASCHEN's collection of pretty pictures to compile and push at a high premium. Advertising Now. Online is a compilation of internet ad efforts - mainly promotional websites - that have come to ornament the 'net in the last handful of years.
Featured campaigns include Burger King's infamous Subservient Chicken and Method's comeclean.com.
The book is also peppered with agency reflections on the internet. Epiphanies include "We've only begun to see the creative potential of the medium" (Jan Leth, Ogilvy, NY) and "The future of internet advertising could be darkened by drunk teenagers, dancing midgets and chimpanzees on skateboards. Which, of course, could make a great commercial, but not necessarily so" (Johan Tesch, Lowe Tesch).
All in all it's a good compendium for ad enthusiasts or industry creatives who can somehow convince themselves this makes a decent business expense.
By and large, though, most promo websites are tedious and short-lived. And even if this book contains most of the ones that defeat that rule, looking at pictures of websites is a weird (read: extremely boring and occasionally confusing) thing to do.
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"By and large, though, most promo websites are tedious and short-lived. And even if this book contains most of the ones that defeat that rule, looking at pictures of websites is a weird (read: extremely boring and occasionally confusing) thing to do."
... that's why the book includes a CD of the original websites and ad units!
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Well, most of my high school textbooks came jam-packed with handy-dandy CDs, but did any of them ever see the inside of anybody's CD drive? Neeeope.
I did end up looking a lot of these concepts up on the 'net and playing with them. But of late I've become preoccupied with how people drive traffic to these destinations in the first place. Sometimes the book explains that, sometimes it doesn't.