You've got to wonder about a person who would accept money to sleep on a desk...in public..all day long. On second thought, what's to wonder? It's a perfect gig. Get paid to sleep. That's what FedEx Kinko's did as part of its No More Allnighters promotion which promotes the company's Print Online service. There's also an "explore the cubicle" website and a video in which a guy consumes the necessary liquid to perform an allnighter. Good stuff.
For the "We All Crunch" campaign, Mother New York throws together an amalgamation of typical (but special!) Crunch regulars that defy the gym-obsessed bodybuilder stereotype characteristic of oh, say, Gold's.
We dig the no-nonsense grimacey grrr on Nancy at left.
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Advertising educates for better or worse, and per the CGM trend we're finding everybody wants to be an advertiser. With this formula in mind, UK-based Cake Group and climate change charity Global Cool throw together Scene Won, a user-generated video competition with a global warming theme. The contest closes on June 30, and the winner nails £5k.
The videos are the usual fare but what's interesting is the discussion they spark. Is global warming really a problem? Opposing views butt heads for the same marketing space.
If we were Scene Won we'd give the £5k to one of the no-global-warming groups for purely aesthetic reasons just to throw people off-balance. Then you'd have a discussion.
Because PETA gets a seratonin high from symbolic violence, they're using Adwords to push the crap out of these supposedly banned ads. We just finished watching an awesome one for their Fur is Dead campaign in which a woman in fur is clubbed unconscious and stripped of her coat.
There are a lot of people we'd like to club because of their clothes, but hey, we hold back. Why bunny-huggers who guiltlessly pillage living plantlife think they're special, we'll just never know.
We get the point, PETA, but why do you have to be bitchy about it? We'd even venture to say you'd look less mean if you left burning crosses on lawns, but somebody else has already got that gig.
For their ongoing Want 2 B Square campaign (whose Boy Meets Girl video we're still fawning over), Scion throws out the last of its six worlds, The Beat. It's music-themed and contains a Dance Dance Revolution-type game, which we like but are ashamed of liking.
We've grown fond of Want 2 B Square and are even starting to think the xB's aren't bad on the eyes. But sentimentality aside, Scion has done a good job of using alternative forms of marketing and subculture inclusions to push the weird customizable vehicle. Which is more than what we can say for some.
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Post-Priceless, MasterCard's marketing attempts fail to gather much interest or headway. Their new thing, called MasterCard Nearby, leverages the power of wireless provider go2 and a lot of early '90's creative to encourage people to interact more with the brand. The service enables you to do exciting and card-relevant things, like search for ATMs. We started to boo but were interrupted by a yawn and now lack the energy to keep booing. Oh well.
Here's a campaign that's too relevant for comfort. Merkley + Partners get cozy with the Ad Council -- which was recently in bed with the US Army for a grammatically icky and unconvincing get-edumakayted campaign -- to inflict fear upon teens for more conservative internet practices.
Part peer pressure, part plain creepiness and all mortification, the spots are entitled Bulletin Board and Everyone Knows Your Name. A typically over-informative PR tells us it's meant to raise awareness about online sexual exploitation but could just as easily be a cautionary wrist-slap over the ever-growing epidemic of Google-happy employers.
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With rss-fed online banners, 33 topic-specific print ads, an online game, screensavers, television and an in-cinema game, MSNBC has kicked off an ad campaign with the tagline "The Fuller Spectrum of News" "which exemplifies the captivating journey and multiple perspectives of news, entertainment and information consumers explore on the site." Hmm. whatever happened to just reporting the news? Oh yea, everyone else does that. Marketing 101: product differentiation. Silly us. Anyway, SS+K created the campiagn, BEAM is handling online executions and Fuel Industries whipped up "Newsbreaker" the RSS-fed online and in-cinema game. Check out the creative here.
As kids we actually thought Kwik-E-Mart was a real but mislabeled place, and now Seven Eleven will make the mistake easier for the next generation to make by (possibly) gussing up 11 of their stores as Kwik-E-Marts.
The liaison hasn't been officially inked but it's part of a joint promotional effort for The Simpsons Movie. The tricked-out stores will include beloved Simpsons products like Buzz Cola, KrustyO's Cereal and Squishees.
This would be way funnier if Kwik-E-Mart rip-offs didn't already exist. As things stand, a chain of stores toting the name exist in Minnesota. Strangely, there is also one in downtown Pittsburgh. And while you probably can't get KrustyO's at these locales you can probably get Spooners, which can't be much better and boast an equally psychotic-looking mascot.
We have a love/hate relationship with Candystand, whom we've reviewed so often we ought to be on their payroll.
We think they know it.
To fully leverage our weakness for time-wasting single-person games and sell us candy at the same time, they've come out with yet another such offering called Orbit Spherez. (Guess what candy they're pushing.) It merits a NSFW rating. Be careful.
Our only big beef: what's up with the laggage? We are not fans of laggage.
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