Probably because it fears death by Google almost as much as it fears sexual ambiguity, Ask.com has decided to stop competing for all-purpose search engine renown.
Instead it hopes to become the go-to source for married women seeking health, grade school homework tips, entertainment, recipe and hobby information.
It is also laying off about 40 people.
Maybe if it wasted less time trying to engage us in expensive guessing games it would've had a better fighting chance. Oh well, such is life in the tubes.
Ever fantasize about one-upping your boss? Forget about scoring a machine gun and leaving life in cubicletopia with a parting gift of unhinged chaos. Play Dodge the Boss instead. (For best results, do it on his or her dime.)
The game is simple but delightfully time-consuming. Use your mouse to avoid the boss-men without touching any of the sides. Dodging the boss as long as possible could land you tickets to see the sultry Kylie Minogue in Paris.
How's that for leaving the office in a blaze of glory?!
The game was disseminated by Rubber Republic and put together by Global Radio for Galaxy FM's "Love Music Love March."
Here's an ad about a middle-aged paperboy working to get braces for his daughter. And here's one about a white collar cog who drives his college beater so he and his pregnant wife can save for their baby.
These spots are part of an ad campaign for Fifth Third Bank called "The Things We Do for Dreams," produced by Anonymous Content for agency OLSON.
We like it. Swimming upstream against a dismal economy, it's nice to see a bank put an optimistic spin on the everyday struggle -- illuminating the decisions we've had to make, and watch our parents make -- rather than distracting us with gimmicky comic relief.
It lends the sense that Fifth Third understands what it's like to do things that aren't fun out of a sense of hope. That's nice. And strangely rare.
For all her noxious crying and whatnot, Hillary Clinton is a well-honed jungle predator. "Winning. Winning, winning, that's my measure of success -- winning," she barked recently.
Having demonstrated yesterday that she's still a viable contender for the presidency, the question arises: what does it take to win, win, win like Hillary?
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To persuade people to Do the Green Thing, Play With Us put together this documentary about penguins in Antarctica. Except the penguins aren't penguins; they're naked people that seem at least partially catatonic.
All this to get us to huddle? We've seen cozier arguments.
Check out this crazy Dove viral based on Japanese puppet theatre. It reminded us of that scene in Funny Face where Audrey dons black garb and does interpretive dance at the existentialist bar. Except imagine the protagonist is Ugly Betty, and body odor -- not materialism -- is the source of the world's problems.
Put together by Ogilvy Brazil for Dove Invisible Dry.
Always is running this campaign where it's printing feel-good phrases like "Have a happy period" over the wax paper on maxi pads. We didn't think much about it until we saw this letter, allegedly written to P&G by a woman gone totally apeshit over it. Her first thought upon tearing open a new pad and seeing "Have a happy period" was "Are you fucking kidding me?"
A really sunny excerpt:
FYI, unless you're some kind of sick S&M freak girl, there will never be anything "happy" about a day in which you have to jack yourself up on Motrin and Kahlua and lock yourself in your house just so you don't march down to the local Walgreen's armed with a hunting rifle and a sketchy plan to end your life in a blaze of glory.
We giggled about it.
And then it happened.
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We just got a ton of creative from a new Royal Enfield campaign in Delhi. It's called "Trip" -- not to be confused with what happens when you ingest too many of the wrong kind of mushrooms.
Pretty standard profile-of-a-user stuff. Each one has a picture of a dude, his name and his motorcycle, followed by a brief timeline of "whoa!" and "damn!" activities. Each timeline ends with "Tripping ever since," which refers to when they started riding Royal Enfields.
Profile campaigns are sort of like the Zodiac. If you add enough variation and disseminate the ads across enough media, you're bound to trigger an irrational "Hey, that's TOTALLY ME!" in anybody curious enough to linger on the copy.
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There are few things more lame than a competitive staring match between two non-blinking pros, unless those pros are also inanimate objects.
Watch helplessly as the portraits of Coldwell Banker's founding fathers, Colbert Coldwell and Arthur Banker, try to out-stare each other. Well, sort of. They're side by side, so they can't really stare.
It could be worse. (Imagine the moving-mouth and eyeball-hockey effects that challenged advertisers usually impose on stills.)
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To celebrate 100 years in footwear, Converse is welding new icons to old ones in a campaign called "Connectivity."
According to Complex, "cultural heroes" like James Dean, Hunter S. Thompson and Sid Viscious will fuse feet (neat touch!) with Common, Dwyane Wade and Billie Joe Armstrong. Sort of like paper dolls.
See more here.
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