Dennis Publishing's lad-mag approach to publishing seems to have peaked, flattened and dropped in the past few years and MediaWeek reports the publishing company has retained media investment firm Allen & Co. to offload/restructure 31 international editions of Maxim, licensing deals with its Las Vegas casino, its steakhouses and lounges and even its line of fashion bedding. Men? Men! Where have you gone? How can you stray from the pioneer who mastered the art of nudity without really showing nudity? Traitors, we say!
Stuff, Blender and The Week are also in the mix with Dennis publishing possibly headed for neighboring unfortunate territory Emap's FHM navigated last December when it folded.
Adrants reader Marcos Rozen, editor of the Brazilian AutoData, sent us this scan of a Chevrolet ad that appeared on page two of the February 5 issue of Automotive News. In the upper right hand corner of the ad, interlocking metal rings are hanging from a fence. One has to wonder how an ad with imagery so similar to a competitor's logo can make it through the lengthy approval process without being caught. We're thinking someone caught some serious shit for this and furious calls were made to Automotive News asking the magazine to yank the ad. At least we hope so. It'd be sad to think any brand would allow this to happen.
Hmm. We wonder how effective an ad campaign is if you have to read the agencies description of it on their website to figure out what that little blue ball of fur is they placed in a campaign for a cookie seller. JWT in Kuwait (yes, we cover advertising news from all over the world) created a print campaign for their client Choowy Goowy, a cookie retailer that delivers cookies in jars to homes and offices.
We suppose we can't complain too much. If they used the actual Cookie Monster, they'd have to get into all that nasty licensing and royalty fee crap. Still, a ball of blue fur as a stand in for the Cookie Monster? A stretch to say the least. Oh wait, it's just a piece of his fur that fell off while he was chowing down the cookies. OK. Now we get it. Silly us. And ho long did we ave to stare at the ads to get that? Hopefully, our explanation will spare all of you the embarrassment of idiocy we just went through.
You can't buy publicity like the kind that comes with an appearance in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue or on the publication's Swimsuit 2007 site. We never thought of the iPod and a piece of clothing but we rather like how model Marisa Miller wears it in this photo. Can you imagine a Zune here instead of an iPod? We thought not.
It's our strong feeling that this ad (via Ichlache) is probably not real, but it vibes like the type of thing Durex would do (particularly outside these fine United States) and it gets the point across in a way that makes our own mouths hurt. The copy reading "Really Big..." at bottom left? Totally unnecessary.
Ow.
- Copyranter saw Dakota Fanning in Vogue ad for Marc Jacobs and marvels at the intriguing coincidence between her recent movie in which she gets raped and the ad in which she, according to Copyranter, looks like she's about to be raped.
- In preparation for its Year of the Pig, China has banned from the country's state-run CCTV all ads that show pigs.
- Even while mocking conversational marketing, Amanda Chapel offers up five reasons why the public relations industry has no place in the space.
- Despite not winning over critics with its Super Bowl ad, GoDaddy reports a 70 percent revenue increase and 37 percent new customer growth on Monday, the day after the Super Bowl as compared to the same Monday last year. Dismissing critics, Bob Parsons said, "This is not about winning an Oscar - it's about growing business." He's right.
- Penn of Penn & Teller is appearing in a Chinese Viagra ad.
- DTACK tape is lifting faces and saggy breasts in a unique campaign for a boring, commodity product.
- The World Association of Newspapers says the newspaper business is doing just fine and reports circulation of newspapers worldwide has increased 1o percent between 2001 and 2005 to 479 million copies.
This series of ads by JWT, Bogota promotes CityTV at the expense of beauty queens. The text reads "A beauty contest is about beauty, but you've got to draw the line somewhere."
Well, a pretty girl is a dime a dozen, and pageant girls know that to win a beauty contest they have to seem spotless on the inside too. So they come up with the most robotic, naive responses imaginable, which happen to be really awesome fodder for ads. The quote at left is a response to the question, "Where would you like to travel and why?" And one ad about the pope and Mother Theresa just killed us. Adverbox has more.
We've seen plenty of domestic violence ads, but this campaign actually makes us cringe. For Women's Aid, agency Grey London paints bruises onto celebrity faces and plasters them far and wide, hoping people would look, recognize, gasp in horror and decide to get comfortable with talking about their own secret bruises.
Granted there are some conversations that started out taboo and are now part of the public tell-all, like routine plastic surgery. But domestic violence is a deeply personal, humiliating affair, almost always entangled in feelings of love, loyalty and fear of stigma. We doubt any one series of visually traumatizing campaigns will help start a casual discourse about it in a public space. And in the States, you actually do need to have a bruise before you can even report anything. Kind of defeats the purpose, right?
AdPunch has more images if you want to take a look.
While those in the NFL might take issue with this Nissan Super Bowl good luck ad which uses a roman numeral style that looks very similar to this year's Super Bowl logo design, we really like the approach. We're not sure this ad actually appeared anywhere but we're told it was created by Curt Detweiler and his team at TBWA\CHIAT\DAY LA. Here's a second version of the ad.
We are told these are bed ads from a Brazilian bedmaker. The images carry no logo and our source does not know who the brand is. But, they are too good to share and done in a way only Brazilians can do. Enjoy them all here.
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