This past Sunday during Desperate Housewives Rembrandt Oral Care aired a commercial for its long-running and very pretty Brilliant Mouth campaign. It's available on YouTube so you can check it out here.
The use of romance to hawk hygiene isn't new; Listerine has been doing it as far back as the '50's, admonishing conscientious teenage boys to check their breath twice before that big date. And don't even get us started on Lysol, which used to be a douche (the feminine kind, not this kind).
So this is a contemporary take on a very old idea. The imagery is better than in the '50's though, and we like that Rembrandt takes a grown-up approach instead of trying to compete with all those overgrown Crest Kids. We are way over sparkly gum-flavoured toothpaste.
For Valentine's Day Auntie Anne's unleashes a slew of websites into the ether, kind of like Office Max did last December. Each features some weird animation, a video or an invitation to expound on love's meaning. Plus each e-card has a coupon for a free pretzel.
We can think of few things we want more on Feb 14 than supple golden curves so we can hardly complain. And we know people under a budget will probably appreciate the free pretzel provision. The sites for the campaign are:
www.aLoveYouCanCountOn.com
www.FunkyValentine.com
www.CupidsDiet.com
www.LoveIsForTheDogs.com
www.ItWasWorthIt.com
www.aPairOfMonkeys.com
http://www.whatisloveanyway.com/
http://www.shessotwisted.com/
http://www.threedownfouracross.com/
Is it just us or are people idiots when it comes to navigating to popular websites? A recent Hitwise study featured on eMarketer found MySpace to be the top search term for 2006. Also on the list are ebay, Yahoo and Mapquest. Are we the only ones that realize all you have to do is add a .com to these popular names rather than search for them? Hmm. I suppose somewhere in the world, there are still people who haven't heard of the Internet either. Oh well. At least Hitwise is making some money with this nonsense.
If you're a small publisher and you want to insure you are getting the most revenue you possibly can from your advertisers, you might want to check out the just launched RMX Direct from Right Media, a service that pits inventory-bidding ad networks against each other and serves the highest paying one to the publisher. Automatically. Currently, RMX Direct has nine ad networks in its system but publisher can add as many others as they want and pit them against the existing networks for bidding.
We'll admit it's one of the few sites we've been to that actually does a good job explaining what the company does and how it can benefit the parties involved: advertiser, publisher and ad network. While we haven't used the product, if you're trying to maximize revenue as a publisher, it sure sounds like something one should check out.
According to Advertising Age, marketing for female arousal sex products will be jumping in '07 with ramped-up campaigns for K-Y Jelly's warming fluid and Zestra's arousal oil.
The act of sex in 2007 sounds like it'll be both exhausting and mildly frustrating. With men on Viagra and women oiling up as if for competitive sports it's a wonder we won't all die of hyper-achieverism come 2008. We hear Microsoft has a cure for that though. More importantly, does this mean our spam rate is going to double?
After Bob Garfield demolished them for disseminating unrealistic online puffery, we're impressed by Match.com's latest initiative, which takes a more intelligent approach than vapid sex-obsessed competitor True. The aim is to draw warmth to Match.com from people who still pan online dating as creepy, oversexed or are simply just too shy.
It came as a surprise when we learned not everybody is won by a sex-based approach. What do you mean sex doesn't always sell? Of course it does. That's why the phrase is "Sex sells" and not "Sex only sometimes sells" or "Sex just sells if you're living an ongoing abnormal state of puberty." No. It always sells.
Campaign by New York-based Hanft Raboy & Partners.
Pjotro of the musical bodysuit is back to promote the Nokia NSeries phones (which, yes, store music). This time he's got competition, the freestyling DJ eFFeX.
The pitch goes, both guys think they're music. (We're not really sure what that means.) You get to manipulate the battle between them thereby proving you, in fact, are music. And hopefully this will make you want to buy an NSeries phone, which means you may have to forego the media miracle cure coming out this summer.
Trailer is here. The campaign was created by Sweden's FarFar.
To celebrate its quirky Japanese roots Asics presents its Fabre74 Onitsuka model in the style of ad-idolatry: with a 1.5-meter sculpture of an Onitsuka Tiger sneaker made of warring elements of Japanese culture. This is part of Onitsuka's Made of Japan effort, which seeks to challenge ideas about the Japanese pop-world with, uh ... a hodgepodge of its icons.
The giant shoe is a collabo between StrawberryFrog, LA-based artist Gary Baseman, and Dutch photographer Marcel Christ, all of whom are about as Japanese as the little Russian toy who gets excluded from the fun and games at the end of the promo video. The sculpture will appear in print, online and at venues in London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona and Zurich.
Not to sound silly (as if we ever do) but we continue to harbor quiet fears about our toys coming to life and tormenting us.
You know those casual-sounding recorded calls that say you should refi your house? Now you too can act like you don't have time to make calls yourself.
Eidoserve presents Abby Me, who does all the dirty work for you. Punch in the number of who you want to call and write a whimsical message. Seconds later a pleasant but eerie female voice will call the receiver from your number and repeat what you scribbled out. It's sure to irritate everyone you know and make you feel more important than you are.
Abby makes good with simple phrases like "Hello, I want to have your babies" but not so well with $10 words like "Supercalifragilisticexpialidoceous." Well, an assistant who at least tries to convey nonsense with a straight face is always a keeper. Best of all, she doesn't charge anything. Why can't most interns be that awesome?
Last October, used car dealer franchise CarMax launched a Boone/Oakley-created television campaign which, among other things, featured a 16 year olf gorl freaking out at her father for buying her a car that was the wrong color. Flash forward to January and a multi-video campaign for Domino's pizza cribs the idea with, yes, a daughter freaking out when her father presents her a car that is not the color she wanted. So much for innovation.
To be fair, the Domino's campaign extended the idea by following the video of the freak out with an apology video from the teen, a video of her explaining she was going to sell the car to someone for $9.99 and - hold your breath - yet another explaining how she got a better deal at Domino's with its Anything Goes Deal.
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