Faced with vastly declining smoking levels around the world, cancer-causing cigarette companies are increasing the level of double talk, admitting smoking is bad and at the same time continuing to promote their cancer-causing business model.
Camel as launched a summer tour reminiscent of the roaring 20's called "Roaring 2000's" which provides "speakeasy events" where, apparently, smoking will be welcome and promoted. In another campaign, Advance is acknowledging the killing qualities of toxins with the headline "Great Taste, less toxins" as if less toxins are a good thing.
WPP has created a test campaign for Advance's less toxic cigarettes to run in Phoenix which includes the copy, "Everyone knows quitting is the best thing. But for those who continue to smoke, now there's Advance." That's like saying you're a loser for not being able to quit so we're going to help you die slower.
MediaPost will hold its Forecast 2005 event in the middle of
the ad industry's mutual back slap fest, Advertising Week and will steer the event towards areas undergoing change - the consumer, media technologies and advertising business models. The event will try to cut through the growing confusion and difficulty in reaching the fast moving and difficult to capture consumer.
Gawker reports a possible exodus of employees over the men's shopping magazine Cargo. Yesterday, three staffers quit and it's unclear as to the cause or whether more people will leave/get fired. Stay tuned.
Likely to have been one of the options floating around the agency conference room during late night concepting sessions is this Dribbleglass billboard spoof for Budweiser. Afterall, alcohol is so much better for you than drugs.
A cream and kiwifruit covered teenager appearing in a New Zealand Vodafone TV ad, claimed to encourage pedophilia, has been deemed acceptable by the Advertising Standards Complaints Board. Can't people just watch commercials without reading sex into it all the time. Oh wait. Had we seen the ad, we'd have reveled in its lurid qualities and crafted an elaborate sexual fantasy of our own. Of course, we'd keep it to ourselves and not share it with some standards body. After all, some things should remain private.
Monarch Entertainment Group's Chicks With Attitude, an 18-market concert tour created solely as marketing vehicle to reach young women, has signed on Maybelline as the exclusive presenting sponsor. Musicians appearing on the tour are Liz Phair, The Cardigans, Katy Rose and Charlotte Martin. Tour promotion will include radio, print, online, point of purchase and a sweepstakes.
Other new ad campaigns covered this week in Amy Coor's MediaPost Out to Launch column are Smithsonian promoting its magazine to advertisers, Rayovac and Musicmatch partnering to boot holiday sales, a relaunch campaign for Heartland Brewery and a Red Stripe campaign featuring Lennox Lewis.
Apparently the environment doesn't warrant A-Listers so Eddie Bauer, along with Conde Nast and the Environmental Media Association, has turned to Hollywood B-Listers to participate in an environmental awareness print campaign. B-Listers Daryl Hannah, Rob Lowe, Amy Smart, Melina Kanakaredes and Christian Slater will grace the pages of 13 Conde Nast publications as well as Eddie Bauer point of purchase locations.
The actors will be dressed in Eddie Bauer clothing and blather on about their own efforts to preserve the environment in this testimonial approach.
Ad agency Catch Light Productions has launched a self service, marketing-in-a-box service called The Brand Store. The Brand Store offers select solutions developed specifically to provide an alternative to full-service marketing when convenience and economy are the driving factors. But, like Google Adwords, it requires a large amount of work on the marketer's part.
The Brand Store is ideal for companies who frequently order items such as forms, stationary, posters, mugs, etc. The "stores" can contain departmental categories for easy ordering of products by various personnel within the company.
Overcome by the cheap $18 price of Sun Microsystems' StarSuite, famous (in Japan) actress Norika Fujiwara faints and gives birth to a horse in this television commercial for SourceNext. Stretching to explain the concept behind the commercial, SourceNext President and CEO Nori Matsuda says, "We convey a concept of our $18 strategy as surprising and moving in the ad. The ad basically says, 'Anything can happen.'"
A Bosnian man who drinks 15 pints of beer a day and was just pictured in a local paper drinking his 400,000th bottle, is in discussions with a brewer apparently to appear in an ad campaign as some kind of role model to aspire to. Can anyone say alcoholic? Does anyone wonder which beer company would want to have anything to do with this guy?
Interestingly, the man, 61 year old Marijan Camber says he does not drink to get drunk and the beer has no affect on him. He once drank 80 bottles in one day just to see what happened and he claims he did not get drunk. Hmm...maybe Bosnian beer has no alcohol in it.
He does offer up a great little nugget that will surely find its way into a headline, ""Sex is a fleeting pleasure that is not always that great and not always available, but the pleasure from beer is always good - and you can have it as often as you want." Replacement for the beer babes?
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