Three months ago, we reported Virgin Mobile catching some heat for using images from Flickr in an Australian ad campaign. Today, the media is all aflutter over the story because the family of one of the people featured in the campaign is suing Virgin Mobile for causing their daughter grief and humiliation.
The person featured in the ad is a girl of 16. The headline of the ad reads, "Dump Your Pen Friend" and the copy reads, "Free Text Virgin to Virgin." You read whatever you want into that one.
...that is, if Allstate is any authority on their musical palates.
And with the help of Rolling Stone, apparently it is.
The campaign is to promote motorcycle insurance. A lot of Allstate's biker insurers are bikers themselves. Neato. Then again, you probably wouldn't buy car insurance from a guy on a bicycle.
- Tom Ford and Vulva fixate on a particular female body part and introduce a new advertising trend: Vaginads.
- Not that you frequent a laundromat all that often but if you do, you just might be assaulted by washing machines bearing gigantic advertising posters.
- We stir debate as to whether or not Mazda, which does still make cars, can still create good commercials.
- What's a week without an appearance by our favorite hottie, Obama Girl? This time she's hooked up with Giuliani Girl to support the troops on behalf of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association.
- Look! Look! Look! Now you can blow an ad banner and make a website freeze!
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You'd probably feel like an ass if you were tracking all kinds of data about the mountain-moving power of social networks without actually doing anything about it. And because it's in just that position, Nielsen is finally jumping aboard the buzz train.
The company has just sent us a beta invitation to Hey! Nielsen, a very late attempt to lavish in the data that MySpace and Facebook are swimming in.
We're still kind of tooling around with it. For obvious (er, metric-oriented) reasons, members are invited to air their views about movies, music, TV shows, online destinations and celebrity personalities.
And here's the Hey! Nielsen value-add: unlike with "other" social networks, the viewpoints of Hey! Nielsen's valued members may be "shared directly with key decision makers in the entertainment industry."
"We have every intention of making sure Hey! Nielsen members are heard," stated the company in an email to us.
The site opens to the public this 24th. Here's to hoping people will fall in love with it and participate obsessively, so marketers won't have to pay MySpace for stats that Nielsen will have to turn into palatable data anyway. We'll totally ignore the fact that MySpace has a head start comprised of years, and millions on millions on millions of users.
No one loves their car this much. Oh wait, this is Volkswagen we're talking about. Those freaks are whack. Just witness how much this guy loves his Jetta and will do anything to keep it clean before he picks up his girlfriend. Even if she has to suffer from his cleaning technique.
This is just awesome. We don't know why but it is. Maybe it's because anytime you place a cute, cuddly character on the street it attracts a lot of attention and makes everyone happy. That's what's happening in Holland with a fish named Guppie, a forlorn looking red fish who ambles about from town to town capturing the public eye.
While no one new at firts, Guppie's purpose was to call attention to a GreenPeace website called MaakSchoonSchap which makes people aware of endangered fish being sold in their supermarkets and asks that they stop buying them.
What's not to like about a cuddly, sad looking fish? It worked for Nemo.
We're having a really, really tough time deciding whether this new video promoting the Hugo Fragrances XY for Men and XX for Women is insightfully witty or over-the-top horrific. Using the male stalks female in the wild analogy, the video lets us observe the mating rituals of a man and a woman in a museum. The video leads to a website which features Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Bette Franke sparring in a boxing ring. All to promote dueling fragrances.
Here's a shocker. A revolutionary report, compiled by a father-son team on a college campus, has found that video games hurt grades, while studying improves them.
Hrm.
Does this mean Candystand hurts professional performance? How much does this actually scale?
A QVC employee has risked life and limb to let us in on what's happening behind the iQdoU? campaign.
The source blithely reports QVC will be unveiling its new logo on the 23rd, a Q that represents a package being opened to reveal the QVC inside.
Sounds complex.
QVC employees were shown the new logo just yesterday.
After Andrew Meyer was arrested Monday and repeatedly Tased by police after verbally niggling John Kerry, his cry of "Don't tase me, bro!" has sparked an online phenomenon all its own.
Even YTMND got in on it: donttasemebro.ytmnd.com.
Vox notes that while the quote's been appropriated with a light-hearted veneer, it's being used as a tool to spark tense discussions about the ethics of cops, Tasers and unruly suburban university kids. Can't we all just get along?
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