- Will Video for Food thinks a recent youTube featured video, One World, by MadV is part of a paid promotion for the supposed launch of his upcoming television show.
- Ad Agency North has drafted an extensive white paper on the rise of consumer control over media and advertising and how marketers can shift their efforts to better coincide with this new flow of information.
- The Web Marketing Association has announced its fifth annual Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Awards. The IAC Awards are an industry-based advertising award competition for online advertising. The Competition Web site is located at www.iacaward.org and the deadline for entry is January 31, 2007.
- Hmm, that was short. Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc. fame has left AOL, the company that purchased Weblogs Inc. just over a year ago.
- Burger King has pissed off Spain with ads for its Double-Cheese Bacon XXL death burger because the ad runs counter to the country's recent efforts to lim down its society.
If Madonna adopted a cheesy bite instead of a boy with a father, she might have experienced less resistance and more of the well-being that comes after plucking your newborn adoptee out of its tiny basket and putting it into your mouth.
Adopt a bite if one hasn't already been left clandestinely on your doorstep, but think hard about the commitment you're undertaking. Watch the teenage adoption video first. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Here's a series of print ads that merits some attention just because we had to stare at them for awhile in order to understand what was going on. The caption reads "More than 5,000 bottles to open." The images are bottle openers in various states of injury (and one suicide) presumably after trying to unscrew that number. Variations on the ad are available here and here.
The series is for 1855, a Paris-based internet wine purveyor. Damn, French-speaking countries just love their wine distributor ads. Nobody else seems to bother. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Altoids' "Oh, the Shame!" campaign compares a boy's first encounter with the curiously strong mints to his first encounter with, well, puberty. "The young have been taught to be wary of all things curious," writer Desmond Lavelle tells Ad Critic. "Be it drugs, sex or the mysterious appearance of hair, they will eventually have to experience such things for themselves. Altoids are no different."
We kind of see the connection there but discussing Altoids and genitalia together in too direct a manner is kind of painful. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Kevin Smith, better known as Silent Bob, hosts Virgin Mobile's premier Bleepin Awesome Awards. Would-be winners enter their videos on Youtube for a chance to get aired on Times Square at New Years.
Videos must showcase a person or thing getting transformed into a more "bleepin awesome" version of itself. We neither know nor care what that means but after a perusal of entries we decided we really want this guy to win. Because come on, how many people can deduce that gratuitous use of smileys, LOLs and exclamation points is directly proportionate to your worship of cats?
But we digress. Um, check out a video of Kevin Smith bleepin a lot here. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Okay. We're not really sure what this Kyle Bone dude is doing with the whole anti-shirt thing, but apparently it has to do with a bunch of parachutes falling on his middle-American town.
To clarify, a PR guy sends us the following background on the docu-style campaign:
"Microsoft believes in the power of big ideas, and that there are countless great business ideas all over America, just waiting to happen. With the right tools, they can flourish and maybe even change the world. Microsoft small business account wants to help small businesses by giving away free software and the opportunity to make big ideas into reality."
Hm. Well, the US was the first country in history to include the pursuit of happiness in its ideal of unalienable rights, so whatever. But for the record and for our own pursuit of happiness, or at least snide smugness, we are playing with the idea of creating a "Lame" category in Kyle's honor. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Portland-Based Bent Image Lab gets innovative and uses a human face to sex up a stop motion character who goes from sweetheart to siren in this 60-second ad for Lux Provocateur soap and agency Santo Argentina (Spanish version here). Executive Producer Ray Di Carlo explains, "It was just a really good way to solve a problem I see in some stop motion puppets --a lack of soul."
Technical breakthroughs aside, the content is a far cry from Wallace and Grommett. After a forest bath with some black Lux soap the id-operative heroine makes the antlers of deer grow in addition to turning up mustaches on her former village brothers. And what in hell is going on with the whip-wielding gnome-looking thing? - Contributed by Angela Natividad
AdFreak's David Kiefabr says, after much searching, he's found his favorite commercial. After viewing it, we just might have to agree. You know all those ads that feature women just because they are eye candy for men? This one cements that notion brilliantly.
Way back in the heady days of 1998 dot com mania, an account director friend who, as much as we did, loved to sling around pompously pointless marketing blather and marvel at the ability of other to, as well, say so much while saying so little thought we'd write a book gathering together all the inanity. We never did but "seven words you can't say on TV" comedian George Carlin created a 3:42 bit on the same topic. For 3:42, he hilariously strings together the pointless blather that not only marketers but all people fling out of their mouths without fully considering how stupid it sounds.
Take note. More than half of what comes out of your mouth in that client presentation is mindless, pointless, idiotic sounding, space-filling blather. Don't you want meetings to be shorter? Aren't you sick of fake words that mean nothing? Wouldn't you rather be actually creating something rather than killing it with the boatload of words you throw at it before you ever show it to the client? Of course you would. So stop talking like an idiot.
So apparently today's the day Sony's Playstation 3 makes its retail debut and as is always the case, fervent fans have lined up at retailers across the nation to insure the are the first to pick up the new unit. Chris Thomas, director of national advertising for The Dave Ramsey Show, along with a few friends, decided they'd check out the dedication at one of there local Best Buys. They put together a video with interviews of those who've been living in tents in front of Best Buy for the past 24 to 36 hours and slapped it up on YouTube.
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