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Earlier this month we pointed out some Tats Cru, Inc. street art that GM commissioned to promote its new Hummer H3, the small man's hummer. Predictably, the art has been defaced as noted by flicker user Irena Tejaratchi who took this image including the phrases, "sell out, "no blood for oil," "sham" and "dummer." While GM might not like their brand defaced, they knew what they were getting into and they most likely figured they'd get a bunch of press, too, which they have.
From the New York's Olympics bid to the NBC peacock to FTD Florist, Radar Magazine has taken a stab at what it calls the gayest logos. In truth, some are pretty gay.
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OK, then. We know boobs have been used to sell beer forever but not in association with the large shady area a pair of prodigious breasts can provide. Under the photoshopped boobage of one woman, another woman holds a glass of Foster's beer accompanied by the headline, "Well. You Wouldn't Want A Warm Beer, Would You?" At first we thought we were looking at some new form of breast-produced beer milk until we came to our senses and focused on the shadier aspects of this ad. Thanks to flickr user mollyeh11 for this one.
Yesterday, one of Goodyear's gigantic, flying billboards crashed into an industrial park in Florida during a thunderstorm. No one was injured but that's not going to be an easy ad medium to replace.
Wharton marketing professor Barbara E. Kahn and Elizabeth G. Miller, a marketing professor at Boston College recently conducted a study which found marketers that name products with ambiguous or surprising descriptions for flavors or colors are likely to see increased sales over conventionally described products. With studies involving the selection of jellybeans and sweaters, the study found showing an example of a strangely named sweater color actually decreased the satisfaction upon respondents seeing the actual sweater.
The study findings elaborate on this further. "We find that the revelation of the color shade (through a picture of the color) prior to viewing the name decreases preference for ambiguous color names, but increases preference for unexpected descriptive color names," the paper states. "These results support the notion that when consumers encounter a surprising name (because it violates beliefs about informativeness), they engage in additional elaboration about the name to try to understand why it was provided. The type of elaboration will depend on how the name violates expectations: If the name is uninformative in a literal sense, consumers will engage in a Gricean process to determine the meaning of the communication; if the name is uninformative because it is atypical, consumers will search for the reason the particular adjective was selected as described by incongruency theory. The result of this additional elaboration is increased satisfaction with the product."
The study reveals online merchants may see better sales for products with uncommonly named colors if a sample of the color is not shown.
Animal Magazine publisher Bucky Turco made his way out to the Palms Resort in Las Vegas for the unveiling of the official HBO Entourage suite. Turco reports, "This branded suite on the 51st floor of the Palms boasts a black-jack table, comes pre-stocked with: Absolut and Jack Daniels, Ben Sherman gear, and two Xbox's playable on large flat screen TV's. Additionally whoever checks into the Entourage suite gets keys to a Mercedes M-Class SUV, massages, and a complimentary Motorola razor phone. To kick off the promotion HBO brought in the whole cast and lots of scantily dressed ladies. This ultimate bachelor pad is available for the next 6 months, groupies not included." Check out images from the event here.
Wednesday, it was Mitsubishi's turn. Today it's Batman's turn. The "caped crusader" has taken over the Yahoo homepage with a bunch of flying bats and a fairly friendly half screen, window shade ad unit promoting the upcoming movie. And no, it doesn't work with Firefox.
In an effort to counter the bad wrap foisted on the cookie, an identifying file placed on a person's computer marketers use to serve targeted ads and sites use to remember people's login information, online marketers are launching a "cookies can be good for you" campaign. Dynamic Logic President Nick Nyhan, who's company measures online ad performance, co-founded safecount.org along with Microsoft to convince antispyware firms to allow certain "good" cookies through their filters.
While methods to replace the cookie are currently being developed, such as United Virtualities' PIE, the campaign hopes to educate people of the cookie's benefits such as saving login info and remembering certain website configuration preferences rather than focusing on its advertising tracking capabilities to which people will just thumb their noses.
