To convince people of the dangers of skin cancer, UK charity SKCin, with help from Rubber Republic, has launched ComputerTan, a fake company and website that purports to have developed a "revolutionary new way to help keep you looking healthy, young and attractive in the office."
The gist? ComputerTan makes it possible to get a tan from your computer monitor. Activating the free trial loads a cool, full screen tanning screen which, after a while, delivers the punchline...in the form of disgusting pictures of people with nasty skin cancer legions. Gross.
But, it works. The effort hopes to make people aware of the fact skin cancer kills up to five people each day in the UK. There's a mobile app and even a line of products supporting the effort.
An infomercial-style video placed on YouTube hopes to lure visitors to the site under the guise ComputerTan is the real thing.
- Here's a list of what has been dubbed The Top Five Most Socially Irresponsible Commercials od the 2009 Super Bowl.
- Collective Intellect has release a post-Super Bowl study examining the uses of social media during the game and found Pepsi to dominate the conversation with 19 percent share of voice. Adding Pepsi's SoBe and Doritos into the mix raises that figure to 40 percent. See a summary of the study here.
- Member's of AOL's FanHouse have chosen Coke's Picnic their favorite Super Bowl commercial followed by Budweiser's Fetch, Bridgestone's Moon Dancers, Budweiser's Clydesdale (unclear which one), Bridgestone's Potato Head, Doritos' Power of Crunch.
- New Media Strategies took a look at all the social media action that took place during the Super Bowl and created a report. There were 190,000 blog mentions and 49,000 tweets among other findings.
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Last Friday, with help from 180LA, Sony deployed an army of "living" mannequins across Manhattan. Chic gamines, harder around the eyeline than usual, were seen sitting at cafes, Grand Central Station and elsewhere, blogging and updating Facebook pages from their VAIO P Series devices.
The campaign also had a Fashion Week component: the dummies were dressed by designers aiming to promote their wares in conjunction with Sony's wee VAIOs.
Hmm. Plastic chicks with hot tech toys, expensive shoes and limited maneuverability. How on earth did anyone distinguish them from the other Sex and the City groupies?
And that's cool, because Grease called and wants its moves back. (Better give up the leather jackets, too.) Hostage swap, anybody?
Helpful cultural sidenote: that guy with the big white stuff around his head is not an angry mashed potato. It is God.
"Back in France," produced by Clipit and directed by Cedric Dubourg, is a sugary protest against Burger King's mid-'90s departure from French soil -- a tribute to how we've managed to enrich the developed world (and are working on the pending one) with our seductive meat patties. Also, it was short-listed at last year's Festival de Meribel. (BK, what do you really need Crispin for?)
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Each print ad in this Puma King series features a footballer (read: soccer-player) saturated in a theme shade, visually arresting imagery (three-headed dogs, eagles, dragons, elks) and the aforementioned tagline. See:
o Gold (at left)
o Black
o White
o Red
Diggin' the fantastical, slightly sinister four horsemen motif. It's such a romantic way of saying "our shoes come in many colours."
By the sublime Robert/Boisen & Like-minded/Copenhagen.
Last week a local news channel reported a major supplier of chicken wings would be shutting down, resulting in a shortage of one of the Super Bowl's tribute snacks.
For client Kraft, Euro RSCG acted fast, seizing the story and making it the subject of an online video.
The result, "Blago stole my chicken wings!", was uploaded to YouTube on Friday, just in time for the big game. The screamer you see there is ECD Bill Mericle.
Hoping to imply the chicken wings shortage is due to consumers hoarding Kraft Ranch Dressing (still our favourite artery-clogging condiment), an enraged Mericle drives by ex-Illinois gov Rod Blagojevich's house and claims HE'S to blame. And dude really gets into it. We kind of want to be his friend now.
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In "House of Cards," Lexus showcases its buttery engine and vibration absorbing capabilities with not one but many houses -- and towers and turrets and a single Parthenon -- of cards.
The mini-monuments are built over and around a jet-black Lexus, with final flourishes added by a concentric figure in jeans and wavy hair -- the kind of guy you'd expect might know something about cardplay -- just to prove the work is legitimately fragile.
As the narrator sets the stage ("What happens when you take one of the smoothest engines anywhere ... and add 88 separate measures to absorb vibrations?"), the engine starts, underscoring the punchline: "Absolutely nothing."
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To promote an office organization product line spearheaded by Peter Walsh, this OfficeMax outdoor campaign wryly de-clutters crows, pigeons and seagulls -- a billboard's many friends.
Heh. Clever. Also, we like the rubber band ball. It's friendly.
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For the first time in many years, the ad blogs didn't live blog the Super Bowl. The reason for the change? Simple. One word: Twitter. With at least four different hashtags (words that let you follow a particular Twitter stream), a cascading waterfall of real-time opinion flooded through for all to see. Thousands of people could live tweet their thoughts in 140 character bits instead of a few attempting to type 3,000 words a minute to publish three stories per ad break.
The Twitter stream we arranged along with AdFreak, AgencySpy and Adland was #superads09. It was near impossible to read every tweet but some information did bubble up. People liked the CareerBuilder spot. They liked the Pedigree ad. They liked the Hulu ad. The like all three Doritos ads. They liked Pepsi's Bob Dylan spot.
They hated both GoDaddy commercials. They hated H&R Block. They hated SoBe Life Water. They hated Toyota's Faces. There was debate over the Teleflora ad which not so subtly made fun of, shall we say, less that beautiful people and just how much backlash that spot might generate.
A service called Thummit asked Twitter users to give each ad a thumbs up or a thumbs down and tallied the results here. Oddly, Bridgestone topped the Thumbs Up list with its Hot Item spot. That was followed by the Doritos remote control spot, Coke's Heist and Monster.
Topping the Thummit Thumbs Down list were, no surprise, GoDaddy's Shower and and Baseball commercials. They were followed by Toyota Faces, H&R Block's Death and Taxes and Cheetos Chester the Cheetah.
Over at the USA Today Ad Meter, Doritos topped the list with Free Doritos (Crystal Ball) followed by Budweiser's Circus, Budweiser's Stick, Bridgestone's Potato Heads, Doritos' Power of the Crunch and Car's.com.
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- TIME's Super Bowl best and worst. If that feels a little constricting, see what the Twittersphere thought.
- Coke drops "Classic."
- DesegreGAYtion: easy to spread (a la Obey Giant), AND it packs max punch.
- Quick dry polish. Har.
- Analytics gets a little too personal. Oh wait! Be warned: THIS IS A SPOOF.
- Last Saturday Google search marked everyone as malware. Including itself. Awkward.
- A little bird pointed out that this Mammoth Mountain campaign looks a lot like something Keystone did last year. Oops. (Keystone's campaign, BTW, was by CULTIVATOR ADVERTISING & DESIGN.)
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