Perhaps directing some of the attention away from Edelman who was behind the Wal-Mart fake blog (flog) thing, are two new blogs for McDonald's, but not labeled as such. The co-promote with Monopoly. The Consumerist points to 4railroads and McDmillionwinner (link goes to Google cache as someone inside McDonald's apparent said "oops" and pulled the blog) and explains how the two sites are inter-related. Even though they carry dead giveaway copy written not by bloggers but by copywriters, the two blogs do not mention any association with McDonald's or Monopoly.
It's not that the blogs were launched in a clandestine manner. In fact, an October 19th press release makes reference to the 4railroads blog. It's just that things should be marked as they are. There's nothing wrong with cute, teaser campaigns but to pass something off as something it's not because it's thought slapping a brand name on it will lessen it's effect is, well, just not right.
TAXI has done a nice job positioning Amp'd Mobile as the alternative mobile phone service of choice and these three new spots either reinforce that or simply reveal Amp'd mobile users are cracked. There's the caught singing in the bathroom spot, the dumb, overzealous Dad spot and the orchestra member gone rocker spot. They each either reinforce Amp'd as a provider of really great content or they just prove adults are just grown up kids in disguise.
In case the goofiness of the spots don't set Amp'd apart from others, the Pound the Pinata site, on which a Mexican trio plays Hip Hop, Metal, Reggae or Mariachi while you whack the pinata phone certainly will. Sure, it's all fun but do you know anyone that has an Amp's phone? And where does Amp'd actually have any service?
Isn't it so much fun now that we have all these really cool video sites like YouTube? Any idiot can put up anything they want and legions of social media lovers will glom all over it like rabid Saw III fans? Not, by any stretch, are the creators of this promotional video for UK men's magazine Monkey isiots but it sure looks like they had fun creating this whacked, monkey-like commercial.
It's not often standard fare drug store cosmetics, housekeeping and high-glamor are mentioned in the same sentence but in this David LaChapelle-created Christmas commercial for British drug store chain Boots, they seem to go together gorgeously in an intriguing over the top sort of way.
In this art director's visual wet dream for the new Pontiac G6, the ever declining prices and increasing speed and sexiness of computers, music equipment and telephones are cited as an analogy to the less expensive and supposedly sexier G6. Created by Leo Burnett Detroit, the spot kinda gets the message across but does anyone really believe cars can get cheaper and a Pontiac cold be classified as sexy?
There's a law somewhere that says two makes a trend and with Chevy joining Nissan in the "our car is so awesome you could live in it" thing, we officially have a trend. As you know, some dude is living in a Nissan and making a "film" about it. Opinions as to how and when and ad somehow became a film aside, the series of "films" is supposed to endear us to the vehicle and the glory of its comfort.
Now, Chevy, with its Livin' Large in Aveo, is following eight college student teams across the country for a week with webcams and blog entries. Everyone gets to vote on which team lives the "largest." Wow. Cool. Yea, road trips are fun and we've had our share back in the day when every friggin' move you made wasn't commercialized.
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If you're in New York for ad:tech or you're heading there and want to make sure you don't miss any of the parties, we've put together a Google Calendar and a Community Walk map to help you locate all the parties. It's not an exhaustive list but it's all we know for now. If you know of other parties that should be added to the list, send an email to tips@adrants.com and we'll get it added. Have fun. See you there.
When we first watched this spot from Keta Keta for the hyper fuel efficient FIAT Panda, we didn't get it. That's probably because Keta Keta tells us the logic of the spot works on three levels: fuel consumption by the West indirectly funds terrorist activities, Panda saves so by buying it people are aiding in the fight against terror and finally, if we call owned Pandas, people like Osama would be washing windshields instead of carrying out terrorist acts. Well that hurt. That's too much thinking. The spot's still weird enough to like though.
Using the delightfully lustful imagery of the typical male fantasy, this American Legacy commercial aligns the allure of cigarettes to that of the hot neighbor next door. The spot is part of a new multi-city health program aimed at acknowledging the difficulties of quitting smoking and offering resources to make the job easier. The spot points to BecomeAnEx.org where those resources can be found.
If there are still college students who use notebooks versus laptops for note taking then a new company called Unotes just might have an interesting new method of advertising to the hard to reach demographic segment. Launching in January, Unotes plans to take the lowly 5-subject notebook and turn it into an ad medium selling glossy four color divider pages, the back cover and watermarked pages and using that revenue to provide the notebooks to students for free. There's a charity angle as well with part of the proceeds going to First Book, an organization that provides books to children of low income families. We've seen the prototype and we like what we see. The program will role out nationally in September.
Along with Unotes notebooks, the website yet to launch Unotes.info will offer a virtual world of sorts which will mimick a college campus and college town complete with, yes, embedded brand promotions and other good stuff such as branded ringtones, MP3s, screensavers, wallpaper, buddy icons, video clips and advergames. It's not up yet so we can't comment on its viability though it's intended specifically not to be a Facebook-like place but rather an environment full of deals which studdents can seek out.
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