According to CSX Transportation it's common for co-eds to wander drunkenly onto traintracks in dead of night and die grisly railroad deaths that often involve bright lights, loud noises, metal on flesh and decapitation.
(We've also heard this happens to koalas in the wild. Drunk off eucalyptus, they fall off their trees and are often hit by cars. But that's a digression.)
To get the word out to college students, agency Exit10 of Baltimore distributed wallet-sized bottle openers that portray a man being decapitated when used. We thought this was a silly idea until we actually saw the bottle opener. Now we just feel very uncomfortable. "This is what a train can do to your body," reads the sober black text against the metal finish.
The sight of it made us rub our necks and put down our requisite Adrants martini. Dude. Talk about a buzzkill.
If lust doesn't do the job for you this Valentine's day, Swatch suggests voodoo. And if the voodoo fails, at least the apple of your eye will have a neat new watch and a weird-looking stuffed toy.
Swatch is running a neat little Valentine's Day campaign with love voodoo master Eddy G Lazaro. In this video he shows you how voodoo love Swatch watches are made. It's not nearly as action-packed as it sounds and there are no shrunken heads, but he does do that neat eyes-rolling-back trick. And each voodoo love Swatch comes with a bonafide voodoo doll.
What can beat that? We're at a total loss. This is just a notch better than smacking your partner on the back of the head and dragging her by the hair into your cave.
Valentine's Day approaches and with that, a frenzy to work out how best to show partners you love them. But love is abstract and ridden with dangerous cliches. How many longtime wives still appreciate the stock flowers and chocolates gesture? Lust, however, is flattering, easy to define and easier still to buy for.
Swedish company Lelo takes the traditionally cheesy sex toy and turns it into something to covet with sleek designs, subtle sizes and sweet little nicknames for its models like Lelo, Nea and Lily. It's a little like the iPod of vibrating gadgets. And for Valentine's day Lelo expands its narrow product line to include a limited-edition pleasure toy just for the season.
Lelo Valentine is a soft black ergonomically sound toy that comes in hot pink packaging and has "love" scrawled prettily right at the pleasure point. Created by Jesper Kouthoofd, it'll only set you back $129.
This year you can demonstrate your love - via lust - in no less than 16 speeds. And you can do it without looking like a prick clutching yet another prick in a giftwrapped box. With their fancy handiwork, high-brow price tags and low-key marketing, the Swedish are quite possibly the best thing to ever happen to the sex toy industry. And we're happy they've filled the niche, considering the Swiss have already taken cheese, chocolate and watches.
After spending $4.2 million on a couple of spots in the uber-competitive ad orgy called Super Bowl, you naturally want some serious run for your money. But not everybody takes the expected measures to ensure an ROI.
Adrants reader Roy points us to this interesting story about the American Heart Association, who paid the Super Bowl invoice and dropped still more cash to produce light-hearted cautionary piece "Heart Attack," then did something odd: they neglected to mention the product, heart drug Altace.
"I don't think it is appropriate to have some guy in a white lab coat staring into the audience saying, 'You are going to die if you eat another chicken wing,'" says Rebecca Sroge, executive VP and managing director of Glow Worm, the agency that created "Heart Attack."
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For all you perverts out there. Oh wait. Sorry. That's just us. And maybe the dude over at Where's my Jetpack who had some fun playing with Land O Lakes butter. No, not the product you sickos. The packaging. Apparently way bakc in the 30's, the designer of the packaging, Jess Betlach thought he'd have some fun by adding the visual hint or female aureola/nipple to the Indian woman's knees. The knees, you ask? Well, according the Where's My Jetpack, thousands of boys would cut the knees off, cut a whole where the Indian woman is holding the product and insert the image of the knees thus creating the illusion of an Indian woman holding her bare breasts.
Remember, this was before Playboy. Before Juggs. Before the Internet. Before National Geographic, perhaps. Apparently, a guy had to so what he had to do to get his daily moment of satisfaction. Humorously, Where's My Jetpack promises to post Land O Lakes' cease and desist when it arrives.
You might be wondering who the odd man at left is. He's Dr. Woodrow I. Lovett, Director for the Institute of Advanced Personhood, or Microsoft's latest attempt to make good on neurotic left-of-center Woody Allen-esque humour. While their Clearification effort invents HANDTOSS, an overachiever disease, the IAP promises solace for such sufferers.
The success of the spoofy sites depend heavily on Demetri Martin, whose latest Comedy Central special was heavily sponsored by Microsoft. We thought Clearification was neat but are now over it. What's Vista got to offer us? We hear it's pretty lackluster. When they can invent a cure for underachieving maybe we'll start paying attention.
Flickr user rcrowley informs us contextual advertising has leaped off the webpage and into the real world. Since he currently has a small cold, he headed over to Walgreen's to pick up some Dayquil. He noticed the top of the bottle was affixed with a sticker that read "Need Facial Tissue?"
While we're down on contextual advertising at times, were thinking it's less likely we'll see a turpentine ad affixed to the toe tag of a teen who died from drinking turpentine than a similar instance online. Good old, human-controlled advertising to the rescue.
The Ad Council and the US Army join forces, enlisting AdPack to help them encourage teens to stay in school. The result? Boost Up. The gimmick? Branded tissues by Zim-squared (sorry, we can't make that symbol without getting our post all fudgey) for at-risk youth throughout NYC.
That's almost too inspirational for words. You know what? Pencils would have been more useful. Or even green recess balls with good bounce to them. We can't think of anything to say to this mediocre effort besides you guys suck. You would probably have sucked less if you ran these kids over with recruiter vans. And we're almost 99% sure those tissues you're so generously doling out don't come in neat tiki man-shaped boxes, either.
We dig this approach that Cargill took to illustrate how they create solutions for farmers. The spot is subtle, soothing and just a pinch witty: if we were barnyard animals an ice cream truck feed would get us pretty stoked too. Then again, the combination of music and food is unbeatable.
Apparently Cargill actually did travel a Polish town with a singing truck to hawk barnyard feed. That's not a job we'd want, but we salute the effort.
Direction credited to Raymond Bark of Gartner.
Owning an iPhone is the equivalent of an out-of-body experience which is the only way to justify the 7% leap in Apple share post-unveiling and the $499-$599 price tag that out-hurrahs both iPod and BlackBerry.
ZDNet talks pros and cons, foreseeing death and suffering for many companies left vulnerable in the storm of common interest. With Apple's cultlike status they could have released this to the exact same jizz-in-the-pants fanfare.
There's a vibe in the air like people are down to give Apple their credit cards for safe-keeping until June, when the first iPhones will slide off conveyor belts and into warm laps. That is, if WOM is anything to go by as the topic's received a whoppin' 1,684 mentions on Google news alone per Adfreak's last count. Obviously iPhone is already more popular than the Beatles, a sweet irony because it's really only a platform for the Beatles and because Apple recently exercised total ownage over the Beatles.
Apple also changed its official title from Apple Computers to Apple Inc, better suited to accommodate its menagerie of soon-to-be-successful non-computer products, including iPhone and the iTV which will marry the 'net to the tube. That's definitely a pairing we've seen attempted before but with Apple's blessing (and the fact that the original WebTV is now owned by MSN, adding the critical pwnage component) we're sure it will fly this time around.
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