In the ongoing saga of documenting marketers' and outdoor companies' seemingly care free attitude regarding an modicum of common sense when it comes to positioning competitive advertisers, our eye on street, Bucky Turco, sends us yet another awkwardly placed set of outdoor posters. This time, two watch companies vie for attention on the same public phone booth. While we can't imagine anyone still uses a public telephone, that certainly hasn't stopped people walking past them. Wake up and smell the competition you knuckleheads.
Bucky Turco sent us a shot of a new Heineken Light poster which, aside from being mostly blank to perhaps capitalize on the "please deface me" graffiti trend, also, very prominently seems to promote Absolut vodka since the white poster can't completely cover the Absolut ad underneath it.
Another agency throw down is about to take place. Euro RSCG 4D is suing is former CEO Charles Tarzian and has filed suit in the New York Supreme Court. Euro RSCG 4D claims Tarzian tries to steal clients, used confidential information to do so and recruited the agency's employees after he had left. Apparenlty, he also lied to 4D clients to seemingly place a bad taste in their mouths which might give them cause to leave 4D and to go with Tarzian. Someday, we'll all learch to get along and be honest.
Someone else is going to have to explain the point of this too me because after viewing the site, I just don't see the point. We should be making it easier for people to consume advertising, not more difficult. BBDO has created this thing called the One Second Theater that is embedded in the last second of it's Dancin' Elephant commercial and can be viewed by moving forward one frame at a time.
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Here's a commercial for Aquafina water that's 59 seconds too long. The joke's pretty dumb too. Yet another fancy, high-priced production to insure nice, fat agency fees. Oh wait. Silly me. That's a good thing. Of course we want big fat agency fees. Otherwise, how would we fund all the foosball tables and pool tables and "client lunches" and "business" cell phone bills and trips to Cannes? Sorry, we lost our mind for a minute there. This spot is great!
This viral webcam video, created to promote the Lynx/Axe ClickMore site, began with promise then devolved into a stupid, cheesy, illustration of stereotypical webcam/online video antics. The premise has a woman creating a webcam video for a guy she met the night before. Since she forgot to leave her number with him, she plans to do it in the video by doing a striptease, slowly revealing each number hidden underneath a piece of clothing. After that, it goes downhill fast turning into a ridiculous lingerie/cheerleader/stripper/pillow fight-fest. Intamacy would have prevailed nicely here but the creators chose to go for cheese factor. Or, maybe it was intended to be ironic all along. Either way, this could have been so much better.
For some reason, Land Rover thinks it's really cool its new LR3, on April 3rd of this year, boarded a C-130 aircraft and, using the SUV's navigation system, guided the plane from Nice, France to the island of Corsica. This drools of stupidity. There's nothing spectacular about this commercial. Nothing to get excited about. After all, the LR3's navigation system is talking to satellites just like the plane's guidance system does. Most every automotive navigation system can keep a car to within a foot or two of its path. Using the LR3 navigation system to guide a plane is nothing spectacular. OK, well, the plane goes a little faster so maybe the LR3 navigation system is quicker than some but there aren't many vehicles that travel 300 mile per hour 9,000 feet above the ground. This whole thing was just cooked up to be some really cool ad idea but it's so far off strategy, it's laughable.
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The people who created this ad are either living in a land far removed from current day culture, are completely clueless or, conversely, have a seriously twisted sense of humor. This ad for the Hasbro Super Soaker Oozinator features a gun that when pumped a few times shoots a white globular substance all over the faces and bodies of those in the ad. Sound familiar? We thought so. While we're sure it's fun to pump something until it shoots a bunch of gooey stuff, we can't help but imagine how this thing got created, reviewed and approved without a lot of snickering. Of course, we may be reading way too much into this but give it a look and decide for yourself.
UPDATE: Here's a hacked gif Hasbro probably doesn't want to see.
In perhaps one of the biggest screw ups in a long time, ABC's Commander in Chief, after months of changing show runners, multiple hiatus's and changing timeslots, has been canceled. The show debited last fall as the highest rated new program on television with 17 million viewers. It was actually good too. But after show creator Rod Lurie was booted, Steven Bocho couldn't maintain it, former Lurie writer Dee Johnson couldn't save it and viewership plummeted to 7.5 million, the network pulled the plug. It;s unfortunate becasue the show had great promise and was on its way to success. Not sure who's at fault here since there were so many multiple changes but it is sad to see another quality TV show get cancelled.
Ford, which is sponsoring the singer's summer tour, has aligned itself with Kelly Clarkson and is using her new song, Go, in a JWT Detroit-created :60. The campaign marks the switch from the company's old tagline. "Built for the road ahead" to the new and relatively meaningless tagline, "Bold moves."
There ought to be a rule for taglines. They ought to actually mean something and not be so bland they can be slapped on any brand interchangeably. "Bold moves"? I mean WTF? Are we talking about Bold detergent moving stains out of a shirt? OK, maybe Ford is makming some bold moves here but this tagline is about as descriptive as Intel's lame switch to "Leap Ahead" which sounds like some descriptor for a kangaroo daylight savings time convention. Seems Ford and JWT caught the boardroom brand blather disease.
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