- Christiania Spirits is hosting a billboard competition. Finalists will be judged on the company's guiding principles known as Purism. OK then.
- A recent ad in the Economist promoting South Korea's Gwangyang as a business center used the Calgary skyline to do so.
- AOL has plans to acquire behavioral ad network Tacoda. The company will use Tacoda's targeting capabilities to improve its advertising offering.
- On the eve of Saatchi's new red pigtail guy commercial, Improv Everywhere is staging a faux protest claiming the ads unfairly represent red heads.
- AdFreak says Microsoft's new Live Derby 2007 game which promotes Live Search doesn't do much more than prove Microsoft is uncool and is still good at crashing.
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Girls. Plaid pleated school girl skirts. Knee socks. Mops. Yes, that last one is correct. Only in Japan do you find these wonderfully odd combinations. Apparently, it's to promote a television drama called Life. All this courtesy of Flickr user antjeverena.
To promote the Red Bull-sponsored Air Race in London, a 120,000 square foot banner, designed by Ministry of Experience, was painted on the grass just 150 below where passing aircraft enter and leave Gatwick airport, the country's second largest. It took 1,230 liters of paint (biodegradable, of course), seven people and 210 man hours to create the message.
We thought this campaign for bus drivers was cute. Considering we never saw anything besides MDUSD or some other such initials taking up (wasted!) space on the sides of our school buses, we think they'd definitely catch the roving soccer mom's eye. (Beware - she is an aggressive driver.)
And seriously: bus drivers make $16.25 an hour? What were we doing in retail all those years? We could have been in big yellow buses, navigating roads and paper airplanes, sitting on dirty shock-ready plastic seats, eyeing the bully who keeps pushing freshmen out the window, crying ourselves to sleep ... oh, never mind.
Aw, this is cute. Perhaps still high off its accolade as best retail outdoor advertising of 2005 for its car-crushing billboard muffin, Boone Oakley (for client Bloom supermarket) has announced its prized pastry has been "stolen."
In exchange for news about the muffin's whereabouts, one lucky snitch gets a year's worth of free muffins (of normal-muffin-size), as well as a cash reward.
The morose missing poster is at left. Check out their appeal in the extended entry.
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Usually we think it's really cool when an ad appropriates some every day object to deliver its message, but in the case of coffee and steaming manholes, the collaboration is less than savory.
The text on this one-year-old Folger's ad reads, "Hey, City That Never Sleeps. Wake up. Folgers."
Dude, can you imagine walking over that manhole and going, "WTF is that damp dirty mist that's just accosted me? Oh wow, it is a giant cup of Folger's coffee." The very thought drives us straight into the arms of Starbucks.
Well, no, not even. Maybe Jamba Juice. The thought of coffee a la manhole just puts us off the whole idea.
[Ed: Pardon this story. Our co-Editor just woke up from a year long nap and forgot to restart her RSS reader. She was roundly chastised in our daily coffee klatch this morning and she promises not to nap so long ever again.]
Now that all the Danica hype has cooled, Motorola, fashionably late, slaps her on her very own MOTO DANICA billboard, which reminded us less of Motorola and more of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
If a Motorola-branded Danica Power Ranger did exist, we hope its (presumable) drag-racing powers would be slightly more dependable than Motorola's mobile phone prowess, because if not, that would be a major case of RAZR burn.
We thought we'd seen the last of the (oft spoofed) (red) campaign but on the streets of New York, the red plague remains alive and well.
It made its most recent appearance in this Converse ad at left, touting (red) products as weapons of change. For those who can't read the blurry photo, the ad says, "Buy (Product) Red stuff. Join the movement. The time is now. Do something."
For a bold headline like "Weapon of Change," that follow-up entreaty leaves much to be desired. The only thing we feel genuinely compelled to do is trash the copywriter who put that desperate string of sentences together.
We're not really sure what Bravo was trying to do here. Maybe they thought it would be clever to try nailing ad dollars and viewers in one fell swoop.
With that in mind we get this ad showcasing The Affluencers, a packaged Gen Y boy and girl sporting all accoutrements of cool, including a love of Bravo. The bottom reads, "Most affluent + most influential + most engaged viewers = THE AFFLUENCERS," followed by the tagline, "Watch what happens when you buy Bravo."
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With increased communication speed and higher expectations of quick gratification, courtesy of the Digital Age, come casualties.
And if Chase Bank is any indication, those casualties come in literacy. Or maybe just vowels. It's hard to say. Maybe we should just leap ahead, cut out all the extra letter-looking things (uh, consonants, right?) and go back to hieroglyphs. We're halfway there anyway.
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