Because 50-something Beverly Hills slingback-trollers need constant reminding about their divine responsibility to unwind the threads of age, Restylane releases this viral hopeful about the dangers inherent to having a cougar mom.
Do you really need to get work done to inspire a giddy 20-something to make out with you? Boys have harbored MILF and teacher fantasies since the beginning of time. It's not like little Bennie needed much convincing to fall into the arms of the sultry (and conventionally deformed) Mrs. Robinson.
If 50 is the new 22, does that make 40 the new 16? And if so, where does that put actual 20-somethings? Are they competing with fetuses?
With a mid-nineties style, Geocities-like site, Ogilvy Toronto has embarked upon a quirky journey for Kraft Canada HoneyComb Cereal. They've created a site called Bee Boy which follows the research of Barbara Sommerville as she explores Jane Goodall-style a boy who has seemingly been raised by bees. Awkward encounters with vibrating cell phones ensue.
We're inclined to say the use of decades-plus old design tries a bit too hard. Beside, it's been done many times before. It's not like Ogilvy is hiding the fact they're behind the project but with the available publishing tools at people's disposal today, it's near impossible to create a site like this unless you know raw HTML. Doing to just screams, "This was done by an an agency trying to make it look like it wasn't!" Perhaps creating a faux blog would have been a more timely approach. Having said that, the videos on the site are amusing enough and worth a look.
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.
- Wal-Mart CEO: I'm not a big fan of marketing. Oops, I meant advertising.
- It seems Microsoft might scoop up DoubleClick for a questionable $2 billion.
- More contextual foolishness. In a Herald Sun article about two Sudanese women getting stoned to death, an ad with a man and his son throwing stones appears. Don't you love the intelligence of computers?
- Michael Eisner has hooked up with MySpace which will broadcast his online series Prom Queen beginning April 2. Eighty ninety-second episodes will be released. Check out the teaser here.
- Musician Nathan Bennett has, in one day, written a song and created a video called On MySpace which thanks listeners for finding him on MySpace. He hopes to use it to promote himself.
- Even prostitutes advertise.
For all you lovers of Second Life, this Netherlands Kit Kat spot, created by UbachsWisbrun/JWT is just for you. So get off your ass. Turn off the laptop and get a Third Life...or at take a break with a Kit Kat bar.
While trolling our usual palette of sites we were unpleasantly distracted by a Hellraiser-esque video of a girl affixing clothespins to her face. The ad gave us an unpleasant start and after clicking onward we found ourselves at Boredom Hurts, allegedly founded by Colin Padden, first to pin and air the latest (and perhaps most common) reason to pop pills: boredom.
Clicking on a beaker marked "Cure" (very "Eat me" a la Alice in Wonderland) reveals a timer counting down four more days until the latest alternative to Xanax is revealed. Can't wait to see what genius is behind this campaign. We hope it's not Vista again.
Adworld: the next Big Pharma? Everybody from Earthlink to P&G is trying to push a diagnosis for a product cocktail.
Update: an Adrants reader reports a "view source" check on the site reveals Ford URLs. Bleh. The boredom connection is apt.
If you're interested in hearing some of the most twisted, blubber-filled blather explaining and defending PayPerPost, the service that pays bloggers to write positive posts for advertisers with questionable disclosure, you'll love this interview Jason Calacanis did with PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy. To hear Murphy say he has no problem reading a blog that contains paid posts that aren't disclosed as such and try to attach some kind of logic to it is one of the saddest moments in marketing history. PayPerPost has been a laughable business model from its start and to hear Murphy try to justify it is just painful and offensive. It's an affront to what limited credibility marketing still has in the eyes of people. Lines are already blurred enough and Murphy, it seems, wants lines to disappear completely.
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In early March, Hyundai began accepting applications for its Mash and Seek Challenge, a game somewhat similar to a game developed for Budget car rental, which will, on April 30, place 16 finalists in teams of four with a single photograph mashed up with the faces of the team members. The first team to find another will win four 200y Hyundai Elantras. Quizes will be administered every two weeks and those that answer correctly will be given clues to the location of other teams. Check it all out here.
Watch out, world - the Onion, our news source of choice, is leaping from the written word and taking on CNN with its own newscast: ONN, "faster, harder, scarier and all-knowing."
The Onion's Sean Mills gets strangely sober in his effort to explain: "[Comedy Central and Saturday Night Live] are parody shows, and this is serious news," he says. "There's no studio audience, and no one's in on the joke. What we are trying to create is a broadcast-quality newscast on the Internet."
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Apparently MySpace cracks down on super spammers. And they're damn stern about it, too: "Individuals who try to spam or phish our members are not welcome on MySpace," says chief security officer Hemanshu Nigam.
But we thought that adding madd friends and spamming the crap out of them was how you leveraged your networking potential? Now we're completely confused about what MySpace is for. We can't help but wonder when they'll crack down on provocative profile pictures whose subjects are self-consciously staring just left of the camera. Or 13-year-olds who blow our bulletins section up with surveys. Or weak local bands who tell us about every cocktail party they're strumming for.
Monsieur Wallace, the unlucky phisherman who'll be banned from Web 2.0 mecca and made an example for bulletin whores at large, runs a company called Feeble Minded Productions, which, while possibly not related to his spam game, is just sort of amusing in this context.
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