Pity the poor conference attendee. At every turn, they are bombarded with useless handouts that, two feet later, end up in the trash barrel. Or, worse, they find themselves on every email list known to man after leaving the conference. Rather than foist this crap on attendees in a manner that's annoying and far too easy to ignore, why not provide them something useful they won't want to toss as soon as they come into contact with it?
At a recent media conference held in Tel Aviv, Israeli retail fashion chain H&O had the right idea when it created seat back mounted "chair vests" complete with pockets filled with bottled water, a snack bar and the reatailer's catalog, all easily stowed in front of a captive audience without a trash barrel in sight. Come on conference sponsors, take a hint from H&O and give your prospective customers something they can actually use.
Damn you, AdFreak. We were all ready to get busy with work this morning and you go and point us to a new Renault commercial which, as well as having hotties in bikinis riding bikes, contains the theme song from the movie Never Ending Story, a movie we love and whose contagious music we can never get out of our head once we hear it. We might as well just throw in the keyboard, call it a day, go rent the movie and watch it over and over again for the rest of the day. Yes, we know, the movie and the song are totally bubble gum kid stuff but we loved them then and we love them now.
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A long time a go in a place far, far away, a certain class of people were once not so affectionately known as retards. Now, far more affectionately, if a bit sterile-sounding, they're known as mentally-impaired/challenged/disabled. As well, there once was a class of people known as cripples. These very same people are now known as the handicapped.
In the 19th century, doctors coined the terms midget and dwarf to describe people whose height was other than normal or proportional. These height-challenged (oops, did we just make up a new one?) are now known as little people. Doctors even threw around the terms moron, imbecile and idiot to describe people of varying (and low) IQ levels. Now, not so much.
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There are so many confusing messages emanating from the cover of this Lands' End catalog, we simply don't know where to start. First, there' the very curvaceous back end of women juxtaposed just beneath the title of the catalog, Lands' End, as if illustrative of some sort of early American west conquest for land but with a tone far removed from that depicted in the Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman movie Far and Away.
Then, there's the young boy tugging on the women's spandex-like skirt with a cute, semi-mischievous look on his face. Is the woman his mother? Is the boy just some random kid grabbing at some random woman's skin tight, bathing suit-like skirt? Is he just doing what all men eventually do, literally or figuratively, when they grow up? Or is this some art director's realized wet dream?
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Creativity is subjective at best but we think we'll have overwhelming support when we say the newly released London 2012 Olympic logo sucks. On the other hand, creativity is subjective at best but also we think we'll have overwhelming support when we say the newly released 2012 Olympic logo is brilliantly infused with modernity of motion and the mastery of motivation. You choose. We can't.
Viewing the logo, designed by Wolff Ollins, initially caused an immediate WTF? Letting the logo sink in while viewing the illustrative brand video behind the logo causes an entirely different reaction. The support for the brand direction could have easily gone down the ill but well traveled road of Olympic fist pumping, rather it quite eloquently examines what motivates humans to achieve. Interestingly, it wasn't for quite some time, we realized the logo's imagery visually represents the numeric date 2012.
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OK, we get that this VW Beetle commercial is supposed to somehow transcend the fact the thing's a car and is something far more...well...different but tagging a commercial about a car with "Some people don't really want a car" while showing the car leads us to say, "Well, yea. I don't really want that car. I'll just take that really cool, over sized VW Beetle balloon the guy's carrying around over his head." All of this beautifully crafted confusion comes courtesy of DDB Barcelona.
Two print ads accompany the spot, one of which illustrates very simply how the VW Beetle can brighten up your day. The other conveys the thrilling rush a vehicle can cause.
Occasionally we see work from agencies that falls short and disappoints. Earlier this week, we took a look at the work gluelondon did for the Royal Navy. It was a site that let visitors send naval-themed personalized messages to their friends which would be delivered via email or mobile. Well, let's just say the site was a bit kludgey and took forever to load even loading several times in the middle of its presentations. Usually this work just lives on continuing to cause disappointment without a care from either the client or the agency. Not this time.
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It's a back. It's a knee. It's a head. It's a butt. It's a distended stomach. It's a gigantic breasts. It's a...wait...should we have to work that hard to figure out what a visual is in an ad? Of course not but in this case it really doesn't matter because this is an ad for a skin care product. And back, knees, heads, butt's, stomach and gigantic breasts all have skin. In this ad for Vaseline Intensive Care Cocoa Butter, the marketer keeps us guessing which, when you think about it, is one great way to get people to pay attention to your ad.
We like gluelondon but we're not that impressed for their recent work done for Britain's Royal Navy recruitment efforts. Basically, it's a website that lets you send personalized video messages to your friends. Well, not all that personalized. From several videos of the Royal Navy doing their thing, one is chosen, the sender writes a message, chooses a name from a name list and then emails the thing to a friend or to the friends mobile.
Sadly, the site takes eons to load. It's one thing for a site to go through a slow pre-load which then results in a stellar experience but this site goes through a slew of very slow pre-loads, some of which stutteringly occur in the middle of the presentation which, itself, is far from stellar.
Targeted to 15-24 year olds, famous for their lack of attention span, we question how many will make it far enough through this site to actually click the Send button.
When we heard there was yet another Axe viral...uh...branded entertainment thing floating about, we were fully prepared to hate it, figuring it'd be more of the same, lame tickle/dress/undress/ogle the hottie trivialized trash. But after viewing Let the Game Continue, a multi-part full-blown movie that follows the travails of a guy whose car has gone up in flames and the escapades he experiences with various women on his way home, we were truly stunned by its entertaining goodness. We watched the whole thing...every bit of it...all the way to the end. That in and of itself earns this effort very high marks from us.
Since this is a commercial, Axe does make several appearances in the movie but they are fully part of the story line and do not detract from but actually add to the the subtle humor that carries through the film's plot. Damn, I just called it a film. Hate that. Anyone for Filmercial?
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