Coke Celebrates Diet Coke/Mentos Geyser Eight Months late

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While Joe Jaffe is all excited about having been present yesterday during Coke's Experiment #214 at which the famed EepyBird did their Diet Coke/Mentos thing, we're gleefully snickering at the mammoth company's 180 on the whole thing from its "craziness with Mentos doesn't fit our brand personality" stance to its eight-months-too-late embrace of the stunt. We'd be as excited as Joe too if we were there witnessing the event but we can't forget that Coke is doing this because their ass was taunted and dragged into it. I'd be curious if the word Mentos was even allowed to be mentioned at the event. Joe makes no mention of it in his review of the event.

Related:

Mentos Loves Diet Coke. Coke Could Care Less
Mentos to Launch Geyser Video Contest
Coke Copies Mentos, Launches Own Video Contest
Coke Wakes Up, Smells Social Media

by Steve Hall    Feb- 9-07    
Topic: Bad, Brands, Events, Social



Another Ad Pulled Proving America is Officially Insane

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Apparently, commercials now cause suicide. You've heard us rail against those cause groups for every conceivable issue and ailment before and we're going to do it again. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has asked GM to yank its Deutsch LA-created Robot commercial in which a dejected robot is fired and commits suicide...in a fucking dream! For fuck's sake. When will this idiocy end? When will people realize we're talking about advertising here and not brain surgery? When will people get their head out of their asses and laugh when a piece of humor is placed in front of them? It's a robot...in a commercial. Hello?

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by Steve Hall    Feb- 8-07    
Topic: Bad, Brands, Commercials, Super Bowl 2007



Pizza Hut Improves MySpace Effort, Still Falls Short

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So, Pizza Hut's removed most everything we found unliveable about their Pizza Hut delivery guy effort on MySpace. This time around they're shooting for something innocuous and mild, changing their protagonist from a ridiculously self-absorbed tool to a fairly average gamer and HD lover.

The updated MySpace also includes Youtube videos that pretty much demonstrate how irresistible the guy is when he's got a box of pizza in his hands. Judging from the jump in friends (it's nearly doubled), the revamped MySpace is apparently slightly more palatable than the previous effort, but unless Pizza Hut plans on using the guy outside of MySpace in long-term ad campaigns or other guerilla efforts, we don't see it working much in their favour.

by Angela Natividad    Feb- 5-07    
Topic: Bad, Brands, Guerilla, Online



Overweight, Sex-Changed Miller Cat Fight 'Girls' Back For Super Bowl

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OK, this is just gross. There's a reason why hot women (and men) are allowed to take their shirts off and strut their stuff for the general public's appreciation. That's the reason why that 2003 Miller Catfight Super Bowl spot received so much notoriety. While Miller did create a male hottie version of the pool/mud wrestling spot, the two guys in that ad stopped short of having an actual fight and got all "sensitive man" on us to which, we wrote, "Oh please...can't they just beat the shit out of each other like the girls did in the mud wrestling spot?"

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by Steve Hall    Feb- 2-07    
Topic: Bad, Brands, Commercials, Creative Commentary, Super Bowl 2007



Wells Fargo Flops with Backstage Endeavor

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Some campaigns are launched with high hopes only to be buried by more important things or simply bad planning. This is what we think happened with Wells Fargo's strange 2006 Backstage campaign, boasting music by no-name artists, a weird Stagecoach Island game, and a national tour (less Woodstock than a futile set of volleyball games).

We would never have found out about the campaign that didn't fly if we hadn't been to the bank yesterday, where we saw a card sticking out of a machine and went in to return it. The coiffed rep gushed, "good behaviour needs rewarding" and, after quizzing us on our FICO savvy, gave us a Backstage shirt. We harbor the suspicion there are about 4,000 said shirts in the backstage of the branch, but didn't say anything.

Of course, had we searched Adrants, we would have realized the game's been around in one form or another for over a year. Aren't we good?

by Angela Natividad    Feb- 2-07    
Topic: Bad, Campaigns, Guerilla, Online



Travelport Throws Blank Page on Browser, Calls it Marketing

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The Flea and JND Technologies in Mumbai join forces to create an allegedly creative marketing campaign for client Travelport Holidays.

The campaign is a hark back to Evian Detox, which promoted purity by overwhelming websites on which its clean glacial banners sat, except it's much lazier.

The Quietest Place on the Web brings you to a white screen with the following sentences: "Welcome to the quietest place on the Web. The next time the noise of life gets to you, do drop by for a little bit of peace and quiet." The wandering eye then meanders down to the bottom of the page for lack of anything else to do, where it finds a link to Travelport India, another website that's not terribly stunning.

Unless Travelport has a huge demo of people seeking to visit the Tibetan monks or the inside of a padded room, we're just not seeing how this initiative will help them draw vacation clients.

by Angela Natividad    Feb- 1-07    
Topic: Bad, Campaigns, Online



K-Fed Nationwide Spot Fuels Political Correctness Insanity

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We passed on all the hype surrounding the K-fed Nationwide Super Bowl commercial offending fast food workers but after seeing the spot, we can't leave it alone. We have one thing to say: Get a Fucking Sense of Humor, People! For fuck's sake, can't we laugh at anything anymore? OK, so the commercial really isn't funny but that's not the point. The point is through some sort of American political correctness on steroids trend and an orgasmic proliferation of cause groups for every minute issue imaginable, we are no longer allowed to laugh at anything. We can't make fun of anything lest we offend someone. We can't tell joke unless they are of the scrubbed-clean second grade variety. We can't even call someone white or black - even though they are - lest we be labeled racist. Stop the insanity, please!

by Steve Hall    Jan-29-07    
Topic: Bad, Commercials, Opinion, Trends and Culture



People Actually Need A Search Engine to Find MySpace

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Is it just us or are people idiots when it comes to navigating to popular websites? A recent Hitwise study featured on eMarketer found MySpace to be the top search term for 2006. Also on the list are ebay, Yahoo and Mapquest. Are we the only ones that realize all you have to do is add a .com to these popular names rather than search for them? Hmm. I suppose somewhere in the world, there are still people who haven't heard of the Internet either. Oh well. At least Hitwise is making some money with this nonsense.

by Steve Hall    Jan-29-07    
Topic: Bad, Brands, Online, Research



Pizza Hut MySpace Effort Not Consumption-Friendly

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You know when you watch a friend do something so stupid you wish you were never born so you could never have seen it? That's the feeling that flooded us when we saw Pizza Hut's latest social networking snafu: the uncool-but-cool pizza delivery guy.

Even if you forgive the use of Incubus' Drive, the pretentious article-preceding-name ("The Ted" - why not go all the way and call him The Tedster?) and the awkward "Who I'd like to meat?" joke, you have yet to account for gratuitous use of words like "babe-licious" and "par-tay."

Let's not forget the use of seedy come-ons like "In a court of girls, I'm the prisoner, not the judge ... and I've been very, very bad." The page in general is so wince-worthy that the very thought of pizza afterward made us throw up in our mouths. Way to go, imc2!

by Angela Natividad    Jan-25-07    
Topic: Bad, Brands, Guerilla, Online



Geeks Offended by Traveler's Insurance Geek Ad

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Copyranter points us to Joel Spolsky, a self-professed geek, who was miffed by a recent Traveler's Insurance ad that was headlined, "To catch a geek, you have to think like a geek" and went on to say, "Fashion sense aside, today's high-tech criminals are evolving constantly... Give your independent agent a call, and spend your time taking your business to the next level. Instead of worrying about a crook in ill-fitting pants."

Joel argues it's wrong for Traveler's to view geeks as some sort of security-related insurance risk and the whole geek versus non-geek thing is so high school. He continues by questioning whether insurance agents are really any more capable than geeks to protect a company's security and that the ad attacks the very people whose job it is to implement sais protection.

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by Steve Hall    Jan-25-07    
Topic: Bad, Magazine