Andy Berndt, once of Ogilvy and now of Google, got up in front of a bunch of marketers last week and said, "Google is not starting an ad agency."
MarketingVox (i.e. me in less knee-slapping form) compares this statement to that made by Google's Alan Eustace pre-Android. You know the one: "We're not doing a mobile phone."
Google may not be starting an ad agency, but you don't have to start an ad agency to make life hard for ad agencies. (And hey, maybe that's just what you slackers deserve.)
One more time: "Google is not starting an ad agency." Think about everything that sentence leaves out.
Show of hands if you believe Andy.
For client Orange, the Alternative is doing that gesture-based advertising thing. Do a little hand-dance to bring news, film clips or music videos to your fingertips.
We see a less useful, but strangely more amusing, version of this technology every time we go to Virgin Records in Times Square, the home of that Nirvana floor display where you can step on or kick projected babies and bubbles. (It's actually more benign than it sounds.)
With what Advertising Age calls Hamlet-like indecision, Hyundai has decided to keep its ads in the Super Bowl after all.
Here's our brief coverage of its flirtation with pulling out. (We hate that!)
AdAge dubs the move "a most unlikely ploy to drum up pre-Super Bowl buzz." Replace "most unlikely" with "feeble," and you've got our opinion.
Not to tear open old wounds, but waffling was what lost Kerry the 2004 election. (Say what you will about Bush, at least we always know where he stands. To our endless, purgatory-like chagrin.)
And going back to that useful Hamlet reference, didn't everybody in that play die because he spent such a long time caressing his volatile emotions?
We spent some time in the Philippines last week. Good news for old-school brand goliaths: free promotion is alive and well alongside freeways and in living spaces (at the same time!).
That, and offshore telesales. We're in the money now, baby.
Everyone bitched and McDonald's listened. Under pressure from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and 2,000 angry parents, the fast food giant haspulled the advertising it had placed on Seminole County, Florida's report cards. Graciously, McDonald's will still pay the cost of printing the report cards, the initial reason given for the ad placement.
We like this cute take on a sinister fairytale. Instead of Hansel & Gretel, think gorgeous girl with good shoes. And instead of breadcrumbs in a forest, think breadslices in a well-furnished house.
And instead of running home to a mean woodcutter and bitchy step-mom, think yummy guy, in bed, with sandwich.
The moral of the spot? White bread's rich in folic acid. Folic acid helps make healthy babies. Enjoy.
This is probably the sexiest way of promoting bread -- without offending the everyday mom's senses -- we've ever seen. It comes courtesy of Mullen, on behalf of Grain Foods Foundation.
Realistically, we'd probably be pissed-off and slightly disturbed if our mate tried seducing us with a trail of breadslices. But hey, Grain Foods, you can sell us bread anytime.
You gotta love a CEO that falls in love with his own product to the exclusion of all else. In a NYT interview Steve Jobs calls the Macbook Air the most elegant of Apple's computer designs, lavishing affection even on its four adorable footpads.
"Some of the competitors' machines are so flimsy," he reportedly gushed, "they require a fifth or even sixth pad to keep from sagging."
Keep the image of those sagging competitor footpads in mind when you've absorbed his take on the Amazon Kindle and Google Android.
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In what first appears to perhaps be a movie trailer, we see aerial shots of the arctic North complete with dramatic iceberg cliffs, the clear blue sea, under sea ice flows and floating icebergs. It's matched perfectly with a movie preview-style voiceover and continues as such until a giant dagger with blueberries on it smashes into a towering iceberg. As the camera pans in and then back it's revealed the entire scene is a glass of Smirnoff North, a new, berry-flavored vodka. At the same time the scene changes a new voiceover steps in and completes the commercial.
We like the ad's simplicity. It was created by JWT with effects rendered by Version2.
What do you do when you've pigeonholed your career in an award-winning TV series? If Eva Longoria and Sarah Michelle Gellar are any indication, you get behind a beverage. (Or change your name. The sirens of Desperate Housewives and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are now, legally, Eva Longoria Parker and Sarah Michelle Prinze. Uh ... yeah.)
Eva and Sarah, among other celebrities, are helping promote a flavored water drink called HINT. It boasts zero calories, no artificial sweeteners and total lack of tact.
Here's to their health. (We're brand-whore traditionalists, so we'll stick with Evian.)
On New Years Day, Euro RSCG, NY launched the Open for Fun campaign on behalf of Ritz. They told us it was "multifaceted" and "integrated," two slabs of PR bait that grip our attention like the iron hand of Russia. Watch the spots: Crummy, The Opener and Videogame. They're weird and, according to our friends the press people, operate on the premise that "95 percent of Americans want more fun."
And we totally wish we were making that up.
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