Trusted Voice Used to Herd Generation Next into Higher Ed

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CollegeClickTV.com hopes to encourage more kids to get a college education -- and possibly get into football? -- by broadcasting soothing pro-college messages, spoken by President Obama, on network TV.

Hear everyone's favourite political personality wax poetic about the merits of an education -- and football -- while a static image reads, "And now a message about... COLLEGE ...the best investment that you can make." CollegeClickTV's URL appears at the end of each clip.

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by Angela Natividad    Feb-26-09    
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Commercials, Television



OMG! An Agency Won Some Business!

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Fallon informs us they've been placed on Nestle Beverage's agency roster and will begin work for the client immediately.

Nestle Beverages VP Alfonso Gonzalez said, "From our earliest meetings Fallon brought insight and understanding to the new world of beverage marketing. Fallon seems to have a grasp on today's consumer who expects more from a brand than a simple transaction. We expect Fallon to create value beyond brand communications."

You go, Fallon.

by Steve Hall    Feb-25-09    
Topic: Agencies, Brands



Man Seeks Credit for 'Hyundai Sunday' Stroke of Genius

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On Super Bowl Sunday Hyundai launched "Angry Bosses," an ad that depicted corpos all over the world angrily shouting Hyundai! in various states of aneurysm-inducing rage.

At the end, a calm voiceover goes, "Win one little award, and suddenly everyone gets your name right. It's 'Hyundai', like 'Sunday'."

Never mind the screamers in the video. That last line, "It's 'Hyundai', like 'Sunday'," has incited the righteous indignation of at least one man, "Bernard in CT," who believes the idea of rhyming "Hyundai" with days of the week was his idea.

And damnit, he deserves the cred for it.

Letter and ad below.

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by Angela Natividad    Feb-25-09    
Topic: Brands, Commercials, Opinion, Television



Here's The One Time 'Go to Hell' Can Be Used to Incite Purchasing Behavior.

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For Dante's Inferno, an Electronic Arts video game, G-Net Los Angeles got into bed with Psyop. The natural result is an ad we suspect might be more lush than the game itself.

We could be wrong, though. Any English major will tell you Dante had a helluva good time describing Hell, and the work he did merits equal dedication from agencies, production firms and game developers alike. Still, this is just one more reason why future generations will be reading fewer books: you think CGI's had its way with women? It's bringing literature to its knees.*

Going back to the ad: like we said, it's gorgeous, but probably could've done without the toothy worm things. It's just too dental-visit-gone-wrong. And while we understand every good Hell scenario needs a bad-ass horned demon master, the one here looks too much like a Balrog.

Once something invites a comparison to LotR, even accidentally, it's gonna have trouble standing up on its own. Even if it is the bloody Inferno.

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by Angela Natividad    Feb-25-09    
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Commercials, Online, Television



If They're Gonna Be Plotting Your Demise, Better to Eat Them While Sober

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Belin Crazy Rings/Tubes/Starfish are essentially drinking snacks. We'd call them beer nuts but the branding material reads "l'apero cingle" -- aperitif snacks. Classy.

Anyway, to best target its market of casual at-home cocktailers, the French company is broadcasting this ad from its website and in banners on sites like MySpace. Our best guess is that they thought, "Drunk people engage in slightly malevolent, poorly thought-out hijinks all the time, so what if our snacks did too?!", and went zealously from there.

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by Angela Natividad    Feb-25-09    
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Commercials, Online, Strange, Television, Video



Triscuit + Kraft = No Snackrifice Necessary

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We have it on good authority that Nabisco's started circulating a new slogan, "Why Snackrifice?", to promote Triscuits -- and, to a lesser degree, Kraft cheese (its perfect mate).

Annoyingly, video searches for "triscuit snackrifice" or "snackrifice" yielded little more than videos produced by people that should not own cameras and a ton of Neopets-related stuff, respectively.

However, we did find a Why Snackrifice? page on NabiscoWorld, which promotes Triscuit (and Kraft!)'s health merits and pocketbook-friendliness. Also, there's a really rad shot of two women snacking responsibly while sitting in ecstatic postures normally reserved for yogurt eating. Scandale!

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by Angela Natividad    Feb-25-09    
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Online, Promotions, Strange



Ashton Tweets, S/Urge, Libel Revisited and the ow.ly-Twitter Hustle

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- zOMG: grainy shots of Ashton and Demi! This cinches it: following celebrities on Twitter is almost as rad as following them around in real life. (Diggin' how the NYT actually quotes Kutcher's tweets, as if to prove THIS IS ALL REAL.)

- Gmail went down early this morning, and it's like the universe exploded.

- We actually ate this.

- BrightKit, a management/metrics dashboard for multiple Twitter accounts, changed its name to HootSuite and went pro-bono. (That is, it's no longer trying to charge a fee for services.) To compensate, it's selling display ad space above webpages whose links are shortened via ow.ly (HootSuite's version of tinyURL) -- meaning you could, in theory, make money (or build brand awareness...?) by spreading Twittersphere link-love.

- Fake Steve Jobs makes "wah" noises over monetizing blogging.

- Coca-Cola's Urge looks suspiciously like Coca-Cola's Surge. Remember the aftertaste on that stuff?

- Wedding the Sex and the City model to kitschy "Cathy": just one more lovechild the universe didn't need. Especially in the name of Baked Lay's.

- "True statements can be libelous if published maliciously." Wait ... what?!

by Angela Natividad    Feb-24-09    
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Celebrity, Events, Online, Social



Sony. Bravia. Zoetrope. (Don't Act Like You Didn't Just Reflexively Twitch Your Cursor.)

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If you've seen one Sony Bravia ad, you've got the blueprint for all of them: seize upon the easiest way to illustrate a product's raison d'etre, then magnify, until the crowd whose attention you so wistfully coveted has been submerged by your idea.

"Zoetrope" is no different -- and just as compelling as its predecessors. (See "Bunnies," see "Thread," see "Bubbles.")

For Sony's Motionflow Bravia TV, Fallon/London built the world's largest zoetrope: a rotating montage of static images viewed through small slits. (See? More fodder for Guinness.)

We got teaser material for the work last December. It was filmed a month prior in Venaria, near Italy's Turin. View the spit-shined final product below.

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by Angela Natividad    Feb-24-09    
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Commercials, Events, Good, Guerilla, Online



World Almanac Explains Why David Cook's on the Cover

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And it's exactly as boring as the title of the post suggests. The sad part is, this video is the most popular of World Almanac's two (and counting!) attempts to go viral.

We'd rather watch the Sonic Hearing infomercial 42 times. And on that same note, we'd rather peruse the infinitely-less-useful Guinness Book of World Records than pick up the World Almanac.

It's hardly the same value proposition, but both are relative time-wasters and have about the same chance of falling to the wayside. The difference is, pop culture is loaded with people and advertisers that are still going out of their way to get into Guinness.

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by Angela Natividad    Feb-24-09    
Topic: Bad, Brands, Campaigns, Online, Promotions, Video



Little Rings Right About Boost Mobile's UNwrong'D

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Remember Boost Mobile, the Nextel spin-off that spent the last three years molesting street culture under the tagline "Where You At?"

Hip-hop's run out of milkable teats so Boost's taken shelter in the ironic, determinedly awkward humor of suburbia. And Skittles commercials.

"Coroner" and "Bicycle" explain how Boost Mobile rawks, not because the value proposition is good (would you rather have "no hidden fees" or play iPhone Ocarina?), but because some things out there are worse. The problem is, you're left with little more than nausea over the still-lingering memories of unkempt armpit hair and breakfast burritos a la Poe. You will have absolutely no memory of Boost's merits.

Which I guess is how it should be.

180LA's responsible for the ads, which fall under a campaign called UNwrong'D. AdFreak's right. That apostrophe -- the whole concept, really -- is like cyanide.

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by Angela Natividad    Feb-24-09    
Topic: Bad, Brands, Campaigns, Commercials, Online, Television