Okay. Anybody douchey enough to rip the premise to Patrick Suskind's Perfume, with penguins, and pass the idea off as "uncharted territory" (they SAID this! We SWEAR!), should be chained to a wall, completely naked, and shaved once weekly until the end of time.
Insult to injury, the supposed YouTube debate that the video triggered is completely contrived and thrown-together by a bunch of people who either joined on the same day or don't have profiles.
We're actually scandalized. This is one of those "I CALL SHENANIGANS", like, from-the-rooftops! moments.
Oh yeah, the video is called Penguin Love and it's for Columbia Sportswear.
As if the crap the London 2012 Olympic Organizing Committee received over this week's release of its much-maligned logo weren't enough, now eight reported cases of epileptic seizures caused by the logo's supporting video have caused the organization to pull the video. Epilepsy photo sensitivity expert Graham Harding explained, "What it appears has happened is that the flash rate of the diving sequence contravenes the Ofcom guidelines." Odds makers have given the logo 10-1 odds it will be replaced by year's end.
Creativity is subjective at best but we think we'll have overwhelming support when we say the newly released London 2012 Olympic logo sucks. On the other hand, creativity is subjective at best but also we think we'll have overwhelming support when we say the newly released 2012 Olympic logo is brilliantly infused with modernity of motion and the mastery of motivation. You choose. We can't.
Viewing the logo, designed by Wolff Ollins, initially caused an immediate WTF? Letting the logo sink in while viewing the illustrative brand video behind the logo causes an entirely different reaction. The support for the brand direction could have easily gone down the ill but well traveled road of Olympic fist pumping, rather it quite eloquently examines what motivates humans to achieve. Interestingly, it wasn't for quite some time, we realized the logo's imagery visually represents the numeric date 2012.
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Worse than watching the fall of a child star is watching the fall of a dirt clod that tried really, really hard to be a star but failed to make it past orbit.
In a video leaked to Defamer Sanjaya smugly divulges his true identity: that of Bill Vendall, an RISD student who adopted the Lamest Persona Ever for a thesis project.
Reality Blurred highlights one of the better quotes from his grand confession: "How you could look at this ... and not see it as a symbol for the self-referencing nature of progressive evolution?"
Well, at least we know Sanjaya's all-consuming power to embarrass wasn't just the result of the stage lighting.
That Cocaine energy drink that's been getting heat is finally dropping off the face of the earth. Redux Beverages has agreed to change the name of the drink, which they claim they originally chose to assuage cocaine use, not encourage it.
We originally thought pushing a drink called Cocaine was stupid but have since changed our minds after tasting it during a frenzied all-nighter.
Cocaine tastes good. And it's got this really awesome vivid pink colour that practically glows in the dark. Our only qualm? It burns the crap out of your throat. Really. Like, two cans in and you don't have a voice box.
We became particularly attached to Cut Cocaine, the, uh, less intense alternative of the alternative. It's supposed to make the burn less potent. (It does, but a burn remains.)
It probably goes without saying that Cocaine's marketing was courting trouble. In any event, we wanted to take this time to say good-bye to our brief but pleasant Cocaine binge. You walked us through some hard times and kept us alert when nothing else would.
We doubt we'll see you again, under this name or otherwise, because come on - if Enron changed its name, it'd still be Enron.
Back to that other expensive habit: gratuitous espresso abuse.
For this edition of Contextual Advertising Screw-Ups, a festive Pizza Hut ad appears atop a CNN story about a death row inmate who, for his last meal on earth, ordered pizza for a transient.
And while that was fuzzy-sweet of him, we weren't quite raring to order pizza online immediately thereafter.
(Note to Pizza Hut: add the word "killer" to campaign negative keywords.)
We do love a good contextual advertising screw-up. And because we're feeling nostalgic, let's tilt our heads and recall the time Expedia sent 35,000 troops to Iraq, or the time Microsoft sponsored the Wii contest water death, or the time a turpentine ad added texture to the tale of the pregnant girl who drank it to off herself.
If it weren't bad enough agencies have to deal with needless agency consultants making money for doing what clients are too lazy to do themselves, now they have to deal with the illogical idiocy common sense-challenged companies like Kraft are now foisting upon them. Kraft, in twisted logic not seen since CareerBuilder fired its agency because the agency's add didn't make the USA Today Top Ten, is requiring agencies participating in a review to not only cede ownership of pitched concepts (a not so uncommon practice) but also to accept liability for those concepts if they end up being used and cause legal problems in the future ( a new and extremely stupid practice).
Someone please help us here. We'll say it again. Kraft wants agencies to give up ownership of any presented idea. Then it wants to be able to sue the agency that presented those ideas if they cause legal trouble in the future...even though the agency doesn't even own the idea any more! We have a headache.
OK, OK. We get it. Big tobacco company's suck but trying to apply old demographic assumptions tobacco companies may have made about African Americans in the past to today's African Americans is stretching it a bit but that's the premise of the latest Truth campaign Whadafxup spot. While we dig Truth spokesman Derrick Beckles' new look as he interviews MTV's Nick Cannon, these spots continue to grate.
We're not defending tobacco companies but we're sure if a little digging was done, every company would be guilty of some sort of stereotyping of its audience. After all, marketing isn't about individuality (yet) and the purpose of demographic targeting is to categorize, label and assign certain attributes whether or not those labels correctly reflect the actual brand's customer.
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While we think its a great idea to call attention to the number of pedestrian deaths by doing so at one potential point of death, the crosswalk, we don't think asking people to read the names of dead people and other "don't walk and die"-related messages while crossing the road is a smart move. One primary preventer of death is to simply pay attention to your surroundings. Distractions such as this would seem to increase the very problem it's trying to prevent. A perfect idea of creative conference room idea gone wrong.
Of course, following this line of logic, all forms of roadside advertising such as billboards should be banned since, when driving, people should be paying attention to the road, not reading billboards, right?
When we're presented the chance to launch ourselves out of a cannon to any destination in the world, we tend to get a bit excited. After all, that Outpost.com gerbil thing was pretty cool. Well after no less that 15 clicks and a seemingly endless collection of forms, buttons, drop down menus and a final challenge to enter personal information, our desire to hop inside the cannon quickly waned. For fuck's sake, marketers, if you're gonna offer up some silly time-waster, the least you could do is make it simple.
If you care, this whole cannon thing has something to do with Heineken, the UEFA Champions League Final and various prize packages. We know we're shirking our journalistic duties here but if you really want to see what happens when the cannon goes off, you'll have to slog through the site on your own,
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