- The Obama Administration's recovery.gov logo kinda reminds us of...
- MoMA shoots for socially-minded redesign. (It should probably start here, though.)
- Google's Eric Schmidt's a Twitter-hater. Well, maybe "hater" is too strong a word.
- For once, an instance where extreme prejudice may improve your online quality of life. (Via that one guy whose site's all covered in Skittles.)
- Hella happy over drillwork.
- Starbucks value meals? Seriously? Sell your stock. Now. Because a licensing partnership with Hello Kitty is just around the corner.
In the continuing saga of Carlos Mandelbaum and his insightful take on the state of marketing today, his latest outing examines the fantasy life of corporate managers. Mandelbaum ponders the penchant of corporate managers to fantasize they are warriors or mystics or...students getting all philosophical and intellectual by enjoying mind-expanding lectures by really cool professors...like the dude that did those weird UPS whiteboard ads.
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- Somebody just sent us a link to KillaBanker.com, a little CafePress store where you can buy knee-jerk reactions to economic despair.
- Hanzi Smatter, a site "dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture," is hilarious. See awkward interpretation of tattoo on a model featured in AussieBum's Commando ad.
- Kellogg's brand rep suffers following Phelps fallout.
- What ho, a Dairy Queen blog.
- More jibjab over Arnell/Tropicana.
At left is the decidedly safe top corner of "Flesh For Fantasy (Girl #5)", an art print with an anatomical surprise smack-dab in the middle. See the whole thing here (N!S!F!W!).
It's part of an exhibit called Talk Dirty to Me, which is composed of pieces depicting sexual language and/or imagery.
This Hearts on Fire covered news of the exhibit in a manner neither lewd nor naughty, although you've still got the issue of a vagina staring flagrantly back at readers. Glam Media, which sells ad space on the site, didn't take to it and requested that the blog remove the image for the sake of "family brand" advertisers whose names may be sullied by appearing alongside it.
But hell, being in the industry he's in (ours), the author decided that in lieu of taking it down he'd post his entire email exchange with Glam instead. You can see that here, along with another arty sex shot and two more digital copies of the offending lips, just for the hell of it.
Way to stick it to the (ad) man, you stalwart blogger you.
On Super Bowl Sunday Hyundai launched "Angry Bosses," an ad that depicted corpos all over the world angrily shouting Hyundai! in various states of aneurysm-inducing rage.
At the end, a calm voiceover goes, "Win one little award, and suddenly everyone gets your name right. It's 'Hyundai', like 'Sunday'."
Never mind the screamers in the video. That last line, "It's 'Hyundai', like 'Sunday'," has incited the righteous indignation of at least one man, "Bernard in CT," who believes the idea of rhyming "Hyundai" with days of the week was his idea.
And damnit, he deserves the cred for it.
Letter and ad below.
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Uh Oh. The Wimpy Swimmers of America cause group is about to get their undies in a twist. As will, no doubt, Bob Garfield. Yes, after its Speedwalker ad offended gays (and Bob Garfield), which we never quite understood, Snickers is out with another Mr. T ad which takes on wimpy "toe dippers" who cower at the thought of swimming in water that isn't a perfect 85 degrees.
"You makin' me mad, sucka!"
"It's time to get in the pool, fool!"
"Take that, toe dipper!"
"I hate flying so this better be the last time I hear you crying!"
"Get some nuts!"
Yea, baby! Classic Mr. T.
YouTube's given rise to more than its fare share of pro-bono talking heads, so it's not often we watch any one "thought leader" video in full. But "The Command Economy," an ad manifesto from Carlos Mandelbaum's Carnival of Ideas, gave us pause. (He's got these expressions that grab you! And we love that musical text-reader gimmick.)
Listen with audiovisual fixation as he explains how the '80s ruined everything (which we already knew), and how advertisers' bad-ass commanding attitude have something major in common with the Berlin Wall.
It's tasty bait, and we wanna find out where he's taking us.
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Co-founder Biz Stone wrote a blog post that elaborates on a suggestion he made earlier about monetizing Twitter. The crucial stuff:
"Twitter will remain free to use by everyone--individuals, companies, celebrities, etc. What we're thinking about is adding value in places where we are already seeing traction, not imposing fees on existing services."
So businesses already using Twitter can chill: they won't be charged extra for what they're already doing. Stone seems to be saying -- and we write that tentatively, because he leaves a lot of room for interpretation -- that only add-ons will cost anything, unless he means Twitter plans to bring ad support to high-traffic areas. (Hot hash tags and Summize search results look prime for this.)
"[We] hope to begin iterating on revenue products this year," he added.
Sounds like Jeff Bezos et al. are starting to tap their watches.
Oh how we just wanted to let this one go. Really, we did. And we thought it would just go away like every other occasional unveiling of an agency's always-embarrassing internal workings.
As idiotic, far-fetched and plain absurd as the Arnell Group Pepsi document is, anyone who's ever worked in the industry knows this brand blatherific crap is the norm when it comes to a renaming/rebranding/logo project. It's. Just. The. Way. It. Is.
We're not defending the document's overblown inanity but pick up any creative brief or major rebranding document you've ever written and read it. Then multiply the idiocy you just read by about 100 and it makes perfect sense, given the size of the Pepsi account, the Arnell/Pepsi document is as hilariously verbose and mind-boggling as it is.
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Ever heard of The BeanCast? It's OK. Neither had we up until a few months ago when this half of Adrants was invited to appear. It's a podcast. Well, a new one is up and it's - surprise - all about the Super Bowl. Yea, we know. It was duller than a newspaper circulation department this year but, hey, it's our job to discuss the ads ad naseum, right?
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