Ten creative advertising ideas from students. The Smart Car and Match.com concepts are particularly clever.
The new Microsoft ads
After a couple of teasers starring Jerry Seinfeld, Microsoft is airing some new ads that take Apple's "I'm a PC" out into the real world. So instead of John Hodgman's dorky PC character (who is parodied in one of the new ads), they've got all sorts of people -- basketball players, actresses, scientists, fashion designers, etc. -- proudly declaring "I'm a PC". As Michael Sippey mentions, the ads do communicate a "message of joy and abundance and widespread use of Personal Computing", but they're not "great".
I briefly worked for a design firm in the late 90s that did a lot of advertising work. One of the hard and fast rules in the office -- which was taken from a book written by a successful ad man whose name I cannot recall -- was that if a company was #1 in a certain space, their advertising should never ever mention the competition, not even in an oblique fashion. And even if a company was #2, they should do the same and act as if they were #1.
That's the problem with Microsoft's ads. They're still #1 and the bigger company, but by referencing Apple's successful ad campaign, they're acting like Apple is #1. (John Gruber made this same point the other day.) The ads fail because they serve to remind people that Apple comes up with good ideas that Microsoft then takes and shapes into something that so-called "normal people" can use or understand. Except that this isn't 1993. With the iPod, iPhone, iMac, OS X, the Apple Stores, and the iTunes Store, Apple has their finger firmly on the pulse of what normal people want and Microsoft's recent attempts (the Zune, Vista) to keep up by emulating Apple have failed. If MS had created the "I'm a PC" message on their own, the ads would be great, but these copy-and-paste ads lack soul and are merely "eh".
What's interesting is that with the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC ads, Apple mentions Microsoft explicitly, over and over, proving the old adage that rules are made to be broken. What works in Apple's favor is that they are the #2 company and were clever about how they attacked #1. Microsoft's hamfisted ads are almost saying to Apple, "nuh-uh, my mom thinks I'm cool" while the image of Hodgman's frumpy PC is hard to shake and makes Windows seem lame without being overly insulting about it.
Surreal Nike commercial featuring British sprinter Nicola Sanders and her talking body parts.
Ten cool TV commercials done by movie directors. Ridley Scott's 1984 Apple ad makes the list along with spots by Messrs. Jonze and (Wes) Anderson. BTW, Jonze's Ikea commercial is superior to his Gap ad. (via self-employedsandwich)
I found this New York magazine profile of fashion photographer Juergen Teller pretty fascinating. For one thing, none of Teller's photos are retouched.
But perhaps most rare for fashion photography, Teller's pictures are absolutely never retouched. "I'm interested in the person I photograph," he says. "The world is so beautiful as it is, there's so much going on which is sort of interesting. It's just so crazy, so why do I have to put some retouching on it? It's just pointless to me."
And then there's this anecdote. After a bad encounter with a subject who didn't like how old she looked in Teller's photographs, he went to see his friend Charlotte Rampling.
Despondent, Teller called his friend Rampling, who offered to cook him dinner. They talked about how it feels to be photographed, and how it feels to age. "I just thought, Fuck this, I'm going to photograph myself," he says. And then there the two of them were, in the Louis XV suite of the Hotel de Crillon, with Teller way too fat to fit into any of the Marc Jacobs samples save one terribly shiny pair of silver shorts.
"I thought, Fuck," Teller says, "I don't even fucking fit into these clothes. I'm really fucking stuck now."
So he pulled on the shorts in the bathroom. "I came out and I had my socks on and I had these shorts on and no top, and I just said, 'Ta-da!' And she said, 'Oh my God. What are we going to do?' And I said, 'Well, I don't know. But really, honestly'-and I could hardly bring it out of my mouth-I said, 'I just want to kiss you and fondle your breasts.' And she didn't say a word. She just leaned back in her armchair and went into her handbag and got a cigarillo out and lit it and the air was thick and I was mortified. And then she sort of dragged on her cigarette and said, 'Okay. Let's start. I'll tell you when to stop.'"
Here are some of the images that resulted from that shoot (NSFW).
A collection of old book ads from the NY Times.
We're going to begin this project with a look at the country's golden age of book advertisements, which ran from roughly 1962-73. Why those dates? The books - and the ads for them - were terrific: fresh, pushy, serious and wry, often all at the same time. There was a new sense of electricity in the culture and in the book world.
The authors featured include Alice Walker, Cormac McCarthy, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag.
On the heels of Michael Bierut's rave for Mad Men comes William Drenttel's admission: I Was A Mad Man.
Then the CEO [of Krystal Restaurants] turns to me, ignoring everyone else, and asks me to take out my wallet. He asks me how much money I have. I count about $150, and tell him so. He smiles, looks me squarely in the eye, and asks: "Would you spend your last $150 on this shit?"
The rest of the story involves me telling him to take out his own wallet and me swearing I'd spend not only my money but all of his. And we did. We spent all of Krystal's money, millions of dollars. We made second-rate advertising, and they had second-rate stores with really second-rate hamburgers. We deserved each other.
An appreciation of Mad Men by designer Michael Bierut.
Jesus God in heaven! Not until I know I'm not wasting my time! From the minute Don launched his this-meeting-is-over bluff, I was on the edge of my seat, and my lovely wife Dorothy will tell you that I literally clapped my hands at that line. For me, this sequence is as close to pornography as I ever get to see on basic cable.
Alright, uncle, I give, I give. I will try and find some time in my schedule to watch this show.
On the personal ads in the New York Review of Books.
There are more semicolons in the New York Review of Books personals than balls in a gay bar.
To demonstrate their product's ability to remove tough stains, the makers of Breeze Excel washing detergent sent product samples wrapped in tshirts through the regular mail, with instructions to wash the shirts -- significantly dirtied in transit -- upon receipt.
Whoa, a TV commercial for McDonald's that features Line Rider. (via waxy)
TBS and their annoying interstitial commericials
Last night I was watching a rerun of Family Guy on TBS and right before the show went to commercial, this happened:
See what they did there? They paused the TV show, ran a little mini-commercial for some show that no one cares about, and then returned to the last two seconds of the segment before going to commercial. Jesus Christ. I realize that Time Warner doesn't actually care about the people who watch their shows and that television programs are just the networks' way of getting people to watch advertising, but this is too much. Do these things actually work or just piss people off in droves? Is there some marketing hot dog at Time Warner who thinks that Family Guy viewers want to watch the blue collar comedy stylings of Bill Engvall? I'm sorry that the DVR is ruining your business model, but can you kick the bucket a little more gracefully? (Digg this?)
In commercials for Domino's Pizza, the chain's employees wage a never ending battle against the Noid, a gremlin who delays deliveries and carries a gun that can turn a pizza ice cold. Many viewers are amused by the Noid, Domino's says, but one of them took the advertising campaign personally. Last week Kenneth Noid, 22, walked into a Domino's Pizza shop in Chamblee, Ga., with a .357 Magnum revolver and took two employees hostage. When police arrived, he demanded $100,000 in cash, a getaway car and a copy of The Widow's Son, a 1985 novel about secret societies in an 18th century Parisian prison.
All Noid got was the pizza he ordered. After a five-hour siege, the two employees slipped away and Noid gave himself up. According to police, Noid has "psychological problems" and believes that he has an "ongoing dispute with Tom Monaghan," the head of the Detroit-based Domino's chain.
Time Magazine, you're making that shit up. (via lonelysandwich)
Approaching the uncanny valley from the other direction
Fashion photo retouching (i.e. high-brow Photoshopping) gets the New Yorker treatment with this story on retoucher Pascal Dangin, one of the best in the business.
In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria's Secret).
The article touches too briefly on the tension between reality and what ends up in the magazines and advertisements. As Errol Morris points out on his photography blog, it is often difficult to find truth in even the most vérité of photographs. Even so, the truth seems to be completely absent from Madonna's recent photo spread in Vanity Fair that was retouched by Dangin, especially this one in which a 50-year-old Madonna looks like a recent college graduate who's never lifted a weight in her life.
The uncanny valley comes into play here, which we usually think of in terms of robots, cartoon characters, and other pseudo anthropomorphic characters attempting and failing to look sufficiently human and therefore appearing creepy and scary. With an increasing amount of photo retouching, postproduction in film, plastic surgery, and increasingly effective makeup & skin care products, we're being bombarded with a growing amount of imagery featuring people who don't appear naturally human. People who appear often in media (film & tv stars, models, cable news anchors & reporters, miscellaneous celebrities, etc.) are creeping down into the uncanny valley to meet up with characters from The Polar Express. I don't know about you but a middle-aged Madonna made to look 24 gives me the heebie-jeebies. Perhaps the familar uncanny valley graph needs revision:
Commercial for the little-known version of Grand Theft Auto for the circa-1985 NES. The Tanooki Suit is the best part. (via house next door)
A list of the 50 greatest commercial parodies of all time, with video evidence.
Le long Deck
The Deck is a smallish ad network that handles the advertising for kottke.org, which consists of an unobtrusive high-quality advertisement in the sidebar of each page of the site. The Deck recently moved to a spiffy new domain and is no longer so smallish; the network now includes 29 sites.
Some recent additions to The Deck include Ze Frank, Chip Kidd's Good Is Dead, FFFFOUND!, Dean Allen's recently resurrected Textism, Clusterflock, and Aviary.
If you'd like to advertise on kottke.org and 28 other great sites, head on over to The Deck site...we'd love to have you.
Six Apart buys Apperceptive and announces an advertising network for bloggers in order to diversify their offerings.
The idea for SA is to move beyond an increasingly commoditized blog publishing software business, and into adding advertising, design, implementation, development and site optimization services to bloggers and companies.
Update: Here's more from Six Apart on the changes.
The Droste effect is when a product's packaging features the packaging itself.
At my grocery store I could only find three examples: Land O'Lakes Butter, Morton Salt and Cracker Jacks. These packages each include a picture of the package itself and are often cited by writers discussing such pop-math-arcana as recursion, strange loops, self-similarity, and fractals. This particular phenomenon, known as the "Droste effect," is named after a 1904 package of Droste brand cocoa. The mathematical interest in these packaging illustrations is their implied infinity. If the resolution of the printing process -- (and the determination and eyesight of the illustrator) -- were not limiting factors, it would go on forever. A package with in a package within a package... Like Russian dolls.
(via andre)
Spine tingling "The World is Just Awesome" advertisement for the Discovery Channel. (via avenues)
Slowing down the playback of a 1999 Apple commercial = drunk Jeff Goldblum. "Internet? I'd say Internet." Great stuff, indeed. (via cynical-c)
Steve Nash directed his own Nike commercial. Nash's original concept for the commercial is clever:
At first, the idea was to shoot on different mediums -- camera phone, 8-millimeter, 16-millimeter (the eventual choice), security footage. My idea was the city was watching me. The genesis was a lot of people film me or take a picture of me in the city on cellphones. If it's such an appetite to see me do normal things, it was an idea to do something people like.
(via truehoop)
Alison Stokke diet plan helps Oprah lose 10,000 lbs.
Or, "with all the dogmatism of brevity", Ogilvy & Mather show us how to create advertising that sells. (via coudal)
Update: The link to the image was being blocked so I fixed it by pointing to a local copy.
Update: This post is now fifth when you google "Alison Stokke". (thx, jack)
A lot of sweat goes into every bottle.
(thx, aaron)
Do you love Will Ferrell? Do you sweat?
The NY Times launches TimesMachine, an alternate look into their vast online archive. It's basically an interface into every single page of the newspaper from Sep 18, 1851 to Dec 30, 1922. The advertising on these old pages is fascinating.
Update: For whatever reason, the Times has taken TimesMachine offline.
Paula Scher argues that the design of advertising has gotten a lot better in recent years but that the graphic design community isn't paying too much attention.
I'm not sure that the graphic design community as a whole is paying any attention to this. I don't see very many speakers from the advertising community invited to speak at design conferences (except for the very few who lead branding groups at agencies and in some circles they are still considered the enemy). I don't read about it on design blogs, and I'm not seeing books published about it. I'm not seeing advertising, in any form, turn up in any design museum exhibitions, not at the Modern, not at the Cooper-Hewitt. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has an annual designer award category for Communication Design and I've never seen an advertising person nominated since the award's inception.
(via quipsologies)
Nice TV ad for the Madrid Metro...a view of the city from underground.
Duncan Watts' research is challenging the theory that a small group of influential people are responsible for triggering trends as explained in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.
"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."
Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."
I've previously covered some of what Clive talks about in the article.
Gelf Magazine, curators of always-entertaining Blurb Racket, list their picks for the worst blurbs used by movie advertisements in 2007. For instance, in reference to Live Free or Die Hard, film critic Jack Mathews actually said "the action in this fast-paced, hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining film is as realistic as a Road Runner cartoon" but was quoted by 20th Century Fox as saying that the movie was "hysterically ... entertaining".
Posters and billboards modified to look as though the people in them have been decapitated. (thx, colossus)
Dave Winer's perceptive comments on the future of advertising:
Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. There's little point in saying something until the time is right, then you just have to say it once, and the idea takes over and does all the work.
That sounds overly optimistic to me but there's definitely something of substance there.
Remember Dove's Evolution video of a fashion model going from drab to fabulous with the help of makeup and Photoshop? They've got a new video out called Onslaught in which we see the barrage of images that are directed at young girls each day. BTW, Dove's parent company makes all sorts of products that may contibute to the problem that Dove is attacking here. (via debbie millman)
No more Times Select. The NY Times finally admits what everyone else knew two years ago and stops charging for their content. Additionally, all content from 1987 to the present and from 1851 to 1922 will be offered free of charge.
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com.
How did that change not happen for the Times when it happened to the entire rest of the web 3-4 years ago?
Cute ad for Deutsche Post...two envelopes playing Pong with a heart.
Digg policies from Lifehacker and Gizmodo, which state that the only Digg-worthy posts of theirs are those with "original content, new reporting, treatment, or photos" because "it's not fair when we get the Digg for someone else's work." This seems inconsistent on the part of Gawker Media. One of their main innovations (if you'd like to call it that) regarding the blog format was the idea of linking to things in such a way that readers don't need to actually leave the site to get the full (or nearly full) story. Why let all those readers (and the associated ad revenue) go to some other site to read the story...they might never return. Due in part to Gawker's influence as first mover in the pro blog space, this practice is unfortunately standard procedure for most similar blogs.
Nice micro-movie/commercial for VW. A YouTube version is also available (with poorer video and audio quality).
Big-seed marketing. Instead of relying purely on viral marketing or mass media marketing alone, big-seed marketing combines the two approaches so that a large initial audience spreads the marketing message to a secondary audience, yielding more overall interest than either approach would have by itself, even if the message isn't that contagious. "Because big-seed marketing harnesses the power of large numbers of ordinary people, its success does not depend on influentials or on any other special individuals; thus, managers can dispense with the probably fruitless exercise of predicting how, or through whom, contagious ideas will spread."
Update: Full paper with data is here. (via atomiq)
Children 8-12 years old view an average of 21 TV commercials for food. 2-7 year-olds view about 12 ads per day. (via 3qd)
Comparison between food pictured in fast food advertising and how the food looks when you actually get it from the restaurant. The Whopper is particularly beauty and the beast.
I really like those UPS whiteboard commercials. Turns out the actor is the creative director for the campaign, Errol Morris directed them, and the music in the ads is by The Postal Service.
The city of Sao Paulo has banned billboard advertising...the results are a bit eerie. (via bb)
Google buys Doubleclick for $3.1 billion. My assertion more than four years ago that Google is not a search engine isn't looking too shabby.
Hip-Hop Pop-Up combines pop-up web advertising with product mentions in hip-hop songs. "For example, at 2 minutes and 38 seconds into the song Big Poppa when Puffy asks Biggie, 'How ya livin Biggie Smallz?' his reply, 'In mansion and Benz's Givin ends to my friends and it feels stupendous' would then pop-up the URL www.mercedes-benz.com." To try it out, be sure to disable your browser's pop-up blocking first. (thx, jonah)
Chicago chef Homaro Cantu talks a bit more about his plans for edible advertising. "You open up a magazine, there's a small plastic thing in there, and you rip it open. It looks like a cheeseburger, tastes like a cheeseburger, it's made from all organic ingredients." The ads will also be allergen-free and may contain a bit of fluoride to help keep your teeth clean. (via seriouseats)
Artist Christian Marclay says that Apple contacted him about using his short film Telephones for their iPhone commercial. He refused and they went ahead and made the commercial using the same idea with different footage. Says Marclay, "the way they dealt with the whole thing is pretty sleazy". TouchExplode gets credit for spotting the reference. (via df)
Interview with Gretchen Ludwig about her dressing room photography. She started the project after she noticed her anti-advertising, anti-corporation self buying a lot of clothes from big corporations that advertise a lot. "The dressing room is not only a very private space, but it is also a space where consumers make most of their decisions. And it's also mostly void of extraneous marketing 'noise.' You don't have the trendy atmosphere, you don't have the pressure of others watching and judging you."
On the gentle art of selling yourself, confidence, and first impressions. "It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the one we fret about). You could say it would be a lifetime's quest to reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole."
Daniel Gilbert on the annoying new practice of advertising objects that cry wolf. "In an advertising campaign that began last week, Nissan left 20,000 sets of keys in bars, stadiums, concert halls and other public venues. Each key ring has a tag that says: 'If found, please do not return. My next generation Nissan Altima has Intelligent Key with push-button ignition, and I no longer need these.'" How long before these ads train us not to do anything nice for anyone for fear of being messaged at?
A 666 tribute to David Fincher featuring video of 6 of his commercials, 6 of his music videos, and 6 of his movies.
A commercial for the iPhone aired during the Oscars last night. Rick Silva noticed that it was a lot like artist Christian Marclay's 1995 piece Telephones (the relevant clip starts at 3:40) and, to a lesser extent, Matthias Mueller's film, Home Stories. Nice detective work!
Update: Here's a list of all the actors in the iPhone commercial (except one).
Update: The missing "French Woman" is Audrey Tautou from Amelie. (thx to several folks who wrote in)
This cool new commercial for the VW Phaeton features professional-grade shadow puppetry. (via youngna)
Is Food Network doing subliminal advertising during its shows? This video shows a McDonald's ad that was displayed for only one frame during a recent episode of Iron Chef America. (via the grumpiest)
Update: Additional information from my inbox: "Thank you for pointing out that Food Network one frame commercial! They do this _all the time_ and the technique was driving me batty: not only is it annoying, I didn't know if anybody noticed/cared. There is at least one other channel (either HGTV or TLC) that does that exact same thing." (thx, alex)
Update: Michael Buffington writes: "You sure the single frame ad isn't a case of local market cable ads getting dropped onto the national feed? When I had cable, I'd see this all the time. A single frame for some well known brand suddenly hijacked by Cal Worthington and his 500 used cars."
Photograph of every advertisement in Times Square. Somehow I thought there would be more.
50 greatest commercials of the 1980s. Amazingly includes video of every single commercial...prepare to waste your entire afternoon. (thx, art)
Update: Here are dozens of additional 80s commercials. (thx, david)
It's almost a shame that I don't get to read more of my spam because it can be highly entertaining. Here's one of the better ones I've seen in a long time, a clever ad for Viagra. Warning: NSFW but LOL nonetheless.
Alex Tew, the fellow behind Million Dollar Homepage, is set to launch his new MDH-like venture tomorrow. Pixelotto will offer 1M pixels of ad space for $2M...with half going to a lucky ad clicker and about half to Tew. Clever. Here's a pre-launch screenshot. (thx, jonah)
More on the craptacular "Our Country" Chevrolet commercials. The new ones, not mentioned in this article or on Slate, with images of exclusively white, male, heterosexual truck lovers, are possibly even worse. "This is our country...no chicks, homos, Mexicans, or black people welcome."
Fuck, this pisses me off: the New Yorker is splitting up their longer pieces into multiple pages (for example: Ben McGrath's article on YouTube). I know, everyone else does it and it's some sort of "best practice" that we readers let them get away with so they can boost pageviews and advertising revenue at the expense of user experience, but The New Yorker was the last bastion of good behavior on this issue and I loved them for it. This is a perfect example of an architecture of control in design and uninnovation. I want the New Yorker's web site to get better, not worse. Blech and BOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Update: Dan Lockton has some further thoughts on multi-page articles.
Update: The New Yorker seems to have reversed their opinion on the matter. Nice work.
Update: Nope, still busted. Crap.
Screw Chevy: "It's not OK to use images of Rosa Parks, MLK, the Vietnam War, the Katrina disaster, and 9/11 to sell pickup trucks."
Update: In a hamfisted tribute on the occasion of her death, Apple posted a Rosa Parks "Think Different" ad on their home page. (thx, mark)
Nikon recently sent a bunch of new D80s to some Flickr photographers and are now using some of the shots those photographers took in an ad campaign. "Nikon did what every major brand should be doing...it got out of its own way and let the real people that counted do the talking: their own consumers." PDF of the ad spread.
Job board
Every week, I get 3 or 4 inquiries from people looking for jobs in the web design/technology area or for employees (happily, it's more the latter than the former these days). When I hear about someone who needs some work done and I have a friend or friend of a friend who's available, I'm glad to make the connection. For the past couple of years, I've wanted to build a job board for kottke.org to make more of these connections possible, but I never got around to it. So when Jason Fried asked me if I wanted to put a link to the simple, focused 37signals Job Board on kottke.org (you'll find it on every page of the site, below The Deck ad), that seemed to be the next best thing to building my own. I've been referring people there anyway, so a stronger connection makes sense.
Scans of video game magazine advertisements from 1982. My favorite features George Plimpton in an ad for Intellivision, which John Hodgman parodies in a new ad for his book.
Profile of Walter Werzowa, the man responsible for the Intel Inside theme. More here about tiny music makers, including the Windows 95 startup sound by Brian Eno, the THX theme, and the Mac startup sound.
A company called Freeload is offering college textbooks with advertising in them to students for free. If this works, will this mean more books with advertising in them?
Clever McDonald's sundial billboard. "The billboard features a real sundial whose shadow falls on a different breakfast item each hour until noon, when the shadow of the McDonald's arches are dead center."
Adidas did a Michaelangelo-style fresco of 10 soccer players at the Central Train Station in Cologne. More photos of Adidas' World Cup advertising.
Speaking of brand genericide, Heroin was actually a brand name trademarked by the Bayer drug company. (thx chris, who joked, "Can I interest you in some Heroin brand morphine substitute?")
Brand genericide
Harris Interactive recently released a list of products ranked by brand equity, a measure of the brand's popularity with US consumers. Here's the top 10:
1. Reynolds Wrap Aluminum Foil
2. Ziploc Food Bags
3. Hershey's Milk Chocolate Candy Bars
4. Kleenex Facial Tissues
5. Clorox Bleach
6. WD-40 Spray Lubricant
7. Heinz Ketchup
8. Ziploc Containers
9. Windex Glass Cleaner
10. Campbell's Soups
Marketing can be a double-edged sword. The companies who manufacture these products have done a fantastic job in marketing these products, so fantastic in some cases that the brand name is in danger of becoming a genericized trademark. From the list above, I routinely use Ziploc, Kleenex, WD-40, and Windex to refer to the generic versions of those products, even though we sometimes use Glad products instead of Ziploc, Puffs instead of Kleenex, or another glass cleaner instead of Windex. If the companies on this list aren't careful, they could lose the trademarked products that they've worked so hard to market so successfully.
Here's a list of American proprietary eponyms, or brand names that have fallen into general use. Some of the names on the list are so old or in such common use (escalator, popsicle) that I didn't even know they had been brands. Two current brands I can think of that might be in danger of genericide: iPod and Google. (via rw)
Design Observer redesigns...looks a bit smarter than before. They joined The Deck too.
An extensive listing of all the promotional merchandise from Pixar/Disney's Cars. Over 70 licensees will be offering themed merchandise like toy cars, cross stitch kits, books, staplers, shower curtains, sippy cups, and a boatload of Kellogg's cereals. Holy overload.
New project from Cory Arcangel: Kurt Cobain's suicide letter with Google AdSense ads (which are automatically generated based on the content of the page). Current ads include ones for free ringtones, techniques to end anxiety, and public speaking training.
Images from a very creative advertising campaign from Amnesty International highlighting scenes of war and torture from around the world. (via plugimi and m. migurski)
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced two TV ads critical of the global scientific and political consensus on global warming. "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life." CEI is funded in part by energy companies, but I guess they're not that well funded because that's some of the most laughable propaganda I've ever seen. (thx, kyle)
Media kit for the New Yorker, including an issue calendar, circulation stats, and advertising rates & specifications. Only 4% of their circulation is via the newsstand...that's a lot lower than I would have expected. Vogue's newsstand rate is ~36% and Wired's is ~13%.
Laundry bus
Spotted this on my walk to the office this morning:
If you can't tell, it's a bus covered with laundry. This had to be an advertisement for something (MTA employees aren't that eccentric) and after a little poking around online, I found out it's part of All's "Spot the Bus" sweepstakes:
From May 15th to 26th, two all small & mighty buses covered in clothes will cruise the streets of New York City. When you see one, send a text message of the time and location to 96787. You'll be entered in the Spot the Bus Sweepstakes.
If you'd like to take part without actually spotting the bus or even living in NYC (and have a chance at winning $5000), I took the above photo at 10:41am near 14th Street and 10th Ave in Manhattan. Good luck!
Yet more advertising....a paparazzi photo of Lindsey Lohan made its way onto a movie poster promoting a film that starred Lohan.
Advertising/Design Goodness is a blog that tracks the best and worst of advertising from around the world. (thx, cap'n)
More creative advertising fun. Mark Cuban thinks that live TV commercials could save traditional TV. More at Ars Technica. (thx, flip)
Last month, an audience in London was shown a 3-minute performed "commercial" before the actual play started. Inadvertently, today seems to be unique/unusual advertising day on kottke.org.
Current TV is running advertising for Sony that was created by a viewer. "Of course, Sony approved Mr. Ibele's finished product before it went on the air."
BannerBlog highlights creative and interesting banner ads from around the web. Today's ad is pretty darn clever.
Good new series of ads for Apple; "Get a Mac". I'm pretty sure the chap playing the PC is John Hodgman (author, Daily Show correspondent, This American Life commentator, former literary agent, monthly readings holder, hobo expert). Can anyone confirm? (via df)
Update: According to MacRumors, the Mac is played by Justin Long.
Update #2: Yep, seems to be Hodgman.
Keyword Cartoons chronicles the adventures of GGirl, a character whose daily activities correspond with high-paying keywords on Google AdSense, like laser hair removal and asbestos cancer.
As part of their "simplicity" ad campaign, Philips is paying Time Inc to put the table of contents in some of their magazines on page 1 (the TOC is typically further into the magazine in a more irritating position). It's funny that there was concern about this type of advertising affecting the layout of the magazine (in the editorial/sales wall sort of way) when the whole idea of pushing the TOC to page 10 or 20 is to accomodate advertising in the first place.
The Deck
Starting next month, kottke.org will be joining The Deck, a "creative, web + design professionals advertising network" consisting of Waxy.org, 37signals, The Morning News, Coudal Partners, Daring Fireball, A List Apart, and now this site. Here's the announcement. I am honored for kottke.org to be associated with these fine sites.
Functionally, this means that a small ad (120x90 pixels) accompanied by a bit of text will appear on (nearly) every single page of the site beginning May 1. If you've been paying any sort of attention over the past few years, you know I'm not a big fan of advertising and putting ads on kottke.org was almost the last thing on my mind. From the perspective of the reader/viewer, ads are often pushy, irrelevant, redundant, deceitful, insipid, or just plain poorly done. But advertising can also be useful when it communicates clearly, is relevant to its audience, doesn't attempt to mislead, and lets the product/service in question sell itself. An artfully done advertisement can raise the boats of all concerned: the advertiser sells more products, the reader/viewer is informed of useful or appealing products and services, and the content provider is able to feed and clothe her family.
In the past few years, mechanisms for the delivery of advertising have evolved outside the purview of traditional advertising agencies. Two of the better efforts I've seen are Google's AdSense (simple, straightforward, highly relevant (most of the time anyway)) and small ad networks like The Deck (high quality, considered, relevant). For instance, here's The Deck's policy on accepting ads:
We're picky about the advertising we'll accept. We won't take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service. Sell us something relevant to our audience and we'll sell you an ad.
That's a pretty sweet deal for advertisers and readers alike. In the past, I've dismissed advertising without experiencing it from the perspective of the content provider. By giving The Deck a go on kottke.org, I hope to gain a better understanding of the issue and fulfill my desire to keep doing kottke.org as a (nearly) full-time endeavor.
There appears to be a bit of a problem with Yahoo's text ad program: you aren't allowed to show pages with Yahoo's ads on them to people outside of the US.
Jonathan Crowe ran an Olympics-themed weblog for Athens 2004 and Torino 2006. Interestingly, the 2004 version got a lot more traffic, but more recent one made him more money via Google AdSense. "Whether [the increase is] due to better ad block positioning, 'better' ads (more on-target or more lucrative), a 'better' audience, or simply a more mature advertising network, I have no idea."
Unknown (relatively speaking) indie rock bands are turning down large sums of money from GM for licensing their music for Hummer ads. "It had to be the worst product you could give a song to. It was a really easy decision. How could we go on after soundtracking Hummer? It's just so evil." (via rw)
Time-lapse animated GIF of the Million Dollar Homepage...watch it fill up.
The delicate marketing of Brokeback Mountain. In Manhattan for example, analysis of the city's various social microclimates was used to select the opening theaters to de-emphasize the art-house aspect of the film. (via dj)
Absolut is ditching their famous bottle ads campaign (which is 25 years old) in favor of references to pop culture sans bottle. (via do)
Very high on the list of things that don't need to be advertised is Tetris. Chances are you remember this Tetris commercial from the 80s anyway. "Use your thumbs, use your eyes, find yourself Tetrisized!"
This blog cites a Target store advertising on Google Maps (by painting their logo on the roof), but it's more likely that the bullseye is there for the benefit of airline passengers landing at nearby O'Hare (as this slightly wider view shows). (via bb)
Hilarious real-world version of Million Dollar Homepage: Fill My Room. For each donation of a dollar, a block gets added to this person's room until it fills up. (via cyn-c)
I was wondering much the same thing as Michael re: iTunes phoning home with your listening history. Isn't that what we want? Our software watching and making recommendations for us...isn't that helpful? Providing better, more targetted advertising (if we have to have advertising, it should be useful)? There are privacy concerns and companies should be clearer about what's going on, but I don't mind if the software I use is a little smarter.
What business are movie theaters in? The fast-food business, the advertising business, or the movie exhibition business? All three, but they take the movie exhibition business the least seriously.
The proprietor of The Million Dollar Homepage has sold 999,000 pixels (for $1 each) and is auctioning off the final 1,000 pixels on eBay (current bid is ~$30,000). (thx, jonah)
The Dayton Daily "News" has a full-page advertisement for King Kong right on the front page of the paper. That's why they call it a journalism business, I guess.
Who doesn't love advertising CMYK jokes? "A Clockwork C:0 M:60 Y:90 K:0"
Spike Jonze. Gap commercial. Go watch.
Paul Ford has some fun at Business 2.0's expense and invents Blogverthacking[TM] in the process.
Dooce puts ads on her site to feed her family (she's supporting them *entirely* by writing her personal web site) and