You can look at this Firebrand video promoting its Road to Monday Super Bowl program this week as being somewhat comical in its efforts to portray the insanity in which we all engage regarding Super Bowl ads. Or you can look at it as a lame effort, cheesily produced with the unattainable goal of getting people to actually care about advertising. Of course, if there were any time of year the average Joe would care about advertising, it would be surrounding the Super Bowl.
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Is there such a thing as tanking a press release, hoping no one will pick it up and make fun of it? No luck of that here today folks. It might be Martin Luther King day but we're still strapped to our crappy, back-breaking, sorry-ass chair dishing out content for the rest of you unlucky souls working today while your bosses are enjoying the day off.
Anyway. here we go. Firebrand (the hottest spots from the coolest brands, ya know) is pleased to announce what it's dubbed "The Holiest Day in Advertising," occurring February 4th. On that day, Firebrand will showcase the best of this year's Super Bowl spots.
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If you like sending your friends those customized promotional videos, then here's another one. It's not anywhere near as freaky as that Dexter promotion that targeted the recipient with a personalized message from a serial killer but it's not bad. It's for the new AMC show Breaking Bad which is a bout a guy who gets diagnosed with terminal illness and turns to selling meth to insure he can provide his family enough money to live on after his death. Check it out here.
Maybe we're stupid. Maybe we're dumb. Maybe we're old school but we simply can't understand why the creators of Firebrand believe it will amount to anything more than a great resource for the ad community to see each other's commercials. Really. Do you know anyone outside of advertising that would actively seek out a website or a cable channel to view commercials, the very thing they are so blissfully skipping with their DVRs? Please. Tell us. We want to meet one of these gluttons for punishment.
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With the season finale of Mad Men behind us it's time to award a few lucky Adrants readers some Mad Men schwag. Earlier this week we asked readers to identify in which episode the Roger Sterling character poured himself and glass of milk and added a bit of Smirnoff to it. The correct answer was episode seven and the lucky winner who guessed correctly is Janice Navea. Janice will take home a beautiful coffee table book filled with ad campaigns from the sixties and, in addition, a Mad Men branded martini shaker.
Four other lucky winners will become the happy owners of the Mad Men branded martini shaker. Those winners are Craig Peters, Kevin Dugan, Jordan Farkas and Patrick who has no last name. The winners have been notified and their prizes will arrive soon.
Congratulations to all. We're happy we could offer up a bit of advertising nostalgia to a few lucky readers.
Ok, so it's an over the top dramatization but you have to admit that presentation Mad Men's Don Draper gave to Kodak for the Carousel slide projector was brilliant. You wish you gave presentations like that more often. Come on. Admit it. You know you do. That Kodak moment was the defining moment of the season finale of AMC's Mad Men which, despite critical debate, has turned out to be a great show - good enough for AMC to renew it for another season.
During the episode we also find out up and coming creative Peggy Olsen was promoted from secretary to Junior copywriter (no small feat for a women in the early sixties one must admit) and that she's pregnant and didn't know it! Or just denied it. The father? Pete Campbell? Did enough time elapse between their office dalliance earlier in the season or is the father someone else? Intriguingly, Peggy was promoted by Don to work on the Clearasil account which Pete, through his wife's rich family connections, just snagged. Needless to say, he's being painting as the whipping boy, emasculated by his family, stomped on by his boss and forced to suffer - oh the horror - the indignity of working with a woman!
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We're going to make this really easy. Mostly because we're just simple like that and because we don't want to pull you away from the foosball table or that cute intern's cubicle for too long. If you watch AMC's Mad Men and you like it, we're offering you a chance to win a coffee table book full of 1960's advertising and a Mad Men branded martini shaker. One Grand Prize winner will get both. Four others will get the martini shakers.
To become eligible to win, all you have to do is tell us in which episode sneak peek (they're all right here) the Roger Sterling character had his morning glass of milk with Smirnoff. That's it. That's all you have to do. Send your answer to madmen@adrants.com and we'll enter you in the drawing to win. We'll announce the winners Friday following the season finale this Thursday night.
We think it's perfectly fine for someone working in the advertising industry to dislike the AMC series Mad Men and to share that opinion with the industry at large. But, when the second sentence of that opinion reads, "I got through about 10 minutes of it before I changed the channel, trying not to squint as I yawned so I could see what was on the latest episode of Dirty Jobs," the next five paragraphs, which contain blatherings about how the show should be more realistic to industry's "magical" era, become baseless.
For someone to write a review of a television show, which has been on the air for at least 12 weeks, after only having watched the first ten minutes of the premiere episode is half-witted at best and most assuredly irresponsible journalism. McKee Wallwork Cleveland Partner and Creative Director Bart Cleveland is the half-wit who brings us wacky commentary such as, "what I really wanted it to be more like was Mad Max. I wanted the hero to be a little off his rocker about doing great work. I wanted to see him threaten to jump out a window to sell a bagel ad." Mad Max? Oh yea. That'd be an accurate portrayal of what we do.
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Two. Count them people. Two! There will now be two shows on television focusing exclusively on the world of advertising. The first, as we all know, is AMC's Mad Men. The second, is, yes, Truth in Advertising, which will begin shooting in October and air on TNT. The show will be set in the fictitious Chicago agency Rothman, Greene & Moore - which sounds so very much like the mission of most agencies: rob their green and more - and star Eric McCormack who previously starred in NBC's Will & Grace. McCormack will take on the role of VP and art director.
Joining McCormack will be Tom Cavanaugh who will play the role of co-creative and friend to McCormack. The show follows McCormack's promotion to creative director and how he, as a nice guy, must navigate the tricky maze of the cover-your-ass agency world.
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We really wonder if people do their homework before launching what they believe will become something akin to the next YouTube. The idea of commercials as content has been done many times before and has failed each time. However, the recently launched Firebrand doesn't seem to care and believes its offering of the "coolest" commercials served up MTV VJ-style will connect "consumers directly with their favorite brands in an integrated environment." How many billions of time have we heard that before?
We tried really hard not to laugh when Firebrand CEO Roman Vinoly said, "We program TV spots like a DJ spins music in a club. There is a rhythm and flow to it." In an attempt to spin Firebrand as something other than a massive database of commercials, Vinoly adds, "On Firebrand, you'll see more car chases, explosions, gags, drama, heroes, Oscar-winning actors, directors and producers in an hour than in a month of HBO." Right, dude. They're still fucking commercials. Not The Sopranos.
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