The hackneyed “Eco-Friendly” approach, now appears at every strata of advertising. People… It’s officially time for new ideas. Feel free to suggest your own “faux-green” ad in the comments below.
Related: Bottle Service of Haiti
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.
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 »
Question
Answer
Seriously. What agency came up with this tagline?
This ad is currently running and most likely you’ve seen it several times this week. But do you have any clue who it’s pitching for?
So to make a game of it -- we blurred the logos on the cars above. Now go ahead and pick from the multiple options and we’ll announce the results shortly. It’s pretty funny when you consider the millions that were spent on terms like “brand identity,” “creativity” and “connecting with an audience.”
Now, shifting our focus from advertising being “ineffective,” to downright “incompetant” we have this following 2009 TV spot from a campaign AAMCO spent $30 million dollars on. Did we mention they Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
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 »
Okay, so we made fun of Vice / Virtue / VBS.tv earlier for taking any and all baby-boomer dollars with their “open door” co-branding approach. But really, we’re joking on the lazy agency mentality of outsourcing youth-targeted digital advertising to Vice, who have been selling-out for so long that they’re essentially a joke. But this new one really takes the cake. It’s like they’re making jokes for us.
This bewildering demographics mash-up of AMC, as in American Movie Classics and Vice is pretty clear. AMC wants to re-brand themselves as hip and edgy and Vice wants their money. So somebody sat Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
“… 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…
Why is it, that everything in media right now operates like the female orgasm? In that repetition is favored over innovation.
It’s gotten to the point that movie sequels are now approaching number four and Parenthood is turned into a TV show. There’s no where left to go with the sequel mentality. In 2010, it has somehow become acceptable to just start over and blatantly remake the same stuff that is already available on DVD. The good news is, that the sequel clock is now reset.
Some “reboots” recently buzzed about, are restarting the Spiderman franchise with the director of 500 Days of Summer, redoing Superman (ignoring Bryan Singer’s earlier reboot), Conan The Barbarian, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Red Dawn, Highlander, Jurassic Park, RoboCop, Daredevil… And that’s just the list mentioned this week. Sadly, the vacuous approach of just duplicating hits also basically sums up every advertising agency creative working today.
This cultural descent extends from movies to the very essence of advertising and baby-boomer marketing think – “just duplicate what’s popular.” Hence the all the recent spots from Coke, Apple and Pedigree looking remarkably similar to foreign ads and music videos. Some examples after the jump…
