Some marketers just don't know when to leave a good thing alone. Last summer, Chicken of the Sea launched an interesting commercial that mixed sex appeal with humor in the form of a hot chick strutting through a lobby wearing a miniskirt and an exposed, very flat belly. She has all the guys drooling until she gets into the elevator, the doors close and she lets her gut bulge out with the joke being she wouldn't have that gut if only she had eaten tuna.
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In one of the most idiotic, unnecessarily sensationalistic pieces of crap, The Weather Channel has launched a promotion based entirely on creating fear of highly unlikely catastrophic weather events. Riffing off the look and feel of the weather-themed The Day After Tomorrow movie, the promotion, which combines actual past weather events with sensationalistic scenarios, promotes the network's new show called "It Could Happen Tomorrow." Well, yea, the Earth could crack in two under the weight of a clan of obese, fast food-eating kids all sitting down on their fat asses simultaneously to play some stupid video game too.
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While we like articles that quickly come to the point, one letter Page Six stories, well, even Page Six needs at least a couple sentences to maintain interest. Take a look at this Page Sixe page Bucky Turcosent us. Relieve us from what book? Oh, and that contextual ad placement? Priceless.
AOL' s new free video service, In2TV will launch Wednesday with premiere advertisers Intel, Kia, Kraft and Hershey. In2TV will host thousands of old Warner Brothers shows hoping to become the first stop on the web for video content. We wish them luck. We have no idea who would want to watch all those old shows and, maddeningly, they had to go and use some video technology that requires Active X rather than a more graceful solution like YouTube or Quicktime. There's also this thing called Hi-Q which, of course, doesn't work with Firefox.
So basically, the service is perfect for all those middle America, late adopter, IE-Suffering couch potatoes who somehow find pleasure in watching reruns of Wonder Woman, Head of the Class and Welcome Back Kotter.
Hated for years, the Canadian Tire Guy and his wife, portrayed in hundreds of commercials and loathed, apparently, by every Canadian citizen has been dropped from the campaign. The Canadian Tire Guy seemed to have fallen into that typically emasculated male stereotype we see often in America as well but put out of their misery before it goes on too long. We won't bore you with the details but every media outlet and blogger has derided the guy for years. Canadian Tire nor the actor who play the Tire Guy, Ted Simonett, willelaborate on the change
Our Asian cultural expert Tian tells us Adidas should expect a bit of backlash from the Asian community in reaction to a newly introduced line of sneakers called the Yellow Series. One particular shoe has the image of a buck-toothed bowlcut slanty eyed face on the shoe's tongue - not exactly the currently acceptable rendition of the Asian populace.
Ironic Sans points out an ad for the Army that, perhaps, sends the wrong message. In the ad, citizens are shown smiling and army personnel are shown with stern, even angry or sad expressions. To us, it looks like being a citizen is a lot more fun then joining the army. We're guessing the top brass is of the opinion smiling soldiers convey a weakness, hence the bad ass, military facial expressions.
Completely misunderstanding current culture, NBC, after forcing YouTube to remove several Saturday Night Live clips, has re-released on NBC.com the very same clips it said should not have been freely distributed. Explaining the twisted brilliance of the move, NBC VP of Interactive Stephen Andrade said, "We were concerned about building their corporation instead of ours since it's our video. We would like to make it as easy for people to share as we can, so we're trying to provide as many tools as we can to do that." Gee, if we were NBC.com, we'd be more than happy for YouTube and everyone else to suffer the bandwidth and infrastructure costs to freely publicize our content.
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Publicis Dialog has created an Alien Film Competition for HP that lets' people upload a photo that will appear in a canned video. It's supposed to be funny but after watching tha same video over and over with a bunch or irrelevant baby and animal pictures inserted, we tired of the whole thing. But, for those who persevere and are chosen as having created the funniest video by simply slapping an image in a canned video, HP will award a Photosmart printer.
John Brock points us to a story about a recently launched Mexican television campaign from the National Women's Institute which portrays blow up sex dolls as office workers to somehow get men to stop treating women like sex dolls. Somehow, we just think this reinforces the stereotype.
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