In a move that could be described as both the display of good corporate behavior as well as a cheesy effort to leverage natural disaster for corporate gain, MasterCard is lending its "Priceless" campaign to the state of Florida for use in a combined campaign to persuade Floridians to make sure they're ready for hurricane season. On the good corporate behavior side of the story, MasterCard will donate the cost of a print ad campaign in four Florida markets to deliver the hurricane preparedness message. On the not so good corporate citizen side of the story are the lobbying efforts MasterCard may have implemented to get Florida Governor Jeb Bush to sign into legislation a bill creating a tax holiday from May 21 to June 1 on all purchases. Hmm. Lower taxes. Higher purchases. More charge card usage. More money for MasterCard.
Anytime the subject of woman and orgasms arises, everyone jumps on the topic and goes nuts. Everyone's writing about a company called Surprise Parties which hosts parties for women to sell sexual aids and discuss means to rekindle their romance. Recently, Carr Knowledge, an agency with offices in Nashville placed a large billboard buy for Surprise Parties that contained the company's new headline, "Stop Faking It." Nashville outdoor companies CBS and Lamar have refused to accept the buy. The 41 other states Car Knowledge placed boards had no issue with the ad which features company's seven senior managers dressed in pink under the headline. The only skin showing on the board are hands and faces.
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So am I supposed to buy this deodorant because there's hot roller girls in the ad or am I supposed to show this ad to a woman who finds green underwear and fish net stockings appealing so she can buy it? Please. Help me out here. Who is Right Guard selling to here? What's the message? If you're gonna pull the hotties out of the closet for your ad campaign, at least be clear on who's supposed to get excited about them.
In the ongoing saga of documenting marketers' and outdoor companies' seemingly care free attitude regarding an modicum of common sense when it comes to positioning competitive advertisers, our eye on street, Bucky Turco, sends us yet another awkwardly placed set of outdoor posters. This time, two watch companies vie for attention on the same public phone booth. While we can't imagine anyone still uses a public telephone, that certainly hasn't stopped people walking past them. Wake up and smell the competition you knuckleheads.
Bucky Turco sent us a shot of a new Heineken Light poster which, aside from being mostly blank to perhaps capitalize on the "please deface me" graffiti trend, also, very prominently seems to promote Absolut vodka since the white poster can't completely cover the Absolut ad underneath it.
Another agency throw down is about to take place. Euro RSCG 4D is suing is former CEO Charles Tarzian and has filed suit in the New York Supreme Court. Euro RSCG 4D claims Tarzian tries to steal clients, used confidential information to do so and recruited the agency's employees after he had left. Apparenlty, he also lied to 4D clients to seemingly place a bad taste in their mouths which might give them cause to leave 4D and to go with Tarzian. Someday, we'll all learch to get along and be honest.
Someone else is going to have to explain the point of this too me because after viewing the site, I just don't see the point. We should be making it easier for people to consume advertising, not more difficult. BBDO has created this thing called the One Second Theater that is embedded in the last second of it's Dancin' Elephant commercial and can be viewed by moving forward one frame at a time.
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Here's a commercial for Aquafina water that's 59 seconds too long. The joke's pretty dumb too. Yet another fancy, high-priced production to insure nice, fat agency fees. Oh wait. Silly me. That's a good thing. Of course we want big fat agency fees. Otherwise, how would we fund all the foosball tables and pool tables and "client lunches" and "business" cell phone bills and trips to Cannes? Sorry, we lost our mind for a minute there. This spot is great!
This viral webcam video, created to promote the Lynx/Axe ClickMore site, began with promise then devolved into a stupid, cheesy, illustration of stereotypical webcam/online video antics. The premise has a woman creating a webcam video for a guy she met the night before. Since she forgot to leave her number with him, she plans to do it in the video by doing a striptease, slowly revealing each number hidden underneath a piece of clothing. After that, it goes downhill fast turning into a ridiculous lingerie/cheerleader/stripper/pillow fight-fest. Intamacy would have prevailed nicely here but the creators chose to go for cheese factor. Or, maybe it was intended to be ironic all along. Either way, this could have been so much better.
For some reason, Land Rover thinks it's really cool its new LR3, on April 3rd of this year, boarded a C-130 aircraft and, using the SUV's navigation system, guided the plane from Nice, France to the island of Corsica. This drools of stupidity. There's nothing spectacular about this commercial. Nothing to get excited about. After all, the LR3's navigation system is talking to satellites just like the plane's guidance system does. Most every automotive navigation system can keep a car to within a foot or two of its path. Using the LR3 navigation system to guide a plane is nothing spectacular. OK, well, the plane goes a little faster so maybe the LR3 navigation system is quicker than some but there aren't many vehicles that travel 300 mile per hour 9,000 feet above the ground. This whole thing was just cooked up to be some really cool ad idea but it's so far off strategy, it's laughable.
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