To make up for all the seemingly less than noble behavior that goes on around here and to show we really do care about serious issues affecting the advertising industry, Adrants has teamed with Business Development Institute, producers of the recent Web Video Goes Mainstream Conference and diversity programs including Vault's Legal Diversity Job Fair & Conference and What To Do When Mother Is On Your Resume Diversity Career Workshops and Job Fair, to present a one day conference and job fair this Fall on diversity, a topic of great importance and one that was recently thrust into the limelight by the New York City Commission of Human Right's investigation of the advertising industry.
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- Copyranter thinks Axe goes too far with its promises of the perfect life just because you use their deodorant. As if girls actually swoon to guys based on the flavor of their pits. The dude in this ad needs a lot more help than deodorant.
- The Art Directors Club will have a panel at its ADC Gallery on September 21 which will discuss how creatives can instigate social and political action. Esquire cover guru George Louis and "I Love NY" designer Milton Glaser will be on hand.
- Here's another one of those Akbank mass human choreography things.
- Consumer feedback to GM's Fastlane blog was part of the reason the company recently announced it would lengthen the warranty on all of its vehicle to 100,000 mile of five years beginning in 2007.
- ATTIK has designed and launched a website for MTV VMA Vanguard Award winner Hype Williams who was bestowed the honor last week during MTV's Music Video Awards.
- Online marketing magazine Adotas is hosting a dinner at Fiamma Osteria Tuesday night, November 7th to welcome incoming ad:tech Chair Drew Ianni.
Perhaps taking a lead from the Levi's Denim Monsters, French marketing firm TriBeCa, to promote the opening of a flagship LEE store, developed a street campaign for LEE jeans in which the jeans were placed over parking meters and hung from wires above the streets while manholes were painted with "LEE," banners were hung in metropolitan areas and bar coded stickers were handed out as coupons for use at retail locations. More street scene images here.
In perhaps an intriguing method of attracting attention to this commercial while giving a nod to citizens of Mumbai, India who close their windows to shut out the sounds of the country's Ganesh Festival, this ad for the Times of India highlights the tens day festival but contains no sound at all. And yes, we struggled with our volume control at first so now you don't have to.
Beginning its life as a greeting card company, shifting to developing a line of baby clothes then turning ad agency, uncooked has developed 11 animated IDs for MTV that follow the company's original greeting card sense of style and humor. It's not everyday a gretting card company goes to work for MTV and this time the work is actually good. Check it out here.
Saddened to be left out of the whole social media photo tagging Flickr-fest, Shake Well Before Use tells us Google has launched Google Image Labeler. The new feature, in beta as all new Google products are, pairs people who use the service with another person, shows them images over a 90 second period, asks the pair to tag (label in Google parlance) the images and then awards points when the two use the same tag to describe the image. Since Google spiders images across the web without human interaction, the only thing it has to go on when responding to an image query is the filename and image title which don't always do the best job describing and categorizing an image. It's not clear whether the earned points get people anything other than a place on the point chart but if the program works, Google Image search will be greatly improved and, perhaps, enable better keyword ad placement.
- Davis Freeberg sends us this long form commercial for TiVo called Blue Moon which is a 50's-style video explaining an important scentific discovery that turns out to be, yes, a TiVo.
- While we really like this new campaign for Florida's Commerce Bank which, in the TV spot, asks "When did you stop thinking you were a magician?" and other kid-related things along with images of kids that change to adults at the end of the commercial, there seems to be a missing transition between the innocence of dreaming in kidhood and Commerce Bank's assertion you can keep dreaming in adulthood if you bank with them. The work was created by Hispanic agency, The Lab thelabideas.com
- Put your Hispanic marketing caps on because the demographic segment is growing eight times faster than other other groups and will, this year, match the purchasing power of African-Americans spending over &800 billion.
- Arthur Schiff, the man behind the classic Ginsu Knife commercials as well as many other informercials died earlier this week at the age of 66.
- Debuting next week during the Come Out & Play festival in New York this month will be "kill them with kindness" game called Cruel 2 B Kind. The game assigns players one weapon and one weakness which consist of random acts of kindness which are to be delivered to other players who could be anyone on the street in the game zone.
- Maverick Media has created another Windows Live Messenger video, called Bottle, that points out the dangers of using old technology to deliver office messages.
- South African singer Verity is hoping record her album by pre-selling 5,000 CDs through a project called the Lucky Packet Project to finance the cost of recording the album. About ten percent of the revenue will go to the South African charity People Opposing Women's Abuse.
- OK, this Great Escape video for the PSP game Dark Mirror is just weird but it definitely reminds one to be sure which bed they slip into the night before.
- T-list is taking social media physical by selling t-shirts on which people can place thisr top five lists of bands, movies, places or any other list one might find on MySpace or any other social media site.
- Getting even closer to the day ads will be affixed to the back of church pews, the Boy Souts of America are now accepting brand sponsorship of its Scout Badges.
- While you may have heard of this stunt already, here's the video of UK artist Bansky "punking" Paris Hilton's new CD by buying copies, altering the cover sleeve's content and replacing her CD with an audio remox of her favorite and inane comments.
- A&T is hyping its online entertainment site Blue Room by airing, on September 10, footage from the Conde Nast Fashon Rocks pre-party featuring Elton John performing highlights from the songs on his upcoming The Captain and the Kid album.
When several people started sending in this image of a Johnny Walker outdoor ad that shows Johhny making his way across a broken bridge, the initially innocuous imagery and our agnostic sense of politics caused us to wonder, "What's so special about this ad? It's just a picture of a friggin bridge." Well after the ad came to us a few times, we realize, "Oh, people are pissed off because Leo Burnett/BBH and Johnny Walker are making Middle eastern fun of bridges destroyed in Lebanon." Oh, OK. Now we get it. Yea. Fuck that shit. We're pissed off too. How dare they stoop to such insensitive tactics to sell a bit of liquor. Whatever.
Anyway, for its part, Leo Burnett says the ad was intended to lift morale which Mack Simpson thinks would have been better expressed as "raise spirits.".
Joining Coke's ongoing Coke Side of Life Stageside thing in which artists perform to a background of subtle Coke branding is Jay-Z who follows Na-Yo who appeared in the promotion earlier this year. Jay-Z appears at Radio City Music Hall in a white tux backed by a full orchestra. We're not sure Jay-Z does it for us but we're sure he will for some. In any event, it's not a bad way to offer up a little entertainment while achieving a bit of brand awareness albeit questionably measurable.
Using flash back scenarios which explain current misfortune, Winston-Saloem agency The Woodbine Agency created a series of commercial for its client Peidmont bank that illustrates the importance of making proper financial decisions and the downside of making bad ones. The series of commercial can viewed on YouTube here.
