It was just a matter of time before Borat got pinned a victim for his masochistic hairstyle but it turns out his case may be bigger than that, depending on whether you value the right to good hair over freedom of speech.
An annual human rights report released by Condy Rice criticizes the real Kazakhstan, listing relevant examples of human rights victims and including fictional character Borat, the woman-bashing, Jew-spooked Kazakh reporter invented by Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.
It's unsurprising Borat's come across some trouble considering the president isn't too keen on Cohen's charming rendition of Kazakhstan as racist, superstitious and misogynistic. The decision to pull Borat's website, Borat.KZ, is ceremoniously noted in the report: "The government deemed as offensive the content of a satirical site controlled by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and revoked the .kz domain."
We think it's sweet that the country has risen to Borat's defense. If we're going to chuck dirt at all our international friends anyway we might as well stop pretending it's for a good reason and go on righteously rallying for fictional characters.
Humbert Humbert had it rough too. Who wants to throw the rock at Mother Russia?
While it might be fun to watch and video tape your roommate's hot girlfriend strip down to her underwear, we're not sure it would be equally as enjoyable to watch and video tape your roommate strip down to his underwear and make out with his girlfriend while you watch. Oh wait. Sorry. Some people like that voyeuristic stuff. And, apparently, so does Network2, a destination for episodic web productions not destined or television but for your computer screen. A promotional video, created by Keta Keta, illustrates exactly what we're talking about.
Remember that weird You are Music thing Nokia did, the thing with the bodysuit guy and the rapper? To push the N800 internet tablet, Sweden's FarFar brings us more weird, somewhat off-putting work with The Internet Walk, which plays on the notion of taking the internet to places it's never been.
Sounds like a good idea in theory but we don't get this at all. And now we can't get the annoyingly lyrical "Come on" out of our heads.
In a liaison that appears strange at first glance, Lay's potato chips joins nationally syndicated series HomeTeam in fueling the fantasies of starry-eyed virgin homeowners. Lays.com will feature moments of joy from past and upcoming episodes. The show is hosted by former Apprentice star Troy McClain.
A good if unlikely liaison. We're pretty sure that the consumption of chips on a couch of one's own is a fantasy every American has when constructing that imaginary white picket fence.
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.
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