- A handful of rich-ass celebrities use reverse psychology to cajole MySpace users into voting. What, does Jennifer Aniston not do it for you? Maybe Leonardo DiCaprio's poverty-ridden excuse for a blog will.
- The wife of David Warthen, founder of Ask.com, is facing tax evasion charges on money she made while working as a hooker to pay for law school.
- Three thought-provoking reasons not to blog anonymously if you're gonna blog at all.
more »
by Angela Natividad
Oct- 7-08
Topic: Brands, Campaigns, Cause, Commercials, Online, Opinion, Packaging, Political, Strange, Trends and Culture, Video
- In a bid to woo former CP+B client Pearl Izumi, Boulder agency Karsh/Hagan launched a poster campaign slamming agencies that drop smaller clients for bigger ones.
- With "silent" ad, KFC offers $20,000 to the United Nations World Food Program if presidential candidates address the issue of world hunger during the debate Tuesday in Nashville.
- Smirnoff is out with a new commercial which has two trapeze artists making a drink in mid air while performing at the circus.
- Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine has joined the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors Consumer Education Foundation and TD AMERITRADE Institutional to launch the Your Money Bus Tour.
To demonstrate how global warming will one day turn familiar surroundings into aquarium props, Offsetters suspended lifeboats off the side of buildings and lined Vancouver's streets with water safety gear: life vests under park benches, and a life guard, on duty, in the middle of a promenade.
Efforts included clear "offsetters.ca" labeling. See more of the work on the website.
Nice way to get attention, ignite imaginations and play with surroundings instead of cluttering them. By Rethink.
Kristen Bell, along with Mark Cuban, Olivia Munn, John Picard, Minka Kelly, Bill Maher, Matt White, Norman Lear, Perez Hilton and others are part of GAP's Vote For campaign. In the PSAs, the celebrities urge people to vote for those who can't, not to stay silent because an individual vote might not matter, to vote green whether or not you are red or blue, to vote for cleaner energy, to spport the troops and other bipartisan messages no one can really disagree with.
It's a nice effort. It's subtle. It's well crafted. And, thankfully, it's miles away from the usual, overtly leftist/rightist approach we see in so many other political PSAs.
Patsy, a little potato-faced woman, doesn't know how to talk to her kids about drugs. But she knows that she should, so she finds ways to unearth drug use in ways they won't expect: ambushing them in the shower, patting them down mid-embrace, and stripping labels off the family's prescription pills. (Don't ask. I was clueless about the logic of that.)
In the end, well-meaning Patsy only alienates her kids and bamboozles her husband into accidentally taking female hormone pills. (No labels on the drug bottles, remember?) The moral of this story? "Don't be a Patsy."
more »
WONGDOODY brings retro effects and electonica beats to No Stank You, a fervently trendy effort to keep teens in Washington from smoking.
A dance-off sets the stage for the first spot. Each team consists of a person and a disembodied set of lungs. One set's healthy; the other looks like the tattered black pieces of a deflated life vest.
more »
Of late, IBM's been trying to loosen its tie and go a little green. Its efforts so far have been earnest but self-conscious: potentially exciting work dampened by risk-aversion.
For its "Fight Carbon" campaign, IBM gets down with the street artists -- "vandalizing" public areas, then removing its work and leaving those spaces cleaner than when they left them.
In its younger years, IBM was clearly not the rebel in the 'hood.
more »
- T-Mobile debuts first Google Android phone, thereby changing face of mobile forever, etc., etc.
- Wieden and Starbucks break up.
- Wrigley sells advergaming goldmine Candystand to Funtank. No word on why the service, which CEO James Baker of Funtank called "great viral marketing," was sold. Maybe it was just time to cash in.
- Biggie Smalls hits the big screen. "Too bad we're not in middle school anymore," says a twenty-something colleague. "I'm imagining the tears ... and the hugging."
more »
...it does, and they don't wish you well.
Time has taught me to look forward to French PSAs, whose entertainment value outpaces (often dire) American counterparts while maintaining a lighter, friendlier feel.
This French PSA for colon cancer is less action-packed than the AIDS PSAs we've been so stuck on. Like a rerun of Osmosis Jones, the :30 spot takes users on an animated trip inside an apparently-healthy man's body, where a grinning cancer cell waits, eager to wreak havoc and whatnot.
Its object is to convince men over 50 to get tested for colon cancer -- which, if caught early, can in most cases (the ad says nine out of 10) be cured. Launched by the National Cancer Institute, it airs from September 14-October 8 across most major French stations.
- Google's Sergey Brin started a blog. In the first entry, he discloses his risk for Parkinson's disease. The New York Times probes why he'd do that.
- British actor Paul Kaye plays Seamus Murphy, the shady proprietor of an airport car park, for another one of those not-yet-viral "viral" campaigns. This is for Holiday Extras, a travel website.
- Esther Lee departs EuroRSCG.
more »
|
|
