Ever wonder what it's like playing asst. media planner to a set of sadistic self-righteous bigwigs? Find out from people who know. WTF-Chuck brings us Three Horses, a mini-feature on getting saddled at the bottom of the media planning ladder. He calls it bitter but we say there's always a little truth - maybe too much truth - in satire.
At some point in our careers we all get to be human shields. And how about demographic quantification? Few things are funner than making caricatures of whole groups of people while hoping to strike a chord with them.
Well, we don't actually get to do that as much as we'd like. That's what TRU is for.
For some inexplicable reason, everybody loves a good karaoke contest. ViTrue, the guys who made Sharkle (ground zero for user-generated ads), teams up with Pringles to host Jingles for Pringles, a video community featuring Pringles' new slogan, "Pleasure. Every single Pringle."
For a few prizes, including tickets to see the American Idol finale, users can turn in songs and videos promoting Pringles' new face.
Well, that's exciting. You know what would be more exciting? Replacing the face of the Pringles man with a warped anime character. Oh wait, Doritos did that already. In fact, Doritos also did this CGM thing. The only difference is, they did it when it was hot.
Can we just hurry and skip to the place where we assume CGM will be part of every marketing effort from this point on? Emphasis on "part." We think it's past the point where asking for content and giving away prizes can be considered a headlines-worthy marketing campaign.
After calling John Edwards a faggot at the last Conservative Political Action Conference, several companies are arranging to pull their ads from Ann Coulter's website, now billed politically extreme by Verizon and probably others. A quick content scan makes you wonder why anyone would make a milder assessment. Guess it's a perspective thing.
With cavalier she's presently flouting Edwards' campaign letter against her alongside her blog. We want to call it ballsy but we think there's a better b-word for it.
Unless you're Kate Moss, losing endorsements is often the first sign you're slipping through the tubes, but in Ann Coulter's case it's just another notch in the figurative bedpost. It's not like she's acting out of character.
Let's have some fun. Perhaps you've seen the recent YouTube campaign for the book Punk Marketing, in which a model, Cleo, stips while reading excerpts form the book. Yea, yea. We know the striptease is nothing new but we haven't seen it used this way before. Now, a second model, Anna, has been added to the mix and we're curious which one you like better so we're going to host a fun little poll.
You can read about the campaign's history here, here and here. You can view the three Cleo videos here, here and here. And you can view the Anna video here.
After you've "educated" yourself, take our quick poll here and let us know what you think. We'll report back the results.
New Belgium, the source of our beloved Fat Tire Ale, kicks off a campaign toting "the sustainable side of whimsical [read: alcohol-soaked] living."
Denver's Cultivator Advertising and Design create Follow Your Folly, guiding jovial beer lovers to an interactive Wonderland promoting sustainability with bare-assed but enviro-friendly efforts like Save Our Rivers. Tagged "Follow your folly. Ours is beer," a featured beer appears in each promotion.
It merits noting that even before Google got all extra-extra with their bike-riding culture and alternative energy hype, New Belgium was already laying the groundwork. They were also the first brewery to switch to wind-power in 1999, and employees ride bikes or walk to work. With careful recycling, reuse and composting methods, only 2% of their waste becomes landfill.
Follow Your Folly looks to us like great marketing in harmony with the socially responsible values of a good company. Even if some people don't care about environmentally responsible corporate conduct, we sorta do. After all, beer is nature's nectar.
With asymmetrical seams (sewn by hand ye old indentured way) and copper rivets, Levi's Copper jeans allegedly hark back to the first jeans ever. To promote this hat-tip to history, Ogilvy One, Singapore also takes a nod backward with a pure HTML-written site.
Using archaic inconvenience to promote user interactivity, oversized imagery elicits scrolling in all directions. Copper trivia pops out of the dirt in old-school info windows and facts on the jeans appear in drop-down menus starkly interspersed across the huge denim-and-dirt backdrop. The usability and aesthetic annoyances that come with vintage web design nipped more than once, but we dig the creative effort.
If you're so inspired that another day without Copper jeans will kill you, print out a life-sized PDF to try on. We've never worn PDF before and we can't wait to show all our friends.
Thanks to Richard Ho of AdCritic.com for the Levi's Copper info.
When in television, it goes without saying you might run into some odd policy meant in some way to protect you from The People or The People from you.
This is exactly what Conan discovered when he joked in passing about the existence of HornyManatee.com on air. An irate NBC called to let him know he can't just mention a site that doesn't exist, and now they have to purchase HornyManatee.com.
So that's exactly what they did. And instead of just redirecting it to NBC per the quid pro quo, they thought, why not pull out all the stops? The results make a good ice-breaker and they even managed to tie it to a cause, because you know how much people love cause-oriented consumerism.
Take the fetish tour for a complete manatee explosion.
That was disgusting. Forget we said that. In other news, and this is totally off-topic, we just found out that right whales have testes that weigh over one ton. HornyWhale.com, anybody? Wow, we've totally succeeded in grossing ourselves out. This is a new high. Or low.
PETA may just have a heyday with this one. A recent Gmail correspondence resulted in this set of Google-served text ads. The mash-up was so strange we had to keep it - not just because of the menagerie of animals but because we can't believe there's such a thing as Squirrel Circus. (Watch the video. We're building a squirrel playset the second we get home!)
While the acrobatic squirrels amused us two minutes too long, the Armadillo Eliminator strikes us as sinister. Those bottles of death fluid are like a cross between antifreeze and Dip.
Like food poisoning after a post-Lent binge, the content spider probably experienced a bad reaction to the recent rodent rampage at KFC and the Geico caveman. But of course we could be totally wrong - armadillos and squirrels feature regularly in discussions we have with strangers over the internet.
We're always open to a time-waster. TAMBA gets all competitive by hopping in on Comic Relief's Digital Challenge, where they launched a new game called Red Lead in honour of Red Nose Day 2007.
The idea is to get the Red Noses from one side of your monitor to the other without getting stabbed by a sharp pencil. Different sorts of noses, like the golden ones, are magical. In case you wondered, there is a cause attached to this.
Note image to the left. Then consider what we said here. The game is cool and all, but are we destined for one sensory violation after another today?
Quitting alone is perilous, so say three ads that demonstrate how sporadic and undependable "cold turkey" really is. Catch spot one, spot two and spot three.
Created by Wongdoody for the Washington State Dept. of Health, Cold Turkey builds upon the previous No Stank You! campaign.
The whole pimply uncooked bird gimmick is weird. And what's wrong with cold turkey, anyway? Cold turkey's helped us quit hundreds of times. As any experienced smoker will tell you, quitting hundreds of times is way better than starting hundreds of times.
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