Posts tagged advertising
Posts tagged advertising
Here’s a handcam recording of a television commercial for heartburn medication. This is the only version I could find that’s embeddable on Tumblr, so apologies! You can watch it in much better quality on iSpot.tv.
The reason I’m posting this commercial is the moment at 0:32 when the doctor prescribes the man Nexium by just writing the word “NEXIUM” on a script and handing it to him. There’s just something I find indescribably funny about that action.
Joe Berkowitz on Fast Company’s Co.Create:
The decade-running “Real Beauty” campaign, which won a Grand Prix at Cannes in 2007, continues its assault on Photoshop by fighting fire with fire. Created by Ogilvy Toronto, Dove Canada’s latest endeavor is a sneaky way to hit the perpetrators of such ads right at the source—their computers.
The link has a video showing off exactly what the marketing campaign did to graphic designers. I laughed, but then again, working on the people hiring the graphic designers might be more effective than working on the graphic designers.
I saw a commercial for Bowflex’s latest exercisemo contraption thinger the other day. Did you know they’re still around? Well they are, and they’re still making manly man workout machines that people apparently buy.
I couldn’t find an uploaded version of the exact commercial I saw on TV; the best I could find is this EXTREME ad that’s totally in your face and super edgy with bleeped out swear words. So edgy!
Anyway, at 1:15, this somewhat embarrassing video does include the part from the TV spot that actually caught my attention. One of the models crushes a DVD while the announcer says, “Because DVDs are dead, flex your swagger with the free Uppercut mobile web app for iPhone and Android.”
Even though we have a replacement technology for DVDs, the industry of FIFTEEN MINUTES A DAY FOR ROCK-HARD ABS exercise machines is abandoning physical gewgaws and getting in on mobile app development.
I’ve been seeing this spot for Kids Foot Locker with Chris Bosh and Ray Allen frequently in the past few days. There isn’t anything I desperately want to mock about this ad; it fits into this weird trend in modern advertising toward awkward commercials without any actual jokes, like Blake Griffin’s Kia ads, but I don’t find it offensive.
… except for the absolutely bizarre CGI on the kid’s mouth at 0:18.
I’d like to apologize to our readers for having gone more than a year without an update in our award-winning series cataloging uses of the typeface Chicago in the wild.
I’m pleased to announce that you have to wait no further, because we’ve once again detected Chicago: this time in a television commercial for American Airlines. The word “DINER” on the window visible at the very beginning of the ad is set in this illustrious typeface.
This is a promo for Ron Paul, “The High Tide,” from 2008 that I only just found now. According to the copy, it was created by a “small group of dedicated grassroots artists,” so it was apparently not an official campaign ad.
It features CG Ron Paul.
Look at that shit. That is some fucking CG Ron Paul.
My favorite part is at 0:41 when doves fly underwater past CG Ron Paul.
I don’t have a punchline or bit of snark to end this post. There is nothing I can do that can top simply repeating that doves fly underwater past CG Ron Paul.
Here’s a bunch of bad 2012 apocalypse jokes followed by Betty White saying “deal with it.”
Alfred Chicken is an old platformer for a few systems: Game Boy, NES, etc. It apparently had an unusual advertising campaign in the United Kingdom, according to Wikipedia:
Karl Fitzhugh, the Product Manager of the Amiga version of the Alfred Chicken video game, ran as the Alfred Chicken Party candidate in the 1993 by-election in the Christchurch, Dorset constituency. The exercise was done to promote the original game’s release. Fitzhugh finished second last with 18 votes, two votes ahead of the Rainbow Party candidate.
He also finished five votes behind the “Ian is King” party candidate.
Associated Press article:
It was an ad campaign conceived as eye candy to bring attention to other advertisements in New York’s transit system. But the “Meet Miss Subways” beauty contest posters of pretty young New York women and their aspirations quickly evolved into a popular and even groundbreaking fixture that ran for 35 years, from 1941 to 1976.
…
The first African-American was crowned Miss Subways in 1948 — long before Vanessa Williams was named Miss America in 1984 — and the first Asian-American was honored in 1949.
“It was the first integrated and ethnically diverse beauty contest in America,” representing working-class women, said [photographer Fiona] Gardner, who was born the year the contest ended. “I realized I had stumbled on a piece of forgotten New York history.”
I don’t know terribly much about the New York City subway system, nor was I alive before 1976, so I’d certainly never heard of this ad campaign before. The reason this story was written is that that quoted photographer, Fiona Gardner, has an exhibition at the New York Transit Museum about Miss Subways starting later this month. Records of the winners were lost, so she tracked down existing copies of the old posters and then the women themselves.
I missed this New York Times piece by Charles Duhigg back in February about Target’s tracking of customers. Which was probably for the best, because reading it caused my head to spin around with rage so fast that it created a tornado and destroyed my house.
It starts with the following:
Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?”
Which is one of the slimiest things I’ve read all year.
It was outslimed later:
“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
I basically just hate everything. Literally every single thing. This is the fury I have.
