Add to the ever growing list of contextual fuckery this Pure Gum Spirits Turpentine ad which appeared directly next to a CNN story about a teen who drank turpentine to terminate her pregnancy. The kicker is the ads tagline, "Nature's Solvent." Yup, turpentine sure does make it easier to dissolve that fetus and make it really easy to slide right out into that trash can. Aside from the intellectually-challenged human idiocy that surrounds the use of these freakish remedies, the placement of this ad has to be the most freakish contextual placement fuck up to date. Can we possibly put an end to our own industry idiocy that causes these idiotic mistakes?
Paul Conley digs deep into an issue about which we have strong opinions. More and more, we are seeing online editorial infiltrated by text link ads from the likes of companies such as IntelliTXT. It, no doubt, crosses the line between advertising and editorial. We don't claim to be perfect here at Adrants. We all need ad revenue to make money but text link ads just go too far. They are annoying with their little pop up bubbles and misleading in that a link in edit should lead to other edit or a referenced website, not an ad.
Conley points out InteliTXT says it uses "in-text placement to cut through the online advertising clutter." Oxymoronic. In-text placements *add* to the clutter. They don't cut through it. In the past, IntelliTXT has asked us if we'd like to use their service here on Adrants. We quickly and politely declined. If humble Adrants can make enough money without text-link ads then one would think a giant company like VNU could live without them as well. Apparently not.
Someday marketers are going to wake up and realize that humans are, in fact , a much needed entity in the creation and management of online ad campaigns and that some aspects of those campaigns shouldn't be left to a bunch of servers in some sever farm in the middle of nowhere. This latest contextual corrigendum comes courtesy of IntelliTXT, that company that places annoying roll over pop ups linked to text in articles on many sites such as the Atlanta Journal Constitution. In this AJC.com article about the sudden death of Anna Nicole Smith's son, we find an ad offering 10 to 20 percent off Smiths at Target as if Anna might want to drop by Target and pick up a new son with her credit card.
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Usually, we'd offer witty kudos to those marketers who manage to squeeze in a bit of well timed self promotion when offering a quote to the media but capitalizing on 9-11 kinda goes a bit overboard as indicated by this Kenneth Cole quote given to the New York Daily News yesterday.
"Important moments like this are a time to reflect," Cole added. "To remind us, sometimes, that it's not only important what you wear, but it's also important to be aware." Yea Kenneth, it's not only important how you die, but it's also important what you buy.
Dear Casale Media,
Please stop serving insanity-inducing, seizure-causing pop unders. Please stop usurping people's decision to block pops by circumventing their browser's pop blocking mechanisms. Please stop foisting crap on us like a pointless Coke versus Pepsi taste test. And Coke, Pepsi, do you really want your brand portrayed in an ad unit that is more maligned than a telemarketer call? Casale, you are huge. You have the biggest booth at every ad:tech show. Surely you have revenue streams other than those that cause people to want to convert themselves into digital 1's and 0's, climb inside their computers, travel through the Internet until they find your ad servers and kick the shit out of them until the words "pop under" and "pop up" are now longer in their vocabulary.
Perhaps there really is some sort of cultural brick wall between New York City and Canada or at least between Montreal's National Bank marketing team and the rest of the entire world. In a laughably out of touch press release, the bank claims it is "once again on the cutting edge of advertising with a colourful new event: a flash mob, used to promote the Bank's role as the presenting sponsor of the Rogers Cup tennis tournament." Colorful new event? Hello? Flash Mobs came and went three years ago, my Canadian friends. It's 2006 this year, not 2003. If calling a three year old trendlet cutting edge weren't bad enough, the bank isn't even conducting a flash mob. All it's doing is unleashing 40 young women dressed in tennis apparel who will roam the streets of Montreal during rush hour August 9 passing out tickets to a tennis match at the Rogers Cup August 12 to 20. Idiots. That's not a flash mob. That's street marketing.
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Continuing their idiotic approach to anti-smoking, the TRUTH campaign is out with yet another off the wall commercial featuring the hairstyle-challenged Derek. In this spot, Derek tries to sell cigarette "flavors" to kids basing the whole shtick on the most ancient cigarette company document they've used to date, a 1972 internal document that stated "it's a well known fact that teenagers like sweet products" as if that statement were some sort of revelation. Can we please retire Derek and this idiocy and get back to some of the better stuff we know this campaign is capable of?
Attention ad agencies. Don't DON'T. DO NOT DO THIS. Do not create a video where you publicly masturbate, backslap and attempt to hipify yourself with viral goodness in front of the industry all in the name of cool factor and winning new business. Watch this video so you'll never do this to yourselves. Agency.com created a video of themselves pitching the Subway business as the pitch itself and uploaded it to YouTube. Everyone in the industry needs to watch this. Not because it's good but because it makes ad agency people look dumb and sound really stupid. It's filled with mindless business blather, self-important ad speak, fist bumps, fashionably un-tucked shirts and way too many utterances of the word "dude." It's painful to watch.
UPDATE: This work is for a sanctioned agency pitch. Agency.com Communications Manager Dan Cordella tells us, "SUBWAY Restaurants SFAFT Group is currently conducting a search for a new interactive agency. They gave all participants, including Agency.com, the option to submit a short video of the team/company, which is a fairly standard procedure in an agency review process. Agency.com wanted to show how viral could work instead of just telling them about it in a video or written response."
UPDATE II: And the blog.
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Perhaps it's just us but this morning we have been attacked by one of those porn-style redirect ads. We were checking out the cast of the upcoming James Bond flick, Casino Royale on IMDB when, after about five seconds, we were whisked away to a promotional sweepstakes eprize page for the movie V. No amount of reloading on use of the back button would stop the fucking ad page from forcing itself upon us. Someone over at Warner Brothers or IMBD better get their shit together or start kicking the shit out of whatever spammer is foisting this crap upon us.
NOTE: In comments, an IMDB representative explains the problem was a coding error on their part which occurred for a short period of time and they fixed it as soon as it was brought to their attention. Warner Brothers had nothing to do with the error.
Normally, we'd never be one to side with a tobacco company on anything, but this new spot from the American Legacy Foundation's Truth campaign is giving us cause. In this second spot in the campaign, a dude walks into a store to buy a mattress and strikes up a conversation with the sales person. He tells the guy that back in 1985, a tobacco company VP wondered if sleep should be banned because the majority of people die in their sleep. So the basis of this spot come from a comment that was likely a joke and is trying to twist it into some sort of "Oh my God, can you believe a cancer stick maker would actually suggest sleep be banned to fend off accusations smoking kills" thing. It's ridiculous.
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