- Marvel's soliciting the YouTube community for the best comic-inspired costumes. Get dressed, flip your camera on and keep your videos down to a minute. Beyond licensing an entire suite of heroes and villains to Hollywood, I guess that's one way to stay relevant.
- Got VD? The decent thing to do would be to tell everybody you slept with, so they can check if they have it too. But don't sweat it too much; this is the digital age! Send those hutches an e-card. (Thanks Adrants reader Candace.)
- Not quite The West Side Story, but it's Macs and PCs, so almost the same thing.
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Like a Calvin & Hobbes decal come to life, "Slash" for MTV Switch depicts people pissing in public places. The moral of the story is to "Save water, flush less." (Niiiiice.)
By Ogilvy/London, which has an odd take on persuasion. Wizzing in a fountain is funny -- hell, incendiary -- while you're stoned and around age 15, but unless things have changed abroad, doing it in the Queen's England remains both unsavory and illegal.
There's no accounting for logic in advertising, however. Along with other "green" MTV Switch ads, "Slash" will likely run across 55 TV channels in 162 countries. The track in the ad is Miserere Mei, by Bouwe Dykstra.
The United Kingdom recently considered passing laws that would enable the gov to detain terrorism suspects for 42 days without a trial.
To give ordinary people an emotional education on what the law would mean, Amnesty International launched "Sleepwalking," an eerie spot that depicts citizens crawling out of their beds late at night and in a kind of stupor. Together they walk into a holding facility and file themselves in separate cells, still more asleep than awake.
The ad admonishes people not to "sleepwalk into" this anti-terrorism bill, which in freedom's name would infringe on citizens' rights.
Slow-moving and unpleasant, but it's powerful that way. By production company DarkFibre. Voiceover by Christopher Eccleston. Learn more at Protect the Human.
MCM Net and Aardman partnered to produce Creature Discomforts, a campaign for the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity. Its purpose, I think, is to encourage outsiders to change the way they perceive disabilities.
I'm just confused about how. The campaign launched a game called Peanut Pickup, where you, a mouse, shoot peanuts into an elephant's trunk. That's it.
It isn't clear what lesson I was meant to glean (could it be a hand-eye coordination game for disabled children...?), but all I could gather was it isn't nearly as fun as Suicide Kittens -- which, for a minute or two, I mistook for another component of the Creature Discomforts campaign.
In a new pro-Obama commercial from MoveOn.org which plays out like a drug PSA, Gossip Girl Upper East Sider Serena Vanderwoodsen feels so strongly about Obama she says, "if you're ever out somewhere and considering about voting McCain, just call me. I'll pick you up. No questions asked."
While it centers on the not so correct assumption all McCain supporters are old and all Obama supporters are young, it does do an effective job spoofing a genre that has become ingrained in the minds of the younger generation, many of whom would love nothing more than to have Serena not ask any questions while picking them up.
Maybe it thought "SFW XXX" gave people the wrong idea. Alongside new buddy the Accompanied Literary Society (which seeks to revive the culture of literary salons), Diesel asked celebrity authors to produce some short stories for its latest outdoor campaign.
The so-called "Flash Fiction" was broadcast on the face of One York Place, NYC, over the course of three days.
Totally falls into the shadow of HBO Voyeur (BBDO/NY). And while I like the idea of reviving the literary salon, I'm inclined to think people -- myself included -- are more receptive to illustrative storytelling. Especially when they have to read them off the side of a building.
By Idealogue and PanOptic Motion.
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May 6, 2007: With the simple but true tagline, "The Faster the Speed, the Bigger the Mess," this :60, launched April 26, from Ireland's Road Safety Authority and Northern Ireland's Department of Environment delivers a powerful but simple message: The faster the speed, the bigger the mess. Entitled "Mess," the commercial is born from statistics that find 30 percent of Republic of Ireland and 24 percent of Northern Ireland road fatalities are due to excessive speed. The spot is part of an increasing trend towards the use of reality-based shock and brutal honesty to deliver the message.
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In what appears to be nothing more than slapping the Green label on Bank of America's Keep the Change program, Citizens Bank has launched the Green$ense Campaign which pays customers ten cents for every electronic transaction they make but only up to $10 per month and $120 per year. Even without the facade of "greenery, Bank of America gives up to $250 per year with its program. And people don't even have to be green to get the $250.
Of course it's all to motivate people to bank electronically which uses less paper which, yes, is an admirable "green" effort. But, seriously, the real reason any bank would motivate its customers to bank electronically is to cut overhead (by hiring fewer tellers) and increase profit.
With cutesy headlines like "Being eco-friendly just got eco-nomical" and "The environment is like a bank account. Every little bit helps," the campaign rolls out in print, radio, outdoor and television.
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There once was a time when it was perfectly fine to use the word gay to describe something other than a person of the homosexual persuasion. In fact, my grandmother used to use the word all the time in a perfectly harmless manner to describe a joyous occasion. The use of the word gay in that manner, while not incorrect in terms of its definition, isn't all that culturally acceptable any longer. Just like titling the chapter of a Hardy Boys book "The Big Boner" (as in blunder or error) wouldn't go over so well in today's publishing world.
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Mirrors don't lie. That's the tool this Erwin-Penland-created commercial for Clemson University takes. Noting most people don't undress in public, don't humiliate their friends, don't vandalize the campus and don't sleep around, the commercial makes it clear you shouldn't either.
"Our goal with this campaign is to reach people - students and non-students - and make them think about their own behavior," said Vice President for Student Affairs Gail DiSabatino. "There is such a bombardment of advertising that promotes alcohol and sports. This is one attempt to combat those promotions."
It won't be an easy job but the message will be spread across posters, newspaper, radio and video.
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