You can react to this MacHeads movie trailer (yes, it is reportedly going to be a real movie) two ways. The first would be, "Oh for fuck's sake! Shut the hell up you lemming-like, religious freaks! It's just a fucking computer!" Or, you could stash away your negativity, open your mind and say, "OK, yea, it is just a computer but look what it has done to form an amazingly creative community that does and creates things that could never be done or created before."
The trailer for MacHeads features everyone you'd expect from Guy Kawasaki who says Mac users changed the world to some hippie lady who talks about how a Mac got her through a funeral to Violet Blue to adamantly states she'd never, ever knowingly sleep with a Windows user.
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It's one thing for a marketer to claim, say, its product will mow your lawn better than any other lawn mower but it's clearly another when a drug maker claims its product will cure certain ills and then cause a heart attack. That's an extreme case but the makers of the cholesterol drug Vytorin are now red faced after a study (which it held for over a year while taking in billions in sales of the drug) found it's drug did not do what it claimed to do.
Vytorin is the combination of two existing cholesterol drugs, Zetia and Zocor, which is supposed to reduce the amount of fatty plaque on artery walls. The study found it didn't which compelled U.S Representatives John Dingell and Bart Stupack to issue a complaint to the drug makers and to the FTC.
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Television has always been the proverbial "lean back" medium with information flowing mostly in a one way direction from the TV to the viewer in a non-interactive manner. That's changed a bit over the years with the arrival of video on demand and other semi-interactive capabilities. However, it's never progressed to the interactivity of the web and it's still unclear whether or not it should aspire to that level of interactivity.
The current passivity of TV hasn't stopped people from attempting to add interactivity to the medium and it hasn't stopped Koen, a student at Working Tomorrow who created this demo of clickable TV whereby a simple click of a product in an ad of product placement brings up information and ordering screens. It's not really new but it's interesting to see how different people execute the same idea. Whether or not TV ever progresses (or should progress) to this stage remains unclear.
In support of his ongoing theory the advertising industry is filled with BDA's aka Big Dumb Agencies, George Parker has unearthed an interesting analogy that involves monkeys and classical conditioning. The net result of this exercise explains perfectly why BDA's (and most other big companies) can never get out of their own way and achieve greatness.
So if you want to laugh and, at the same time, realize that, yes, you too just might be one of those monkeys trapped in a perpetual hell of repetitive behavior without knowing why, give this a read.
The human brain is an amazing thing. It does so many complex things with complete ease. Luckily, one of the things it does is filter out, according to some, is the up to 5,000 advertising messages a city dweller sees each day. This is a very good thing. Because if the brain weren't able to filter out the incessant onslaught of advertising and consciously processed each of those 5,000 daily messages, it would explode quickly sending the owner of that brain to the nearest mental institution.
In some respects, advertising is a never ending cycle of idiocy. People ignore ads so marketers just create more. People block ads so marketers just come up with more methods to circumvent that blockage (just wait until you see the DVR-proof side and bottom bar ads the nets will soon implement).
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Men have fantasies. Lots of fantasies. And We're not just talking about sex here. In this new commercial for J.P. Morgan Chase from Mcgarrybowen, we see a man doing the James Bond thing to get a stolen credit card back. But, as we find out, he's only doing it in his mind while taking a call from Chase alerting him to some fraud on his card.
As with most male fantasies, it's all about action, car chases death defying stunts and fancy footwork. Nothing out of the ordinary except for the fact guys in these sorts of commercial always seem to be, well, average looking. Very un-James Bond-like, in fact. While many commercials are filled with stunningly beautiful or mouth waveringly sexy women, we can't seem to get rid of the Verizon Dad and his ilk. Perhaps, not unsurprisingly, its because the guys who create these commercials (and it is all guys in this case) love to look at beautiful women but want nothing to do with any man who might be better looking than them. So, we get Mr. Average who always seems to end up with Mrs. Amazingly Hot.
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Just why is it the more senior the executive, the more buffoonish and meaningless their commentary becomes? Advertising Age asked ten industry leaders to comment of the impending recession and what it means to the ad business. Many, from TNS Senior VP Jon Swallen to KIA Motors CMO Ian Beavis to Bear Sterns Analyst Alexia Quadrani to Pizza Hut CMO Brian Niccol offer insight and concise detail on what they see happening in the market and what their companies are doing to keep moving ahead in a downturn.
DraftFCB Chairman-CEO Howard Draft confirms our hypothesis with this bland commentary, saying, "I remain cautiously confident. At this point, we're not seeing any major client cutbacks. Our budgets remain on track." Hey, we all want to be upbeat but would it have been so difficult for Howard to leave press release speak behind and actually offer the industry something meaningful?
Adrants is happy to announce its continued partnership with Business Development Institute and its ongoing series of Diversity in Advertising conferences. Aimed at addressing an issue that usually receives nothing more than lip service, the conference series hopes to keep the discussion of diversity in advertising alive and to broaden the appeal of a career in advertising to all.
This year, there will be four events. On February 12, the Second Annual Advertising and Marketing Industry Diversity Job Fair will be held at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. On February 27, the conference will travel to New York's NYU. In March, we will hold our first job Fair conference in Chicago. And during Advertising Week September 22-26, we will hold our second Experienced Hire Diversity Recruiting program.
We'll share more details with you as they become available. The BDI website will also carry updated conference information and details on how to attend and/or sponsor.
Adland has unearthed an old 1979 ad for Pakistani Airlines promoting its flights to New York City using an ominous plane shadow cast upon the Twin Towers. Certainly in the seventies, everyone was enamored with the stature and size of the the then amazing looking towers but unless you were Irwin Allen, even in your most imaginative moments you weren't envisioning this ad's imagery would foretell the horror that occurred September 11, 2001.
Barring that horrific day in 2001 and placing oneself in 1979, it's actually a good ad. The Towers were the premiere iconic image of New York city and they retained their iconic status through three decades until they fell that fateful day. No one in 1979 could seriously have believed an image like this would become reality. Sadly, it did. Similar images from the past will continue to pop up from time to time in old magazines, in old ads, in old movies and we'll wince a bit each time we see them remembering our connection to that day. Sally Martin.
Sometimes an innocent instance of "sticking it to the man" is not just sticking it to the man. It might be sticking it to women. Literally. Blood and all.
Words & Pictures takes a closer look at the activities of the East London Decapitator and observes the lauded ad-manipulator targets women five-to-one.
Considering the female half of Adrants is the Queen's Country right now, that's a ratio that literally hurts our necks.
Read the analysis, if only for the accompanying "DIE, BITCH" comic.
What do you think? Is this all in good fun, or the makings of a carte blanche psycho?
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