- Geek rigs maternity device to tweet when his unborn baby kicks. Probably the earliest instance of Twitter use EVAR. (Thanks, Atif!)
- Collateral Damage's top 10 marketing blunders of '08. There's way more than 10 ("It was a very good year for very bad things"), and the top two are tied. Go figure.
- Deep Focus does FlightLipDub.com -- the new online home for Flight of the Conchords.
- Free Will Power aims to safeguard "the future of pro-choice America." There's spoken word poetry! And a T-shirt contest!
- It's a site on the hunt for beautiful ads.
- Another advertising socnet.
- Best and worst of AdFreak. If you consider what Collateral Damage's worst marketing campaign was, you can probably guess AdFreak's best ad of '08. We'll give you a hint: celebrity mashup.
Having failed (twice!) to woo young defectors with ads, Microsoft tries appealing to their unending quest for ironic shirts.
The so-called Softwear line of tees joins Crispin Porter + Bogusky's ongoing "I'm a PC" campaign. Common -- who already appears in ads for Microsoft's Zune -- infused the shirts with retro cred and his own '80s-inspired designs.
Variants include:
o The DOS Tangle: "The first logo you saw on a screen."
o The 101: "Learn to speak the language." Oooh, binary.
o The Misdemeanor: "Everyone deserves a second chance."
There's something the world needs now: mugshots of Bill Gates prowling the streets.
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- Bratz could be yanked off shop shelves. A federal court ruled designer Carter Bryant guilty of developing the brand while working at Mattel. Well, there's one less plastic scapegoat in the world.
- Spitzer's back, bitches! -- as online columnist?!
- Rumor has it Wal-Mart'll be pushing $99 4-gig iPhones after Christmas. Huh.
- Todd Tilford -- who founded Pyro in Dallas -- joins Grey/NY as ECD.
- I feel epilepsy coming! This hallucinatory beverage experience brought to you by Omega 3 Smartfish and TBWA/Norway.
- "Cheese" + "Cupid" -- a hit on Google, if not for Wisconsin Cheese.
- Satan plays devil's advocate.
- Fashion a la Lego.
Oh, MTV.
Over the years it's taught us how babies are made, why the Holocaust was not very nice and where those sassy red tennis shoes really come from. Most importantly, it helped bring Britney back and has kept Russell Brand knee-deep in pharma specifically for our viewing pleasure.
Given what we owe MTV for this elegant yet candid upbringing, it's only natural that someone try paying a little back. And who better than Amsterdam, baby?!
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Last Sunday The Simpsons took the piss out of Apple: the brand experience, the cult of the white earbuds and even Steve Jobs' sermons on the mount.
To incentivize the watch for hardcore ad-heads, wait 'til the end, when a dude with a mallet recreates Apple's "1984."
Magical. Experience Mapple -- "It's so sterile!" -- below the drop (courtesy of Hulu).
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See teaser visuals for the Whopper Virgin campaign by Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Burger King. Turn the volume down unless you dig the cacophonous din of high-pitched wind instruments.
According to AdFreak, Crispin -- our fearless leader! -- will scour the world in search of people that have never tried a Whopper, then publish a documentary about this deep spiritual journey alongside director Stacy Peralta.
The site boasts footage of unravaged remote villages as well as cultural wisdom, of which this is just one example: "If you want a real opinion about a burger, ask someone who doesn't even have a word for burger."
Ahhh. Today their stomachs, tomorrow their labour force. It's enough to make Hernan Cortes beam with childlike delight.
Victoria's Secret Pink Collegiate represents everything wrong (but sellable!) about college: bright-eyed, gum-popping sorority girls that coordinate dog leashes to their shoes, non-merit-based exclusivity (unless heart-shaped hickeys count), high-pitched voices, strawberry blondes, fruity body spray, polka dots, and pink.
Victoria's Secret recently gave unrepresented schools the chance to join the Pink Collegiate Collection -- a pupil-dilating clothing line sporting Pinkified uni logos and mascots. Probably for the above-mentioned reasons, a passel of hackers decided to have their way with the system.
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Memorable moments from 41 ads, nicely choreographed to the tune of One Spring Away. Yeah, the gorilla's in there, plus bits from Sony's Bravia spots and Gap's Khaki Swing.
Steve is jealous because, in less sober times, we've bounced this same idea back and forth: "Hey, what if we mashed up a bunch of ads to, like ... a song...?"
But it takes a fine hand to elevate advertising -- coolly thrashed by jaded pundits -- to the soft-focused realm of scrapbook-worthy human experience. The Band From does it better than we could have.
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