AOL' s new free video service, In2TV will launch Wednesday with premiere advertisers Intel, Kia, Kraft and Hershey. In2TV will host thousands of old Warner Brothers shows hoping to become the first stop on the web for video content. We wish them luck. We have no idea who would want to watch all those old shows and, maddeningly, they had to go and use some video technology that requires Active X rather than a more graceful solution like YouTube or Quicktime. There's also this thing called Hi-Q which, of course, doesn't work with Firefox.
So basically, the service is perfect for all those middle America, late adopter, IE-Suffering couch potatoes who somehow find pleasure in watching reruns of Wonder Woman, Head of the Class and Welcome Back Kotter.
Hated for years, the Canadian Tire Guy and his wife, portrayed in hundreds of commercials and loathed, apparently, by every Canadian citizen has been dropped from the campaign. The Canadian Tire Guy seemed to have fallen into that typically emasculated male stereotype we see often in America as well but put out of their misery before it goes on too long. We won't bore you with the details but every media outlet and blogger has derided the guy for years. Canadian Tire nor the actor who play the Tire Guy, Ted Simonett, willelaborate on the change
Our Asian cultural expert Tian tells us Adidas should expect a bit of backlash from the Asian community in reaction to a newly introduced line of sneakers called the Yellow Series. One particular shoe has the image of a buck-toothed bowlcut slanty eyed face on the shoe's tongue - not exactly the currently acceptable rendition of the Asian populace.
Ironic Sans points out an ad for the Army that, perhaps, sends the wrong message. In the ad, citizens are shown smiling and army personnel are shown with stern, even angry or sad expressions. To us, it looks like being a citizen is a lot more fun then joining the army. We're guessing the top brass is of the opinion smiling soldiers convey a weakness, hence the bad ass, military facial expressions.
Completely misunderstanding current culture, NBC, after forcing YouTube to remove several Saturday Night Live clips, has re-released on NBC.com the very same clips it said should not have been freely distributed. Explaining the twisted brilliance of the move, NBC VP of Interactive Stephen Andrade said, "We were concerned about building their corporation instead of ours since it's our video. We would like to make it as easy for people to share as we can, so we're trying to provide as many tools as we can to do that." Gee, if we were NBC.com, we'd be more than happy for YouTube and everyone else to suffer the bandwidth and infrastructure costs to freely publicize our content.
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Publicis Dialog has created an Alien Film Competition for HP that lets' people upload a photo that will appear in a canned video. It's supposed to be funny but after watching tha same video over and over with a bunch or irrelevant baby and animal pictures inserted, we tired of the whole thing. But, for those who persevere and are chosen as having created the funniest video by simply slapping an image in a canned video, HP will award a Photosmart printer.
John Brock points us to a story about a recently launched Mexican television campaign from the National Women's Institute which portrays blow up sex dolls as office workers to somehow get men to stop treating women like sex dolls. Somehow, we just think this reinforces the stereotype.
Countering all that is sacred about the James Bond franchise, the producers of the film have decided to throw any semblance of respect for the brand to the wind and accept $14 million from Ford to allow the automaker to place its Mondeo in the the upcoming James Bond film, Casino Royale, starring Daniel Craig. While Ford certainly makes a decent car or two, the Ford brand and all it stands for is so counter to what the James Bond brand has imbued into culture over the past 40 years that we simply have to believe the producers behind this movie have thrown up their arms and said, "Fuck it. No one's gonna go see this movie anyway so we might as well get some cash now."
OK so maybe this campaign grabs attention visually but does anyone playing/winning the Minnesota State Lottery want to look like a stupid, buck toothed gopher? Oh wait, that's pretty accurate. See more idiots here.
Not that we have any right here at Adrants to comment on others' typos but, with help from It's All Advertising, we're going to do just that by pointing out a California Highway Construction billboard, the creators of which, found it a bit difficult to spell "dollars." Does there seem to be more typos these days or is is just due to the phone cam-Flicker-blog-YouTubeification of the world? Do tell.
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