I'm talking about that commercial for Pepto-Bismol, the one where the advertising icons come to life and start attacking the city. They're crushing buildings with their feet and generally causing havoc everywhere. And then they get upset stomach and diarrhea. Maybe from all of the people they've been eating or something. Now, this seems like great news for the world. The giants will get sick and stop attacking the world, maybe even die, never hurting the world again. It would at least give the city some time to figure out what to do with the giants, blow them up or drug them or tie them up or something.
So why do they send in a helicopter with a giant bottle of Pepto? Why do they want to help the giants, make them feel better? The giants take the medicine, and the commercial ends with the monsters continuing to attack the city.
???
I guess the prospect of giants having diarrhea all over the city was worse than him stepping on people and crushing buildings.
What is it with cereals and free movie offers? Every time I see a box of cereal that says you can get a free movie, the movies are usually really...how can I put this...lame?
Take the new offer on boxes of Product 19 (a cereal I haven't had in years but decided to eat again). The movies you can get are Dunston Checks In, Cocoon, Lucas, Cheaper By The Dozen (the remake), Nine Months, Thumbelina, The Pick-Up Artist, and Breaking Away. OK, so a few of those movies are actually pretty good, but I'm talking more about the offer itself. Aren't these movies you can probably get in the discount bin at Best Buy for $9.99 or less anyway? How did they come up with these titles?
I was just watching a commercial for Colgate Total, and the woman in the ad is going on and on about how much she likes it, that her doctor recommended that she use it, etc, etc, and then she uses this line:
"It's the only toothpaste I use."
Well, so what? I'm sure the product is fine, but who switches toothpastes regularly? I think most people find a toothpaste that they like and they stick with it forever. They might switch to a different flavor or something, but I would be that very few people completely switch their toothpaste.
Not that they couldn't, of course, because there are approximately 3000 different types of toothpastes now. It takes me about 10 minutes just to find the one that I always use (Crest gel) because it's lost in all the other flavors and styles. Gah. Sometimes I think choice is a really bad thing.
If you rub some of the ads the Wall Street Journal is planning to run then you'll be able to smell them. The paper promises that the scented ads will be much classier than the fragrance inserts in glossy magazines.
It's hard to figure out what the actual advertising angle is to this story about the tabloids coverage of Jennifer Aniston's rumored nose and boob job. Seriously - can anyone tell me how this is news?
If you like to shop in New Jersey (and who doesn't) you're probably looking forward to the 2008 opening of the Xanadu Meadowlands retail complex (read: mall). To finance the construction it's offering $2.5 billion in naming rights to different areas within the mall.
You've seen the commercials: a guy puts on some Axe body spray and/or body wash and he goes from being a nebbish to being mobbed in a way somewhere between the way that the Beatles were mobbed by women in the 60s and a Caligula-era orgy. I was wondering: does this really work? Is there some ingredient in Axe that makes the ladies go crazy?
Short answer: no. Long answer: no.
I used the stuff last week for three days in a row. I used the body wash and also sprayed the stuff on, and in three different situations I was completely ignored by females. Unless you count the clerk at the supermarket asking me "Do you have your Shaw's card?" as foreplay. Same thing at Border's Books and Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
Of course, I'm not saying the stuff doesn't work. Maybe I'm using it wrong?
I always get a little bummed out after the holidays. I really love Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's, and it's always sort of a letdown when Jan 2 comes around and we're back to the same old grind and same old "feeling" to the year. I don't mind if there are holiday specials after January 2 or if people have their lights up after New Year's Day.
But I think that January 22 and beyond is a little too much.
There's a new commercial for Special K cereal that shows a mom dressed in red and white, next to her family's Christmas tree, and her daughter calls her "Santa!" She then realizes she's too fat and needs to lose weight so she goes to the cupboard to eat Special K (is that how dieting works, you're overweight so you go to the kitchen to get something to eat?). "Joy to the World" plays in the background, the family is under the tree, and the dad helps the kid with her toys.
Mediaedge:cia has been picked by Federated Department Stores as their new agency of record. The change came after the complete lack of review and will include national planning and buying for Macy's.
The drastically reduced print spending by major auto companies is at least one factor - albeit likely a big one - in Time's decision to cut almost 300 staffers. The decreased ad revenue was just too big a hit for the publisher to take.
It should be as no surprise to anyone who's seen the spots that Orville "Deadenbacher" is creeping consumers way the heck out. A reanimated dead guy who wears as iPod while he's microwaving popcorn...yeah...it's creepy.
Stephen Baker is decrying his inability to escape from annoying and intrusive ads during a recent flight he was on. The ads, not confined to tray tables and such, were blaring from the TV sets in the cabin. Baker raises an interesting point that the thinking on advertising has changed, at least among the forward-thinking groups, and no longer values pure reach as much as specific targeting or at least entertainment value. Unfortunately, as I wrote the other day, ads are being put everywhere as marketers are more and more desperate to get their messages across and through the clutter.
This must be how the characters in movies like The Blob felt when they saw the creature, or how people must react to seeing a family member they just heard was horribly disfigured buying a non-fat latte just minutes later.
Suffice it to say that Digital Orville Redenbacher, the centerpiece of a new campaign from CP&B for the brand, creeps me the f**k out. There's not a single thing about this image that's not disturbing on at least seven different levels, including the fact that he's apparently listening to an iPod while microwaving his popcorn (which sounds like a euphemism but isn't), begging the question of what the digital version of a deceased corporate icon would be rocking out to.
For some time now, we've been hearing rumors that "the new at&t" would be changing the name of its wireless carrier, which is currently Cingular, but contains part of the old debacle AT&T Wireless, to at&t. Whether or not they are going to make it lower case or not isn't the issue here, it's the fact that they're changing Cingular's name at all. The amount of money that was spent to not only build the infrastructure and the customer base that it currently has, and have it be a "new" company (I've been a customer almost a decade, from when it was Cellular One in New Jersey) rather than an old world one that just happens to have bought its way into the future has to be staggering, but they for some reason feel the need to, now that the megaconglomerate with a lot less employees than it had before the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the divestiture of Ma Bell has sort of reformed itself.
I'm not really sure what the point of it is, unless you really think that people are going to harken back to the olden days of yore (ten plus years ago) when good old AT&T was providing them with phone service at home, or maybe back to the 70s and 80s when you had a nice rotary phone that weighed a ton and you rented from the phone company. What, rented a phone? Wow, and we think that today's terms and conditions are out of control.
On Wednesday, Engadget's Ryan Block mentioned that the company was looking to have the rebranding in place by the time that the Apple iPhone was released, so we're talking June-time here. Aside from the fact that a rebrand may leave Jeff Burton's #31 Chevrolet without a sponsor, potentially, why are they just flipping the switch over to a name that isn't relevant to the younger generation in this company, except for when they are reading about technology? Kids these days don't have at&t products, unless they're (now) Cingular customers or happen to have DSL at home that's brought together by them. The only reason that the next generation is going to "know" at&t is because they bought their way into their lives and changed the names (back and forth) from a ton of companies that they sort of owned in the first place, but willingly changed the names of when the companies split up. I understand the value of speaking in "one voice" to your customers, and maybe that works with bringing in new ones, but what about your existing ones who actually like what Cingular is about, think the jack is a cool logo, like the orange and black colors, and so on and so forth? If investments such as that are waste-able (which is what is going on here) then why bother being creative at all? Why don't we just go back and call everything what it originally was, just so we can make a connection with people who aren't going to be your core customers for the next two decades? I think if A&P will change it's name back to The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, I'd definitely shop there more often. Not. Bell Atlantic changing its name to Verizon (say what you want about the name) actually made sense because the company wasn't just Bell Atlantic anymore. Cingular changing its name "back" to at&t is pure vanity.
The Humane Society wants everyone to know that trapping is wrong, and they are doing so by airing a 15 second anti-trapping spot on Fox Sports Network (in December 2006). Fox even ran the ads at no charge. The U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance is urging all hunters, trappers, and anglers to voice their disapproval of the public service announcements by contacting News Corporation (Fox's parent company) and get them to take the ads off the air. This has already been tried once, to no avail.
Sadly, hunting, fishing, and the like isn't quite so important to me, it simply isn't my thing. The ads being run by Fox at no charge made me wonder if Fox has a reason for doing this, despite the sportsmen who are decrying this act. In the "stupid humor" portion of my brain, I wondered if Fox wants to help out their name's sake. You know, don't trap the foxes, etc. Nevermind. I said it was stupid you know.
This is an example of how a simple 15-second PSA can make the public (and by that I mean sportsmen) really mad and no one is now doing anyone any service. If the sportsmen need something to put out its misery, they should do the entire world a favor and aim at another one of New Corporation's businesses instead. That's right...MySpace.
I'm sorry, call me stuck-up, call me pious, call me midwesterner (I am in fact) but I don't like to drink me coffee right out of the street. You don't know where that cup of coffee has been, or rather what (or who) has been near that cup of coffee. What if bird poo lands in it from the sky in mid-sip? What if Professor von Hadtoomuchtodrink falls in and pukes all over, I don't want that in my coffee, not to mention the safety hazards for whats-his-name falling into hot liquid while inebriated. Nothing against the professor. Nothing against Folgers, I just would rather have my coffee handed to me by an employee of a coffee establishment where I know that because of the morning rush, they haven't had my coffee in hand for more than a half second or so. When will they have time to put anything weird into my coffee like bird poo, puke, or gravel? Last time I checked, coffee joints (who don't put the coffee in the street for you) don't employ birds indoors nor generally have a professor hanging around with a hangover. Sounds good to me.
I'm not sure how else you would explain these ads for Sprite Zero, which use the same "Fold-In" technique that have been a part of Mad Magazine's back page for many, many years. Basically, you fold the paper a certain way so that the image changes and the words scrunch together to form the joke. I guess it works, and if you've never seen it before you probably think it's really funny. If you know Mad artist Al Jaffee had done the gag since 1964, it kind of loses something.
Okay, that's being a bit picky, I'll admit that. Still, the ads don't impress me that much because they seem to use the same tired approach of reaching men by showing women as objects of convenience that should be discarded when not being used for sex. I'm not making a moral judgment about these ads, I'm just saying it's a tired approach.
Advertising Design Goodness posted these ads from Saatchi and Saatchi in New Zealand for the Bose Noise Reduction headphones. The "airplane" ad is okay, and I can accept that the guy in the boat may be unaware he's headed for a waterfall, but I have some issues with this one:
You might have to look at the larger image to see, but the man inside the train window is completely expressionless. Wouldn't he, I don't know, look concerned? Or be screaming? Obviously they just spliced two different images together, which is fine, but the ad isn't supposed to look like you did that. It's a minor thing, but it ruins what could otherwise be a decent ad.
Has there ever been an anti-drug commercial that didn't treat its target audience like they were complete idiots? If there is, I haven't seen it yet. The latest one to go in my "WTF? file" is this spot created for the "Above the Influence" campaign. In it, a new fad called "SLOM" or "Sticking Leeches On Myself" is sweeping a high school. Even though it seems weird, kids are doing it just because everyone else is. Get it? It's just like smoking pot because your friends pressure you into it!
No, stupid, it's not like that at all. Kids smoke pot because pot makes them feel good. Yes, there's an element of peer pressure involved, just like with tobacco and alcohol, but that's only part of it. Kids do things to alter their state of mind because they enjoy the feeling, and to insist that it's the same as applying leeches to your face is both ignorant and insulting. If you want to tell kids there are better things to do than get high, that's fine, but the first thing you need to do is not talk down to them.
Wow, there's a sentence I never thought I'd say.
What is it with cereals and free movie offers? Every time I see a box of cereal that says you can get a free movie, the movies are usually really...how can I put this...lame?
I was just watching a commercial for 
If you rub some of the ads the Wall Street Journal is planning to run then you'll be able to 
You've seen the commercials: a guy puts on some 
I always get a little bummed out after the holidays. I really love Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's, and it's always sort of a letdown when Jan 2 comes around and we're back to the same old grind and same old "feeling" to the year. I don't mind if there are holiday specials after January 2 or if people have their lights up after New Year's Day. 
Mediaedge:cia 
Stephen Baker is decrying 
This must be how the characters in movies like The Blob felt when they saw the creature, or how people must react to seeing a family member they just heard was horribly disfigured buying a non-fat latte just minutes later. 
For some time now, we've been hearing rumors that "the new at&t" would be changing the name of its wireless carrier, which is currently Cingular, but contains part of the old debacle AT&T Wireless, to at&t. Whether or not they are going to make it lower case or not isn't the issue here, it's the fact that they're changing Cingular's name at all. The amount of money that was spent to not only build the infrastructure and the customer base that it currently has, and have it be a "new" company (I've been a customer almost a decade, from when it was Cellular One in New Jersey) rather than an old world one that just happens to have bought its way into the future has to be staggering, but they for some reason feel the need to, now that the megaconglomerate with a lot less employees than it had before the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the divestiture of Ma Bell has sort of reformed itself. 
I'm not sure how else you would explain 
Has there ever been an anti-drug commercial that didn't treat its target audience like they were complete idiots? If there is, I haven't seen it yet. The latest one to go in my "WTF? file" is 
