OMG! According to the United States Alcohol Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, watching someone drinking a beer in a Japanese Asahi beer commercial may cause alcoholism in the States! Everyone, cover your eyes immediately before you succumb to the power of the almighty television commercial...in a language you can't even understand...in a commercial you will never see aired in America...because its a friggin Japanese commercial! Why doesn't the U.S. government just skip all this shit and force us right into the 1984-like world in which they really want us to live?
Overreact much? How about gone entirely insane. The government wants to take legal action against Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka who is seen in the Asahi ad consuming beer, a no-no in the States. While it's one thing to enforce the U.S. regulation of not showing the actual consumption of alcohol in advertisements, it's entirely another to foist that law on another country or a person who just happens to now live in the U.S. but made the commercial in another country under an entirely different jurisdiction.
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Entry update: Balendu at Adpunch brings our attention to a series of Mustang billboards that actually blur the scenery behind them. The idea is to lend drivers the impression that Mustang drivers see the world in hyperspeed.
Created by Miami Beach Ad School students Ian Hart and Annie Williams, the work takes a traditional medium largely ignored by its audience and turns it into a frame through which any passerby can see the world from the perspective of a very sleek vehicle. The board is made of GE Lexan EXL semi-transparent resin and blurs the scene behind it regardless of the weather.
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Swedish group Garbergs uses the "Cribs" angle to push the multi-faceted new line of models by Mitsubishi. At Not Everybody's Car we explore the garage of LA inhabitant Action Jackson who of course is ostentatiously hip-hop and has a showroom-caliber set-up of cars that flash and buzz when you mouse over them.
Hiding an interactive test-drive opportunity in the "Cribs" and hip-hop motifs is a clever way to generate brand buzz. Oh, except that it's not. Nobody buys this stuff anymore. "Cribs" is played-out and everybody tries to use the hip-hop angle. When we're bored, we don't sit around cyber test-driving cars with our bosom buddy Action Jackson. We play on Digg so we can talk shit about big companies that try to trick us, share WoW tips and swap really important news generally related to Apple.
In his long-winded mod-turtleneck way, Youtube philosopher Sergei explains why anti-smoking scare tactics like this fuel stigma but don't actually help serious smokers, who just feel alienated and become more defensive about their right to smoke.
Sergei makes some good points even if he's probably preaching to the choir. We also like that he smokes throughout, and puts points in subtitles. That's panache. In fact we're pretty sure that most people who like to puff while listening to themselves talk in a small cafe would elect for subtitles or at least bullets to illustrate their wisdom if they could. (We would anyway.)
Unfortunately, even savvy marketers are hard-pressed to work out how to foster a non-smoking culture in a way that encourages non-smokers to pursue a better quality of life but doesn't insult their intelligence.
PETA continues its naked campaign with supermodel Joanna Krupa who appears "naked" in a new anti-fur "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" print campaign for the cause group. In a video, the Polish born model tells us she received a video from her sister that showed dogs being abused in China which motivated her to become part of the campaign. She tells us there's plenty of alternatives to fur although we hope most people, aside from supermodels, of course, don't choose to go naked.
It was only a matter of time before a game as fun as Crazy Taxi would reincarnate in ad promo form. That's what Nokia has done for its interactive film/game The Passenger, which is pretty engaging. The music ain't bad either.
You're a driver on the night streets of Paris when a sultry woman hops in and urgently asks to be transported to three addresses. At aid is the Nokia Multimedia Car Kit CK-20W, a nifty GPS-stocked device, but follow directions or your passenger will throw insults at you. Don't you love doing life-saving favours for people who get all bitchy?
The game was put together by the interesting mindfolk at Hyper Happen, Fuel Industries and Karbon Arc, and features footage of Paris shot just last November. Thanks Netanel for the tip. We don't want to sound too excited but this would make a pretty decent (if really, really short) standalone video game. Then again, we're not actually gamers, we're biased ad people, so we imagine actual joystick jockeys are rolling their eyes in disgust right now.
Alumni from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) started production company The Dandy Dwarves and were tapped by their alma mater to create an interactive viral marketing campaign.
The fruits of their labour? SCAD Shorts. The object: guess the title of the bizarre spot playing on the screen. The trick: titles must always have the SCAD acronym.
This is harder than it sounds but results in some weird videos.
Repeat visitors get a running chance of winning - what else? - an iPod.
If you like beat boxing, you'll like this new commercial from Nike where athletes' breathing takes on rhythmic form and becomes a creation unto itself. The ad was created by Wieden + Kennedy Shanghai and produced by HSI in Culver City, CA. Not much else to say other than watch.
Hmm. Must be time for the next season of Entourage on HBO. Hmm. Paging Ari Gold? Hmm. Yup. It's time. Looks like we've got a cute little bloggy blog and YouTube video action here promoting the February 24th return of the series. We love how we get these tips from gmail addresses as if the sender is stupid enough to think we won't know this is an HBO-created promotion.
UPDATE: OK, OK. We give. The denials are coming in from left and right. This dude is freakishly on his own in his attempts to get Ari's attention.
Like the queen bee on the quad, some people just get off on making other people look lame in comparison. We're guessing that's how this spot for Vilara is supposed to encourage people to go there. Apparently Vilara is super-awesome because chavs (a slang term for working-class uneducated folk, according to handy Wikipedia) don't know where it is. And the website notes places only get It status when they're virtually unheard-of.
So why advertise for it? Who are they talking to exactly? Won't this in fact make chavs aware? Does that mean they stop being chavs? And what TV-watching demo will actually be relieved that the topless kissing chicks featured in the ad won't be at this dream spot?
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