The sad horse at left is the fruit of a Mentos Gum campaign that brings literal meaning to "pop art," leveraging the delicious feeling we get when we poke holes through bubble wrap - or, in this case, gum out of tinfoil.
We dragged our cursor around for awhile before artistic inclination failed us. An Adrants reader notes, and we agree, that it leaves one wanting for a satisfying noise. Although granted the sound of tearing tinfoil is not as exciting as a momentous bubble wrap pop.
Following its long running strategy of attracting men with the most powerful aphrodisiac, women, and its latest Bom Chica Wah Wah theme, Lynx, with help from the Lynx Mynxes, has launched Lynx Players and the Bom Chicka Wah Wah Rally - some kind of flirting contest. Anyway, it's all about bodacious babes and Florida sunshine. Oh, and, apparently, some deodorant gets sold along the way.
Advertising educates for better or worse, and per the CGM trend we're finding everybody wants to be an advertiser. With this formula in mind, UK-based Cake Group and climate change charity Global Cool throw together Scene Won, a user-generated video competition with a global warming theme. The contest closes on June 30, and the winner nails £5k.
The videos are the usual fare but what's interesting is the discussion they spark. Is global warming really a problem? Opposing views butt heads for the same marketing space.
If we were Scene Won we'd give the £5k to one of the no-global-warming groups for purely aesthetic reasons just to throw people off-balance. Then you'd have a discussion.
Hmm. Let's think. How can we launch a campaign that celebrates the advancement of women and their transformation from refrigerator advertisement decoration to glass-ceiling breaking CEOs and Presidential hopefuls? Ooo. Ooo...we got it! A campaign that rests solely on hair color and pits blondes against brunettes in an intelligence challenge. Now that's sure to remove any doubt we'd be positioning women as objects of desire, right? Sunsilk thinks so.
An Adrants reader sums up this Northwestern Mutual site perfectly, writing, "It won't make me buy their financial products but it's fun." Visit Wreck Your Worries, type in a worry and choose from four tools you can then use to destroy your worries. It was very theraputic but we'd agree with the reader. After we finished hammering away all our daily worries, we just left. Yup, we didn't buy any life insurance. Not a bit.
Looking over our shoulder as we wrote, our blowup Bob Garfield doll, standing stoically but mildly deflated from all the darts we've tossed while in the corner of our office, was heard saying, "Oh shut up Adrants! You guys are idiots! I know what you're all about! You'll do anything to piss people off with your lame-ass commentary!" OK. Sorry, Bob. We promise we'll read your Chaos Theory piece now. [Ed. To be clear, the real Bob Garfield didn't say this. He gets mad when you put words in his mouth so we thought we'd be clear on that point. OK? Good.]
We have a love/hate relationship with Candystand, whom we've reviewed so often we ought to be on their payroll.
We think they know it.
To fully leverage our weakness for time-wasting single-person games and sell us candy at the same time, they've come out with yet another such offering called Orbit Spherez. (Guess what candy they're pushing.) It merits a NSFW rating. Be careful.
Our only big beef: what's up with the laggage? We are not fans of laggage.
We're completely weirded-out by the T-Scan 2000 for Milwaukee's Best Light.
The TScan scans your tongue to gauge which beer is right for you. Because we're sharp as tacks, we didn't actually put our tongues on the screens, just clicked through the scanning process to the very end. But the system rejected us because it lacked sufficient tongue information. Okay, whatever. So we clicked through again. Again, insufficient tongue information, and could we please add pressure too?
OMGWTF, we said. So, ever so gingerly, we put our tongues on the monitor.
And still yielded no results.
And now our screen is wet.
We feel so douchey.
Apparently even movies want in on CGM. Paramount gets together with Eyespot to push a video mash-up contest for the Disney-fied Rear Window-esque film Disturbia starring Shia LaBeouf.
The promotions put heat on how well you know your neighbors and encourages a sensory mix of audio, visual effects and whatever else you can weave out of Final Cut Pro. Contest winners get an Xbox 360 because everybody already has an iPod and only spammy banners give iPhones away.
Commendably persistent in its quest to spark the libido of speed-freak co-eds (previous attempts one and two), Mazda throws the weight of some slightly-below-indy Canadian bands behind a new virtual driving game.
Created by Fuel Industries, the courses were shot on college campuses and university students can choose between three.
We played the game and it seemed promising until we realized the speed couldn't be adjusted (from what we could tell, anyway) and we didn't even have to mess with the right or left functions. Just keep pushing the forward button and the car turns for you. If only real-life cars were that smart. Oh wait, Lexus might be.
Learn something from Candystand, the branded-game pros, or even Nokia, who really struck gold with almost the same idea. In fact, it was made by the same people.
Ew, a sloppy seconds campaign. Not cute.
There's all kinds of time-wasters people can play online and there's innumerable ways for people to win money. There's also hundreds of mindless advertising awards show that offer up nothing more than pretty statues to collect dust in your office. Why not combine all this into something that's fun and involves people outside of the industry as well.
Dubbed existential advertising, Lost (the site, not the show) is a place where people can join, invite others and get creative in doing so. Instead of link-begging (which is all we're up to at this point, sadly), players are urged to come up with creative ways to invite people to the site. For each person that accepts an invitation, the inviter gets a point. If they don't get any points withing a 30 day period, they lose and they are out of the game. If them win, they get $5,000. Give it a try.
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