While the '90s can't yet be packaged vintage, the '80s are fair game. This spot for the Dell XPS m1330 by Smoke & Mirrors and Mother brings us back to the stark black-and-whites, the bad music and the inaccessible pre-fembot women that so characterized that most disastrous of times for fashion.
Witness while a bunch of immaculately-dressed '80s gamines put together an oversized engine that then slides into the frame of a Dell XPS.
If Dell insists on pursuing every throwback avenue it can (note multi-color madness here), this effort is at least a decent one.
The allure of sex, drugs and rock n' roll continue to outlive most of its human origins. This is the only explanation we can pinpoint for VH1's brand-new show The Rock Life, which dissects the sun-drenched world of Malibu-based rock band Whitestarr.
We can only guess that this is going to be a less masterful version of Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, which covered the slow ascension of the somewhat-more-believable band Stillwater, through the eyes of a teenage journalist-to-be.
Check out the show intro here. This masterful oeuvre was put together by Version2.
The song is the band's own. Note influences of the Stones and the Beatles, and - by gad, could it be? - possibly LFO.
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- The Denver Egoist hopes to "promote creative growth in Denver" while at the same time admitting Denver is "conceptually stunted."
- Muchmor Media, an independent Canadian web publisher, has launched mymuchmor.com a social network for naturalized Canadians and the 270,000 newcomers who arrive in Canada every year.
- Cynopsis reports Merv Griffin, creator and producer of game show hits Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, died yesterday. He was 82.
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Witness here the unnecessary loss of a whole minute.
Duller than dishwater, man. Put together for P&G by Leo Burnett, Puerto Rico.
New Balance, which hopes for a brand revival with help from its parent company Payless (we don't see it happening), tapped Almighty, Boston to help them push their brand-spankin'-new NB Zip shoe technology.
We're not really sure what the NB Zips do and aren't really digging the idea of foraging through the requisite (and probably pointless) web destination, which has sprung up, all Flashed-up and interactive-like, to explain the mystery.
The ad, in which a potentially addled boy brings roadkill back to life by shocking it into consciousness with his shoes, has us hoping New Balance will come out with a Taser footwear variant of this promising technology.
Chances are, though, that "NB Zips" are really just a revival of those horrifying LA Gears that did so badly when we were kids.
We can't even count the number of times we've been dragged to some canine haven by an overzealous pet, so this new ad by Petco, brought to us by good old Brentter, definitely struck a sappy chord.
We were jarred back into reality by the voice and branding message at the end, though. It just didn't jive well. The guy sounded like a hard-boiled narrator for an energy drink - you know, like this, except ever so slightly less intense.
That bold-ass font didn't help matters either.
Advertising Age drew some attention to an effort by Levi's to strengthen its clout in the gay community by producing an ad twice - once for the straight community, and once for the gay one. The gay one ran exclusively on MTV's Logo network (which, unless it branches out, sounds like it's probably getting less play than the hetero version).
As always with Levi's the production is clean but the concept is wrongfully credited for being the first to do the gay/straight coin toss with human beings.
Orbitz, noted by Ad Age for having done this with marionettes, also produced a set of thematically gay and straight ads with human beings.
Oops.
We won't fight the notion TV needs all the help it can get when it comes to program development so we're holding out high hopes for The Storyteller Challenge, a TV pilot competition presented by MySpace, FOX and the Producers Guild of America. The competition, hosted on MySpaceTV (which currently makes no mention of the competition), will award two winning entrants $25,000 and a chance at an development deal with FOX. MySpace members will comment on the 5-7 minute entries, vote for their favorites, suggest plot lines and generally play television critic.
First it was Doritos commercials. Now it's full blown TV shows. What's next, movies? Oh wait, we had Project Greenlight and that didn't go over so well.
On a mission to benignly molest any and all Sci-Fi classics we may have placed on the altars of our souls, DirecTV tears into the scene in Aliens where Ripley fights the alien queen.
In this appropriation she's really peeved because the queen won't leave her in peace to watch her DirecTV.
Nice touch with Sigourney Weaver who, according to Adfreak, joins William Shatner, Pamela Anderson and Charlie Sheen in the annals of DirecTV's illustrious ad history.
Post Kill Bill, Daryl Hannah doesn't seem to be doing much, so who wants to bet a cookie that the next ad is a Bladerunner nab?
We can't shake the sense that there's something really dated - think late '90s - about these mod new Sony VAIO ads (1, 2, 3) by Ignited for Latin America.
Oh, wait. We just figured out why. 1998 was the year Apple came out with its snazzy pick-a-swatch gimmick for the clear and colorful new iMacs, starting with Bondi Blue. That was really hot for back then, but, oh, we need more than color these days to save a flailing brand.
But assuming the product actually were imaginative, the ads also leave something to be desired, and the slogan, "Like no other," was clearly not the result of a "Eureka!" moment.
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