Shortly after snarling at L'Oreal for its Telescopic Mascara product, which vowed to make lashes "up to 60 percent longer" (a promise aided and abetted by Penelope Cruz), the UK's Advertising Standards Authority has unearthed another deviant: Avon.
Avon claims its mascara makes lashes 65 percent longer. Despite a lie that's five percent more misleading, however, the company isn't using a celebrity model to push its snake oil, so hopefully the body public won't be too susceptible.
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W+K Amsterdam has whipped up some not so magical spots for EA's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix video game. In the two spots, three characters take on the roles of Hermione, Harry and Ron and try, first, to run through a wall in their school and, second, to hide from their teachers in the teachers lounge. Sadly, their school isn't quite like Hogwarts. And it isn't in a movie. And the school must suck if it hasn't been able to properly educate these three idiots on the difference between fantasy and reality.
Hurrah, new browser-sporting wi-fi iPods, and they look just like everybody said they would.
Steve Jobs previewed an ad for the new toy in his keynote yesterday, which you can find if you dodge all the 'Amazing!'s, the bad jokes, and his overextended attempt to make a ringtone out of Aretha Franklin's Respect.
The ad is short and follows the same see-what-my-finger-can-do aesthetic as the iPhone ads. Looking forward to seeing the "official" version.
Also, Apple announced a partnership with Starbucks where you can log onto iTunes for free on a wi-fi-ready Apple unit, and even - get this - buy a song in a Starbucks while it's playing. Cashing in on the impulse has never been easier.
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- Yahoo grabs ad network BlueLithium for a $300 million.
- It outlasted every other dot com magazine but Business 2.0 has finally succumbed to the tightening economics of magazine publishing and will cease to publish on its own, becoming part of Fortune.
- Make sure your Facebook profile doesn't include any salaciously incriminating information. The site has just made profiles publicly searchable.
- JupiterResearch reports just 15 percent of viral campaigns achieved success in the last year. Good. Maybe we'll see a lot less crap from marketers now.
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In partnership with BlogAds, PETA has launched an ad writing competition which seeks to find the best BlogAd-style blog ad to promote its websites such as GoVeg.com, FurIsDead.com, LettuceLadies.com, and StopAnimalTests.com.
The winner will be determined by the very subjective metric of "most likely to drive traffic to PETA's Web sites."
Running from September 4 through September 24, ten finalists will be chosen, with the winner receiving a $500 Apple gift card. There will also be a People's Choice winner.
Finalists' ads will become part of the BlogAds campaign.
Late last week, we received an invite from Hugh MacLeod to join a new social network called Quechup. While we love Hugh, we need another social network like we need another MediaPost email newsletter. Like many other invites we receive, we ignored it hoping Hugh wouldn't be too angry. He wasn't. Mostly because he had no idea he sent the invite in the first place.
While it's standard practice for a social network to ask you if you want to invite friends from your address book, it's far from acceptable to do it automatically, behind the scenes without the member having any knowledge the invites have been sent. That's what Quechup did. That was bad.
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With all that Wirebreakers nonsense, we were beginning to worry that Motorola had wasted all its creative genius on one crappy series of first-generation RAZRs.
It turns out we were mostly right. Meet the RAZR 2. According to this ad, it's got jealous engineers worldwide screaming, crying, vandalizing toilets and spitting out their coffee.
The latest round of steroid-enhanced promises are impressive, but unless Motorola's nailed out the faults of the last generation (we're still feeling burned by the crashing screen, malfunctioning buttons and sketchy reception), it's going to have customers reacting in exactly the same way as this multilingual chorus of emo engineers.
Ever feel rushed during sex? Or, perhaps feel it's a bit too rough? Apparently, that's the vibe Peugeot is tapping into with this print campaign that features lovers in helmets in case, well...
We're not sure but we'd love to do it in an all-white room like that sometime, if only for the purity of it all.
Shortly after its embarrassing Friday spat with Apple, NBC developed a similar relationship with Amazon TV.
One of the biggest points of the Apple/NBC disagreement was Apple's insistence that NBC wanted to raise its costs per episode to $4.99. NBC said this wasn't true, and the REAL issue was Apple's refusal to sell episodes in package sets.
Well, regardless of who you believed then, NBC put its money where its cavernous mouth is and developed a relationship with Amazon TV's Unbox. Episodes are still going for $1.99 ("Up yours, iTunes!") and customers who buy complete seasons get a 30 percent discount.
Nothing like a public mud-fight to get the blood pressure up. Think we can talk them into solving future disputes election '08 style?
Several years ago, Patrick Sell, who has a history in marketing with stints at Doremus and Reuters, launched a site called I Do Nothing All Day. Aptly, the site contains nothing more than videos he takes while out and about in New York City. Of course, they aren't just any videos, they're videos of beautiful women walking down the sidewalk or in the park. Originally, Sell envisioned I Do Nothing All Day as a site where all kinds of New York City imagery would be captured and shared but as we all know, nothing attracts more attention than a beautiful woman walking down the sidewalk on a hot summer day.
Now, before you go and label Sell a perv, check out the site. It's nicely done and he asks everyone permission before he films them. He's not doing anything more salacious than you'd find in your average fashion magazine or on fashion show runways anywhere in the world. The work is just a simple appreciation of natural female beauty. Now that we have that clarified, Sell has expanded, launching Turning His Head, a site which sells women's clothing featured in I Do Nothing All Day videos.
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