ad satire hilarity meets the way we really should feel about processed food.

Oh, food, why have we forsaken you so?

Friday Fun — advertising edition

This is the kind of stuff that makes advertising just outright fun — a reformed alien speaking for Raisin Bran... Brilliant!



Picked up from Boing Boing.

Random thought...

I rarely watch TV. Maybe a baseball game, The Daily Show, Mad Men, and random shows on the Food Channel and MSNBC. Beyond that, not much. When I do watch TV, I marvel over the ads.

I've been in advertising and marketing in one way shape or form for almost 20 years. This means i know the tricks and lies. The strategies are transparent, and yet I'm still amazed by what advertising turns into in a pure mass-market medium. The strategies used to make unhealthy food sound healthy are simply stunning. The ways in which we are sold a vision of what our day-to-day lives should be gives me the willies.

I'll say more later. After The Daily Show.

Crafting another generation of consumers

Thanks to Highlights for Children I’ve finally gotten the perfect opportunity to explain marketing to Buttercup.

See, yesterday, we got the latest round of marketing from them. This particular one is for a series of pubs about the fifty states. Before I even had a chance to intercept the thing, Buttercup had it in her hands, pulling the plastic off. There was a poster showing parts of the series. There was a sheet of stickers for the states — stickers being prime swag for the kid-set. There was a card assuring me about the fun and educational value of the series, and assuring me that I was under no obligation to buy anything. And last but far from least, there was the sweepstakes game.

The sweepstakes game is, of course, the prime driver here. There are six scratch-off spots. Scratch them off and find out if you’ve gotten: (a) the free book with one star, (b) the free bag with two stars, or (c) the free book and bag with three stars. As Buttercup started in on it, I grumbled that she would find three stars, of course. Why, she asked, and with a sigh, I told her that this is what marketing people do — we make the audience think they’ve gotten something special, even when everyone else who got the package also got three stars.

She didn’t care. She scratched them off and applied the three stars to the reply card, absolutely pleased that she’d gotten them. And of course she wanted to know whether we could send them in for the book and the bag.

I tried to explain how the process works, that we would send it in and pretty soon have things arrive that we would be expected to buy. She mentioned that we had gotten them last year, and I realized we were on the slippery slope again. Parental guilt was about to set in — if we got them, she might learn and that would be a good thing, but was the (small) added expense worth it — but it was bed time so I hoped it would pass.

No luck. I found her filling out the response card in the morning with her name and age. (Who knew that the words “Print Name” vs. “Signature” were a learning tool?) Her next question, though, was a good one for the lesson I wanted to teach. “Why are your name and our address already on here,” she asked. “Because they know we might buy it, so they’re selling it directly to us, sweetie. And making it really easy to send back to them.”

“Oh,” she said. “So can we still get it?”

I sighed, asked her to put it away for now, and eat her breakfast. Will guilt push me over into sending the card in? Probably. Do I feel like I got sucker-punched by classic, tried-and-true direct marketing techniques? Absolutely.

Brilliant PSAs

Picked this up from Gawker and AdRants... It's a brilliant PSA for NOT getting drunk.

Friday Fun - advertising meets cool music meets illustration edition

Picked this Scrabble ad up from Boing Boing. It's top-to-bottom awesome.



More here.

Badvertising — how far is too far when it comes to inappropriate use?

I understand the idea of mixing kid's entertainment with adult themes, but I don't understand doing it in an ad for the kid's meal using Spongebob Squarepants. Do we really need young kids imitating this kind of thing? Such a crass example of a failed creative idea doesn't even require further commentary.

crazy ads

Picked this one up via Gawker, because I apparently missed it during the Super Bowl. Still, the Nannerpuss may qualify as one of the most disturbing ad images ever...

In the U.S., we will do anything to market anything.

Well... Our auto industry is tanking because they make cars people don't want, and they rely on outdated corporate models and development strategies. Oh, and did I mention that their advertising stinks. All you need to do is watch a football game and count the number of cookie-cutter pick-up truck ads for the latest models which were designed and produced on the assumption that the market for big trucks would never shrink. Thanks to the congressional bailout, though, the companies' marketing budgets are safe — safe to continue trying to sell us on these ever-larger vehicles. Safe enough, in fact, to make an ad as bad as this one...



H/t to Gawker for this one.

Friday Fun - advertising edition

Went to the AICP show hosted by the Richmond Ad Club last night. There was some truly great work shown, and some spots just demanded to be seen again. And again.


Tide-to-Go "Interview"




Bud Light "Swear Jar"




Skittles "Touch" (Brilliant echoes of classic stories in this one.)




JC Penney "Aviator" (Touching, really touching.)




JC Penney "Magic" (One of many that show how nice it is to see the whole spot as opposed to cutdown versions usually included in ad buys.)




Guinness "Dot" (Someone had seen the classic MGM cartoon of the circle and the line before making this spot.)




StuffIt Deluxe "Pregnancy"




Epuron/German Ministry for the Environment "Power of Wind"




Peace on the Streets "Kill the Gun" (Reverberated with me for obvious reasons.)




And because I don't want to end on a somber note...

Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man"

more ad fun

Hat-tip to my fellow Richmond blogger Buttermilk & Molasses for this one.



It's funny and to the point. In this case, the message is one that resonates more and more: this election is not about us, and it's not about the past; this election is about our children and their future.

Friday Fun - mindblowing ad edition

bad ad

I put it to any of my fellow media-obsessives out there to tell me where the worst mistakes happened in this spot. Was it on the part of Shawn Johnson's agent? Was it on the part of the Creative Director who came up with this stupid spot? Was it on the part of the copywriter who wrote such a hilariously bad line as "It makes my taco pop"? Or was it on the part of the brilliant brand manager for Ortega who clearly saw an obvious connection between Olympic gymnasts and taco fixins?



(Picked up from AdFreak.)

brilliant

If you've ever wondered how things actually get produced—and how clients brilliantly screw up the communication process, this should give you a pretty good idea. And a good laugh, too... "What If a Corporation Designed the Stop Sign?"

ads that will make you laugh, cry, and everything in between -- all with added features and fried chicken

When Brian posted this haunting video of David Hasselhof over at Incertus, I added a nice little commercial link in the comments. Brian has since responded with a classic local commercial of his own. To that end, I add one of the classic television ads of all time. All this for just...



But wait, there's more!

brand fascination

More times than I can count in my career in advertising and media I have been involved in conversations about branding and brands. As you might expect, the tenor of that conversation depends on the client-in-question. One common rule I think you can establish, though, is that most clients do not really understand the difference between brand and branding. The two are often confused for each other, and though they are part of the same overall picture, they are not the same thing.

Essentially, a brand is the identity you create. In visuals and copy, it is what becomes your identifying mark. Branding is different; it is the feeling evoked by your brand. And it is a great deal more complex.

You can always create a great, memorable visual identity. Think Target or L.L. Bean. The thing is a great visual identity doesn't create the brand identity. Or more to the point, the visual doesn't create people's feelings about the brand. The company, instead, needs to connect with people's experiences and emotions. For example, Target has done such a good job of building its branding that many people (including me) think of that big red bullseye whenever a question of essentials from socks to shampoo to toilet paper comes to mind, and the biggest consumerists may even make the leap from essentials to figuring out what else they need (or want) from the store.

While I've found this a difficult concept to communicate in the past, the WSJ pointed to a site today where you can see what people's perceptions of brands are. Considering the extent to which consumerism and branding shape our society, it's a pretty interesting little exercise.

more ad stupidity

Nobody ever said ads had to be true to their market, right? In fact, sometimes it's better if an ad creates an aspirational feeling rather than depicting reality, right? Right. As Exhibit A, I offer this page from this week's Target circular.

Beautiful girl? Check. Aspirational look on face encouraging shoppers to feel good about themselves? Check. Correlation between sale items and visuals? Um, not so much. Why? Take a look at the product just below the headline... the weight-loss product. Yeah, and the smoking cessation lozenges below it. Oh, and the prenatal vitamins at the top of that column. Yeah... the real target here doesn't look much like the model.

I am Helvetica.

Wilco and Volkswagen. I am a cliche, which is probably why I love these ads.











And this one that is reminiscent of the famous chair ad in the late nineties:

ad moments

Mrs. Butterworth has joined Charo and Little Richard in Martin's excellent Geico campaign. Wait for the great punchline at the end...

design and ad fun

As part of a project I've been working on at home, I've been poring through several turn-of-the-century copies I have of North American Review, Harpers, and the Atlantic Monthly. There are some real gems of classic type and art, not to mention a certain degree of hilarity.