Here it comes... Here it comes... Here it comes... Oh wait, that's another thing. But, still, here it comes. Just as we new it would, marketers have begun to ravage Facebook with their wares. MySpace was turned into an ugly, flashing, digital billboard. Second Life was a silly waste of money. What will Facebook bestow upon marketers and marketers upon Facebook?
Whatever it is, no one will care in six month to a year because there'll be something else gracing that slide in every ad agency's PowerPoint presentation where the new and the cool are recommended because, well, they're new and cool and it makes the agency seem new and cool in front of the marketer and the marketer new and cool in front of its customers and investors. Here today, gone tomorrow Cool and the Cool Hunters who follow the wave are about to hit the speed of light.
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If you followed my Advertising Week adventure at all, you probably know I hit YPulse on Friday. In the late afternoon, a bunch of kids were corralled onto the stage to give us one last shot at learning their inner-workings before hitting the road.
Like the minds of the demographic it hopes to distill, the one-room YPulse Tween Mashup conference hall is a different world.
Upon entering, you're accosted by Michael Jackson's ABC (this is before Hanson's Mmmbop was spun about 6 different times) -- and with so much pink SWAG just waiting to be snapped up, you feel roughly the same emotional tug that only Lisa Frank's overpriced unicorn-shaped pencil sharpeners could conjure.
With all this going on, the YPulse atmosphere serves to make marketers feel pre-adolescent and out-of-touch, all at the same time.
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Tell me how to nail cheap two-star accommodations in NY the day before Advertising Week, and I'll call you a liar and tell you how you - yes, you - can survive in a youth hostel during a business trip.
Because after (reeeeally) bad planning on my part, that's where I ended up.
At the end of yesterday's Saving Darfur session, which ran a half hour over time, I wandered the streets of New York in desperate pursuit of the 1 Subway line.
After accidentally interrupting the filming of a movie called "Fighting," I located this crucial urban vein, hopped on and trekked to my hotel.
Priceline.com has this cool option where you can "name your price!" on a hotel. The setback is, if they find you a place at "your price!", you're married to it - no refunds, no takebacks. [Ed. Someday we'll elevate ourselves from the slums and hire and executive travel planner who will hunt down and torture Paris Hilton until she orders Hilton Management to put us up at the Waldorf Astoria for $50 a night.]
So it was with surprise, some chagrin and a sudden craving for croissants that I discovered my hotel, attractively dubbed West End Studios, was not a hotel at all but a youth hostel.
The world spun. I'd gone from from Underdressed Amongst Ad Execs to Overdressed to Kill. Flippin' amazing.
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OK. Pay attention. If you are a marketer or an ad agency that markets products and services to tweens, teens and twenty-something females you owe it to yourself to spend some time viewing these videos from 3iYing, a New York based "all girl creative agency" which has filmed hundreds of girls reacting to ads for a series called Adflip. In each of the videos, girls tell us why the ads they hold in their hands cause them to flip the page and get ignored.
Commenting on the ridiculousness of many of the ads twenty year old Rosaura sees in her favorite magazine, she says there are "orgasm faces everywhere. It looks like they're climaxing right there on the page." One tween wonders why a Lot29 Juniors ad features a giant breasted girl in the ad saying, "I'm a junior and I don't look like this. What does she stuff everything in her bra?" Explaining why a Dodge ad got the flip, one girl says, "to market a car it's not like once it matches my lipstick, oh, of course I'm going to go and buy it."
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For a dollar, you could get a Digital Panhandler to shit-talk somebody in an audio email. (As a courtesy to patrons, your identity will remain anonymous.)
Ain't technology great?
For other sackcloth-sporting brethren the premier Panhandler lends these words of encouragement: "Remember Digital Panhandlers you are not alone. Where ever you may roam in the matrix you will find a fellow Digital Panhandler."
In the end, that's all these ad-supported new-media-buzzing VC-hustling widget-builders are doing anyway, right? And why not? At least one guy's freshly-plush off the hype.
Copyranter directs our attention to yet another gratuitous use of ass in advertising. With absolutely no relation to its purpose, the Technical University of Munich career forum chose to find hot booty, photograph it and display it purely to attract attention. Oh wait, that sounds like we're complaining. Because we're not.
Oh but wait! We are. We have to. It's out job. We simply must rail against the objectification of women (and their amazingly beautiful asses) in advertising. It's despicable. It's shameful. It's Neanderthal. It's a blight on the fine, upstanding morals of the advertising industry and absolutely will not be tolerated! It sickens us to think a fabulous piece of ass like this would be reduced to an OMFG-inducing ad.
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Here's a shocker. A revolutionary report, compiled by a father-son team on a college campus, has found that video games hurt grades, while studying improves them.
Hrm.
Does this mean Candystand hurts professional performance? How much does this actually scale?
After Andrew Meyer was arrested Monday and repeatedly Tased by police after verbally niggling John Kerry, his cry of "Don't tase me, bro!" has sparked an online phenomenon all its own.
Even YTMND got in on it: donttasemebro.ytmnd.com.
Vox notes that while the quote's been appropriated with a light-hearted veneer, it's being used as a tool to spark tense discussions about the ethics of cops, Tasers and unruly suburban university kids. Can't we all just get along?
We just thought it was interesting to note this video clip from the movie Network is even more relevant than it was thirty years ago when the movie debuted. This is the movie that gave us the famed line, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" In the clip, Peter Finch rails against the public which has been dumbed down by television and don't read books or newspapers any longer. Sound familiar?
Television is not the truth Finch tells us. "It's a goddamn amusement park." TV will tells us anything we want to hear and it will lie to deliver. Combine that with the rest of the media business's insanity and the our fixation with celebutards and the world depicted in the recent movie Idiocracy seems completely plausible.
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The cats over at the US Food Policy blog have shot us some compelling information about the McRib.
To start with, they introduced us to the McRib's ingredients, which are fairly unsavory (blame the bun and the sauce). Then, they dropped the microsite on our heads.
We really hate seeing chicks that appear to be affiliated with a subculture (pop rock much?) introduce a product, then stand around pouting while waiting for us to make a move with our mouse. It is indescribably tacky.
But that's a digression. The real reason why US Food Policy sent us over to McRibland was because the National Pork Board, backed by the federal government, claims to have created the McRib (per its '06 annual report).
Anybody who's seen Thank You for Smoking may not find this odd. We certainly don't. And we continue to maintain that parents need to educate their children about the dangers awaiting them in this big deceptive world - including tricky marketing. At the very least, it would be nice to think that the government doesn't collude in our market intrigues.
Maybe that's wishful thinking. So while we're on this moving train, way to take one for Team Obesity, guys.
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