"The generation that swore it would never get old -- didn't. Welcome to the summer of life."
Just for Men has decided to target the Confident Male Boomer, a man so sexy he need not fear his graying head of hair. (Bitch, please! He rocked Woodstock AND he surfs!)
The only question is, is the gray in all the right places? Fret no longer about nature's crude hand; get ahold of Touch of Gray, the only hair dye that lets you "keep a little" salt in that mostly-peppery mane.
That guitar riff sure does set the stage, plus the narrator's got us PUMPED. And the closing guffaw, "Never trust anybody over 90!", coupled with those bad-ass peace signs, won some high-larious backlash on YouTube.
"Why in hell do people still try to make candy in potentially phallic-looking shapes? You'd think they would have learned by now....."
It's definitely a mystery worth pondering. Adrants reader Candace sent over this rawkin' shot of Hannah Montana's Concert Candy. The packaging features our Lolita du jour holding a mic up to her mouth while a giant gummy guitar comes at her from the left.
"Guitar and microphone shapes!" the package boasts, but that guitar doesn't look all that guitar-like, and I don't think the gummy mics will help either.
- Cops in Scottsdale, Arizona use Twitter to keep the community abreast of what's happening in the city: closed roads, active crime scenes and the like.
- Google cozies up to agencies with evangelism missions and SWAG. Don't be fooled by all those friendly faces! John Battelle isn't.
- Ramadan's got brands in a tizzy. Coke released special packaging; Starbucks is showcasing Arabian blends and Ramadan-inspired pastries at its stores in the Middle East. Observers of Ramadan, which fast! until! sunset!, will undoubtedly be thrilled. (I love SBUX, but after a food-free day it's the last place I'd go. Who says "I'm starving! A tart and some coffee would do me good"?!)
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It's not often online banners excite. Gone are the days a banner would evoke anything other than "Will that friggin' thing stop flashing?!" But Pittsburgh agency Brunner has created an ingeniously inventive banner campaign for Zippo which makes humorous use of the product's primary function.
In three version, a skyscraper banner is cut in two. The top half is a fake ad. The bottom is the actual ad for Zippo. The top reacts to the bottom and then the two come together to deliver more information about the lighter. You can see the three versions here, here and here.
When wandering through the aisle of any given grocery store, it's fairly easy to be overcome by the 6 billion types of cereal, 26 versions of Triscuits, 152 brands of potato chips and enough different kinds of ice cream to make one's head explode from brain freeze. So it is with welcome relief Masterfoods' Revels is keeping its flavors to a minimum.
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If you're into basketball and online poker, you might like this new game from Raid Bet called Can You Basket. In the game, you control the shooting of three animals and the net passes back and forth on the screen. The game's creators say it's a "viral game" so it's clear, even at this very early stage, it's going to be a stellar success because, after all, calling something viral makes it so.
Sapient, who, it seems, hasn't been in the news since the digital boom of 1999, is out with a sponsored study of chief marketing officers which resulted in the creation of a "top ten list for agencies of the future." At the risk of boring you with the details of a study that offers no new insight, here's the list:
1. Greater knowledge of the digital space. (Seriously? That's a stunner!)
2. More use of "pull interactions." (Oh yes they did. They created a new buzzword for social media)
3. Leverage virtual communities. (Apparently, none of the surveyed CMO lived through the Second Life debacle)
4. Agency executives using the technology they are recommending. (It would certainly be nice but, in most cases, it's never gonna happen. By definition, most senior management is disconnected from reality.)
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If you're in the business of selling items of, say, an "adult" nature such as lingerie, pornography and sex toys, you can't really expose your wares in your advertising. Beate Uhse AG found an ingenious way around this unfortunate fact with this directional billboard featuring four naked women with all the OMG-you can't-show-that-in-public parts neatly covered with an arrow.
The creativity - or the prurient persona of the work's creators - behind this one is to be applauded. Show the "product." Make it easy to find said "product." The work was created by Cayenne.
- Bill Clinton received a warm...and appropriate...welcome message from a local Denver strip club during the Democratic National Convention.
- Want to quit your job in style" Check out Droga5's Quit in Style site they created for the YoungGuns Award.
- Pingdom examined traffic for ten social media sites over the last year. Digg still tops the list but the piece points to some interesting trends.
- Agency GCI Group and game developer Launchfire Interactive have created several online games to help promote the Dell Latitude E-Family line of computers.
- Damn Receipt aims to achieve brand love by hooking up people and brands. The site allows people to upload a copy of a shopping receipt. Marketers can visit the site and pay the person.
New York Times journalist Matt Richtel has invented a storytelling format called the Twiller. The idea is for Twitter users to follow fictional characters -- which some already do anyway -- as they progress though a plot.
It's not the worst idea ever, and when my friend Atif first explained it to me I thought, "Hey, that sounds sort of like Memento."
Except Twillers are a long-term commitment. Richtel's been developing his plot for the last two months. Follow @mrichtel, tweet by grueling tweet, as he works out the narrative kinks.
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