Tracking Social Media and Digital Advertising Hookups

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Is Adidas Original?

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So Adidas does a shot-for-shot remake of the cantina scene from Star Wars (YouTube). Then they hit you with a tag line about celebrating “originality.” Is that the photoshop, cut and paste definition of “originality.”

I think Borges tried to claim that rewriting Don Quioxote word-for-word would be considered a new work, because it would introduce a self-aware, modern context. I doubt the agency types had anything other than laziness in mind though.

Credit for picking up an easy paycheck: Sid Lee, USA… Basically they just called up The Mill and asked them to cut and paste celebrities into something that’s already popular. Is that an “original idea?”

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Disposable Digital

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With anything digital, the talk is always of the “next great technological innovation,” rather than how good something currently is. Case in point, the amazing facial recognition apps, we had all just about forgotten about. Almost forgotten about, that was until Google Goggles announced they had the potential to identify any stranger on the street, if you provide them a cameraphone image. Which of course, is GPS tagged.

On one hand, it’s sort of interesting that the Orwellian tagging of Facebook and Flickr has given rise to an Orwellian society. Surveillance databases and the fact that no-one cares, result from the disposable nature of information today. There’s so much of it hitting you at once, that people are only expected to glance at walls, updates and amateur hate blogs with a cursory interest. One that has no depth, beyond grabbing sound-bites to repost elsewhere. What Wikipedia has allowed, is for people to gain a Cliff Note idea of concepts, without actually having any knowledge of them. No different than people laughing at ICP’s Miracles video, only to be confronted later with the fact they themselves don’t know how magnets work.  They just thought they did, by glancing over keywords like “North Pole,” “South Pole” and “metal”  – yet coming to no understanding. You can read more about our amateur post-modern philosophy, blaming the marketing perspective of Baby-Boomer culture for the benevolent view of today’s shit-pile, here.

Whereas people have always claimed to like something like The Royal Tennebaums, because it makes them feel smart to pretend to enjoy something they heard was based on Salinger, this new false Read the rest of this entry »

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Absolut Targets Hipsters

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After the awful campaign (Absolut Crap) where they dressed up cutesy, indie icon Zooey Deschanel as a platinum blonde Barbarella, TBWA has taken a new approach.

First off they quietly commissioned the Spike Jonze Sundance short, featuring hipster robots hanging out in LA and listening to Pitchfork bands.  Which became a site where you can appreciate the naturalistic visuals of previously mentioned Lance Accord.

SHORT FILM: I’M HERE

Unless you stick around ’till the credits, you’d have no idea Absolut was funding this target on the forehead of hipsters. For the brand to ingratiate themselves with the PBR set makes sense, as these psuedo-blue collar fools eventually turn 40 and need to drink something else.

On that note TBWA has created an event space for 30 days in NYC, showcasing the genesis of the hipster era. Namely, the very 1999 notion that graphic design passes for art. To bolster this flashback, TBWA has enlisted the hipster version of Collette, a bookstore from the new cusp of gentrification out in LA (Miracle Mile area) called “Family.” Which already has a 10-min documentary on it, shot by Read the rest of this entry »

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More Plagerism and Twitter Bullshit

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Do you like those cutesy, stop-motion Amazon Kindle commercials? Wish that photographers Angela Kohler and Ithyle Griffiths made more of them? Well… Good news… Sorta.

The World Wildlife Fund (the other WWF) has hired LA’s Viral Factory to do what advertising does best. Rip-off other people’s ideas. Granted we just complained about this trend with HATEBOMB: Reboots, Remakes and Rip Offs. And we need to keep doing so. Like some substitute high school teacher, it’s our job to remind everyone that “you can’t take credit for appropriating other people’s work.” Or something like that.

Seriously. Do Creative Directors just sit around and see what’s popular on YouTube? If so, is there an iPhone app that can replace them? That would really speed along our plans to open an automated, cat-run digital shop. After all, in the YouTube game… cat videos have the upper-hand.

Non-cat videos and more after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

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Who The Fuck Is Timothy Olyphant?

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Apparently FX Network has given “carte blanche” to the creative team behind these ads for the new show Justified. Which are appearing everywhere at the moment. In each instance exclaiming, “this is the new show starring… TIMOTHY OLYPHANT!”

Who? Is that even a marquee name? Because in all the video clips we’ve seen for the show, the main Read the rest of this entry »

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Gervais vs. Shandling

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Who doesn’t love Ricky Gervais? Garry Shandling, that’s who. As evidenced by this cringe-inducing interview, where the pair uncomfortably trade tales of developing material for television. And then take passive-aggressive swipes at each other.

The whole premise behind the “Ricky Gervais Meets…” series for Channel 4, was having an unscripted meeting between Gervais and the TV comedy greats who influenced him. The reason you’ve never heard of this series before, is because it was aborted after the third episode. An unnamed souce claims that Gervais gave up on the series, because “the Shandling experience put him off for good.

OK. So what happened? Well, for starters Shandling doesn’t have a high appreciation for Ricky’s comedic sensibility. So he confront Gervais on the racist/homophobic/disability jokes that appear in Read the rest of this entry »

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JEDWARD is back…

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“… With a brand new invention”

You might remember reading about how NASA mounted a “Golden Record” on the side of space probe that was blasted to the far edge of the galaxy. Basically it was a time capsule approach to all sorts of Earth sounds, in the event that an alien race had a phonograph and wanted to hear whalesong. If you’ve seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture or Star Trek IV, then you basically know the whole story.

However, a new video that keeps disappearing online since its January 2010 debut holds similar appeal. In it, freaky Irish identical twins with blonde Kid n’ Play coifs do a mash-up of “Under Pressure” and “Ice Ice Baby,” with MC Hammer backup dancers. All this is framed inside a Missy Elliot type video. And did we mention this whole thing springs from a Simon Cowell hosted reality show?

It’s literally like someone condensed the last three decades into one, singular streaming video. That YouTube hates and takes down every second. Hence, explaining the video quality that hasn’t been seen since aficionados traded dubbed VHS tapes.

Seriously though, this a tough find. Maybe NASA has plans for it…

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More Todd Margaret News

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(UPDATE: The David Cross / Will Arnett pilot Todd Margaret is back up. Veoh this time -  link)

YouTube went an disabled our videos for the Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. Which is ironic, given that we first reported on how interesting it was that they only banned UK viewers from seeing it.

But it came down after a bunch of sites like New York Magazine’s Vulture Blog, Warming Glow and /Film all embedded these videos (without crediting LonerBoner) as part of some “breaking news” story on how this David Cross / Will Arnett show has been around for a few months. So the videos got 20,000 hits overnight, broke a new daily record here, and now isn’t on YouTube any longer.  So apologies to all those other blogs piggybacking our content, that now have missing videos.

So it looks like IFC were the ones that complained. Which we guess means that IFC will be releasing the show here in the US?

So, in the meantime if you want to see the pilot episode for The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. Torrent or Rapidshare. For now you can grab it here as a 180MB file.

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Cyber Emo vs Vintage Virtual Reality

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A friend recently summed up the Facebook-era of online activity succinctly, stating “it feels as exciting or thought provocative as watching an episode of Ellen.” Adding the phrase, “it feels like your Mom’s internet.”

In many ways we agree. The whole online experience today feels like a time-wasting trip to the suburban mall. Maybe it’s all the senseless chatter, commercial signage and snapshot voguing that echos the food court environment. Or maybe it’s all the young girls.

That’s the one, great step forward in the social media era. It brought women, younger and older, into the once exclusively male and geek dominated domain of “cyberspace.” For a flash back to how this used to be, five seconds spent on ChatRoulette (link) will show you an anonymous webcam portrait of dudes in dorms, masturbating schlongs and more dudes in dorms. In other words, good luck finding women outside of the fluff communities of Facebook, Twitter, online retail and homogenized blogging.

Whereas all this social media stuff is purported to be keeping everyone connected, in reality it’s all just pretending your famous. Facebook / Twitter / et al are only about  emulating celebrity culture, with  followers tracking your every minute move like  stalker fans. It is just ego stroking,  borrowing from the culture of tabloid soundbites and newsmagazine fandom. As if everyone in corporate marketing is a rockstar wannabe. There is no real communication going on here.  Just people who are sold on the US Magazine / Access Hollywood view of America, and now simulate it being by both groupie and B-list famewhore.

Whereas this publicity environment of constant press-releases used to be the domain of the media, today the situation is brands trying to figure about how to excite all these miniature self-promoters to buzz about their latest product.

It wasn’t always this piss poor. The release of AVATAR has got us thinking of what a pussy time 2010 is. Which is even more depressing, when you where you consider where James Cameron took pop-culture Read the rest of this entry »

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Social Filter Apps To Come?

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At a recent SXSW Interactive 2010 mixer we witnessed the following – people bumping iPhones, exchanging Twitter usernames and buying their own drinks. Which is a polite way of saying a ton of people showed up looking to network on social media paydays, but no one seemed to be cashing in yet. It’s as if everyone was following advice collected from keynote addresses, blogs and whatnot on how to properly socialize in the year 2010. It seemed like a hollow charade mixed with peer pressure. As if anyone will be seen as confident players in some Web x.0 freaknik… by iPhoning these newer Twitter IDs instead of swapping older business cards.

Long story short, LonerBoner met a bunch of people who seemed self-employed, freelancing or downright unemployable. Yet all having the idea that they’re movers and shakers in this social media clusterfuck of Tweeting your mobile blog updates to some Facebook page. All these lanyard losers seemed proud of the fact they were dropping money to see the CEO of Twitter. Which is a little questionable, as he’s not a Jim Jones or even Tony Robbins type. His message is only one of creating an abundance of meaningless information. Yet people seem intent on adopting “The 4-Hour Work Week” to autoblogging or “running their own shop,” based on solely on repurposing the cloud of social media soundbites.

The real issue now, is how can this information overload be filtered so that anything of worth differentiates itself from the blather that makes up 99% of the peer cloud that your follow? While Read the rest of this entry »

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