That new mirror pic ad babe, Ariel, isn't too pleased with Chevrolet's second foray into the whole consumer generated media thing. oh wait. Sorry. She doesn't like being called an ad babe. Besides, that's rude and inconsiderate. WTF were we to think. Our most sincere aplogies, Ariel. Anyway, enough with our Neanderthal mentality. Let's talk about Chevy.
Chevy's new promotion, called reduceuruse, is, we guess, a follow up to its Chevy Tahoe roll-your-own commercial thing which through a dumb-ish commercial featuring a guy with a bucket on his head getting smacked by baseballs launched from a pitching machine, asks people to submit a video showing what they'd do with all the time they'd gain by using E85 fuel. As far as we know, E85 doesn't magically appear in one's gas tanked and still has to be pumped so we're not sure where all this saved time is coming from. Perhaps someone can enlighten us. Perhaps someone can enlighten Chevrolet too. The reduceuruse site doesn't exactly do a great job explaining what it wants. Oh, and the Alternative Fuels link takes you to a page that features the much crapped on Tahoe. Perhaps they could have featured a different vehicle. After all, GM says E85 fuel works in a lot more vehicles than the Tahoe. And what's up with that freakishly odd dancing couple?
Our long time buddy Tony Pierce, now writing over at the LAist, has caught yet another studio in yet another fake quote promotional stunt. This time, it's for the movie Accepted and the critic in question is Paul Fischer. Who? Exactly. These positive quote manufacturers do their thing to hype horrible movies because no respectable film critic would bother touching these movies. You can check out Tony's stop motion TiVo analysis of the whole thing here.
If you happen to work as a grocery or retail store clerk you might find yourself checking into a hospital for dizziness or a mental institution for insanity all caused by being forced to revolving ads on the conveyor belt in front of you. In what is certainly one of the more blatantly disgusting forms of ad creep, EnVision Marketing Group, which patented the idea, is rolling out ads on the conveyor belts of 52 Cincinnati-based Kroger grocery stores.
Like a kid gleefully plastering every square inch of his bedroom wall with posters of Kelli Garner, EnVision CEO Frank Cox gushed, "Conveyor belts have never been on anybody's radar screen for marketing. But a store with eight to 10 checkout lanes, well, you're talking about 100 square feet of wasted ad real estate." Indeed. But what about all that food covering up the ads, Mr. Cox? Perhaps Cox should start calling hospitals to place ads on the ceilings of patient's room. Now there's a captive audience.
Watching these new spots for Starz just reminds us there must be a lot of people in this business with an apparent inferiority complex. That's the only conclusion we can make after seeing so many ads that feature blithering idiots for the sole purpose of making the rest of us feel better/cooler/smarter/hotter. Does is really require an idiot to sell everything? Are we so insecure we need to see dumb people just to make us feel better? Please. Enlighten us. See yet another dufus in action here and here for Starz.
While we don't know for certain if this ad was served using contextual technology, Animal's Bucky Turco informs us of an odd ad placement for the upcoming Oliver Stone movie, World Trade Center. It appeared smack in the middle of a Yahoo story about the thwarting of a major UK aircraft bomb plot. Not to belittle the freakishly horrific nightmare this could have become, we still feel it's our duty to point out contextual fuckery at its finest.
We were going to tell you to check out this Snakes on a Plane trailer spoof called Snakes on Claire Danes but it's so awful., we're not going to. Oh wait. The movie's crap so any spoof would have to be crap, too, right? Besides, the whole thing is a cheesy promotion for this site called SecretSauce.tv.
We're thinking "Show Me" state, Missouri, didn't quite have in mind what the rest of us take away after reading this billboard which carries the headline, "The show-me your nuts state."
BigHeads Founder John Palumbo writes to tell of the trials and tribulations he goes through when trying to offer his services to agencies, many of which view anything other than their own idea as competition. We're just going to let John tell the story in his own words because we get a kick out of how it validates just about every fickle, nervous, running-scared agency mindset we've personally witnessed.
"I thought you'd find it interesting to hear how much bullshit we are running into when we speak to agencies about using BigHeads as a product for their clients As you know...we envision BigHeads to be both client- and agency-friendly (in other words...something clients could use and something agencies could use for their clients). Well...the agency approach is somewhat of a joke."
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Recently, rapper Lupe Fiasco signed a marketing deal with Reebok to appear in several ad campaigns but just last week he appeared at a PUMA-sponsored event to hype the release of the company's Karmaloop sneaker. Needless to say, Reebok's a bit pissed and isn't so happy it paid Fiasco millions only to have him help promote a competitor's brand. Apparently, there's an emergency meet between the two sides this week to iron out the whole mess.
Apparently, as indicated by this very sparsely attended ad:tech Chicago 2006 session, not many people are intrested in listening to creative types hyping their most recent creative endeavors. Moderating the collection of creatives, Click Here ACD Brian Linder, DesignKitchen CD Sam landers, Arc Worldwide Group CD Tim Irvine and AvenueA Razorish Disciplne lead (whatever that is) Brooke Nanberg, was Program Partners SVP David Hutchinson.
Landers, the most "creative looking" of the bunch, took the audience though the very Flashtastic work he had done for Motorola to promote the brand and, well, I'm not sure what else. The most telling bit of education here was the utterance by Landers, "oh, it's still loading." Linder shared the work his agency did for high end tequila Patron. Unfortunately, the campaign consisted mostly of low brow humor - not exactly the approach to position a high end brand. His agency also created a site, simplyperfect.com, that carried the campiagn's theme of debate but enabling people to take two side of an issue and post it for others to comment upon.
Irvine shared work for Cadillac that attempted to take the "old" out and inject the car with some "badass" as one critic said while describing the new Cadillacs. Irvine created a fairly cool online car racing game that appeared to be engaging. Within the first month of the campaign the site got 170,000 page views, 57,000 visitors and 150,000 downloads. Nanberg, in explaining her work for AT&T's Digital Lifestyle center - a site that illustrates how AT&T integrates with life, suffered the unfortunate side effect of Flashturbation. Pages took forever to load. Pages hung. Pages froze. And the kicker is the site actually has a Troubleshooting link right up top as if it was in the plan that many people would have trouble viewing this site. The one shining nugget she left us with as if it were an earth shattering insight was "creative is non-linear." Um. OK.
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