The inaugural Miami ad:tech show, held at the Miami Beach Convention Center June 26-27 was a success by my metrics. It was well attended. It offered content not found at other ad:tech conferences and it opened the eyes of many to the burgeoning Latin American and Hispanic marketplaces. While many of the panelists and speakers agreed definitive research on the space is lacking, there is no doubt each demographic group has left its minority status behind and are fast becoming a major influence on the American scene. And "they" isn't even the proper word. After all, there's really no "we" and "they." There's just "us." Americans. The people that live together on this soil, fuel its multi-faceted culture and buy a lot of stuff.
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High off our last accolades, Candystand took the liberty of sharing its new air hockey game with us.
They promised it would be as addictive as ping-pong but it wasn't. It sucked, mainly because the hockey puck is controlled by the movement of your mouse and it sometimes takes awhile for it to catch up.
With that in mind, the British destroyed us more times than we want to relive.
Air hockey = FTL. And the music is horrible!
It's a rare thing when marketers get pissed-off about the appropriation of meaningful symbols to sell stuff. Isn't that, like, what we do?
But the Beatles and the Vietnam war (particularly in the context of our current overseas "disagreement") are somewhat sensitive topics. So if you're going to use "All You Need is Love" to push diapers, expect to be swathed in shit.
See the first spot for All You Need is Luvs. We have to admit it's sort of cute.
In defense of its use of the Vietnam-inspired tune for a Luvs Deluxe campaign, Mark Rolland of Saatchi & Saatchi said, "The song itself was chosen to help create a stronger connection to the Luvs brand and awareness of its core benefit--leakage protection for less."
Stick to ripping IKEA ads, man.
In an effort to convert coffee-drinking loyalists, Coffees of Hawaii recently left some free coffee samples pinned to car windshields in front of a few Starbucks. The samples promoted the frequency and variety in their coffee delivery service.
Apparently the Hawaiian tradition of getting visitors leid is a kindly euphemism for what they prefer to do with local competition. Here's to hoping the coffee is just as hard - er, strong.
With the help of video site Blastro, which specializes in pandering to the brand-spankin'-old Urban Hustlers demographic, Scion shakes off its Little Deviants to remind suburban "deviants" they're still down with the community.
We have to admit that the interactive room in Block Savvy nails the street aesthetic nicely, and Streetfire, their racer-friendly customization page, brings Scion back to what made the otherwise-unattractive vehicle unique in the first place (its mutability).
But we're otherwise really bored with all this desperate pleading in the direction of hip hop. It's the reason why we liked Want 2 B Square and Little Deviants so much - Scion carved an edgy new personality on its own merits instead of paying Kanye for his. So much for that.
Perhaps to the dismay of college students across the nation, 40 percent of Facebook's audience, following the lifting of membership restrictions in September, is now over the age of 34. It's not like we didn't see this coming since day one. What was once an exclusive social network for 18-22 year olds (or anyone with a .edu address) is now home to the masses. The much older masses according to new figures from comScore.
Since September, membership has jumped 89 percent from 14 million to 26.6 million as of May. Fully 10.4 million members are 35 or older. Though that's a significant shift, the biggest growth came from the 25-34 set which jumped 181 percent and the 12-17 set which jumped 149 percent.
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The college dorm room. Ah yes. That tiny, not so personal space that sees more action in one semester than in the entire run of Big Brother. Is there anything that hasn't happened in a dorm room? Not anymore thanks to IKEA who's released a video in which heads randomly pop out of a dorm room's enclosed spaces and begin to beatbox. It's all to get people to head over to roommateliving.com on which IKEA hawks its college room-ready wares. And yup, there's even an IKEA College Night promotion from July 6-9 where college students and high school seniors can bring their IDs to IKEA stores for a chance to win free stuff.
Why go to the trouble of producing an actual campaign when you can just film the casting sessions and upload them to YouTube? Seems laziness is the new Second Life. For AXE, Jun Group has adopted this new trend (well, at least we're dubbing it a trend) has placed three casting videos on YouTube for their target audience, college men, to slather over. Two videos (one, two) feature a single model doing her rendition of Bom Chicka Wah Wah and the third marries the two (and other auditions) together.
The guys over at Brand Experience Lab were kind enough to share this ad for Silverjet's "women-only loos" with us.
The concept was clever and probably would have rung unexpectedly fresh if, twice before watching it, we weren't told the approach would be "a little different for an upscale airline!"
But since the surprise was spoiled and we are for the most part tired of Mile High Club jokes, the whole thing seemed kind of trashy.
If we ever harbored any doubts about whether gender division actually prevents the nice from going naughty, we would have visited a public men's room at 2 AM or picked up a Colette novel.
Maybe knowing that a bare ass is at least the quickest way to get our attention, Toto's Clean is Happy shows us the backsides of its spokespeople before we ever see their faces. (Which makes things sort of awkward when we finally do.)
And we could have dealt with that. What we couldn't deal with was the smiling woman telling us a bidet is all about relaxation and wellness as she sat, perkily perched, atop a toilet.
The site was put together by the Jonestown School of Advertising. Must have been a pretty hit-or-miss project. For every classmate whose junk in the trunk we wanted to gawk at when we were in school, there were at least 10 that we hoped would keep theirs stashed.
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