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.
Miami Ad School students have created an interesting campaign for the United Nations Mine Action Service that drives home the message by making every parking spot in a lot a handicap spot. Powerful. Confusing if you're trying to park but powerful.
Odd is a good word for these two Skittles commercials. Odd but good. Very good. Very weird but very good. Very good but very weird. You get the point. give the a look here.
- George parker comments on "UberScam consultancy Pile and Co's" In House Agency Forum. It's not pretty.
- AdFreak's got a re-mix of Apple's '1984' commercial featuring the Jill Sobule song II'm Gonna Be A Supermodel. It's really not that good.
- CoolOr features some images from a project called The Antwerp Miniature City one of which features a miniature mobile billboard truck.
- Friskies used real bird food to sell its bird food in this outdoor installation.
- PETA is wrapping live humans who are playing dead in grocery store meat containers to make their "don't eat meat" point.
- MySpace has launched ad-supported IM.
- We have no idea who this is for but, hey, it's weird, it'a about a guy who lost his beefer to aliens and, no doubt, it will be revealed some marketer is behind it.
If you care, the seventh and last Adicolor film is out. This one is called Black.
Here's a whacked little promotional clip for FOX's American Dad that features a guy with a great attitude on life. At the end of the clip, he tells us why he's such a positive guy.
To promote its line of online security products, Symantec has launched Safetytown. Created by Night Agency, the site contains "choose your own adventure" videos that follow the travels of a father who has been informed a mysterious charge has been made to his credit card. Full of overwrought melodrama and really bad fashion, the first installment shows the dad receiving a call from his credit card company informing him a charge was made to his card from a sporting goods store in Arkansas. Dressed only in his bathroom and a winter coat, the dad sets off to find out who used his card while his wife and child tearfully watch him leave.
The site's got other goodies such as wallpapers, music, the dad's bathrobe and a trial download of Norton Internet Security. If memory serves, this is the first time Symantec has done anything outside of the basic technology sell in its marketing.
Aap Global, the company that created the technology behind elevator handrail advertising, is now licensing the technology to partners internationally.
MySpace is now part of the PointRoll Include program. We're not sure how all those teens will take to the company's Fatboy, BadBoy, TomBoy, PaperBoy and TowelBoy expand-o-banners creeping all over their pages.
We're not quite sure how but this game, Maconomy X, is supposed to induce creatives into filling out their times sheets.
Doubleclick has released a new white paper, Best Practices for Optimizing Web Advertising Effectiveness, that aims to share help marketers improve their online advertising efforts.
Two college professors, University of Colorado Marketing Professor Paul Her and the late Binghamton University Associate Professor Yong-Soon Kang, are about to poke a whole in the ad industry's love affair with sex as a tool to sell. In June, the pair will release a study, "Beauty and the Beholder: Why Pretty Faces Don't Always Help Sales," conducted among 200 college students that will show sex-laced advertising can backfire. We hope everyone ignores the study.
If you've seen any financial services-related commercial in America, you know most drone on incessantly about service and advice and expert consultation or good hands or they get all warm and fluffy like a Kiplinger's Magazine cover or a State Farm commercial. In India, they have fun. In India, they poke fun at the American cowboy. In India, they catch the market by the balls...uh...bulls. Written by Sunil Shibad and produced by Steam Engine Production, this commercial is for Ventura Securities.
Let's see. A magazine gives you a few pictures and words 12 times a year. The Internet offers billions of pictures of women in various stages of undress and enough online games to play until one is 152. Marketers screw up a lot of things but they're pretty good at following the eyeballs. Mediaweek Monitor says ad pages in men's magazines have dropped four percent through June. Conde Nast admits they had a terrible first quarter for Details.
