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Waste Your Saturday With 50 Funny Commercial Parodies

Nerve.com has assembled a list of 50 fake commercials for everything from Tylenol BM (you'll sleep right through your bodily functions!) to the Woomba (it cleans your noony!). There's even some that don't involve body parts, like Lily Tomlin's increasingly agitated housewife hawking "G-r-r-r Detergent" in 1975. Our favorite recent commercial parody that didn't make the list is probably the Jamie Lee Curtis commercial for Activia, because you can never get enough of women eating yogurt. More »

guerilla marketing

Top 5 Guerilla Marketing Mishaps

In the never-ending quest for free publicity, guerilla marketers have gone through great lengths to try to make a big splash. Many guerilla marketers will often concoct stunts that are risky or illegal to grab the publics' attention. Some stunts go over better than others while a few completely backfire. As a tribute to these foolhardy souls, WebUrbanist has put together their top 5 mishaps in guerilla marketing. The list, inside... More »

ads

Location-Based Cell Phone Ads Launching Soon

PC World has an overview of Loopt, which will begin testing location-based advertising via CBS Mobile in the near future. What's notable about the service—aside from the fun concept of triangulating location via cell towers—is that Loopt and CBS Mobile "seem to have made most of the right choices for privacy." That includes the service being opt-in instead of opt-out, and no personal data (such as account info or phone number) being sent back upstream. The targeted ads replace existing ads as well, so there's not a location-based spammy increase in advertising with the service. This is the kind of advertising we "like"—localized, relevant, and anonymous on our side of things. More »

polls

Is This Absolut Ad Cheeky Or Distasteful?

Absolut is running an ad in Mexico that some in this country are finding offensive because it favorably depicts our borders as they existed before the 1848 Mexican-American war. We're going to bite and talk about the ad even though it means that the advertisers win and America dies just a bit more. More »

settlements

AT&T Mobility Agrees To Refund Money To Florida Customers & Pay $2.5 Million To State's CyberFraud Task Force

Florida's Attorney General scored a victory for consumers last week, when AT&T Mobility agreed to refund fees that third-party vendors snuck onto thousands of accounts under the guise of "free" ringtones, wallpapers, and text content. They also agreed to hand over $2.5 million to help fund the state's recently-created CyberFraud Task Force, to spend $500,000 for "consumer education on safe Internet use," and to start policing third-party vendors better and make sure all billed items are clearly described. More »

badvertising

Discover The Fairsley Difference!

This fake ad-battle from "Mr. Show"—a big city supermarket chain squares off against a naïve local grocer—perfectly captures a certain type of aggressive, scorched-earth advertising style usually reserved for political campaigns.


videos

Time Warner's Hilarious Verizon FiOS Attack Ad

Competition brings out the best in employees, friends, and companies, as demonstrated brilliantly in Time Warner's attack ad against Verizon FiOS. The scenario is that a cocksure suburban dude is interrupted making a bowl of fiber cereal by the doorbell. He opens his door to find a nerdy pitchman for Verizon FiOS on his doorstep. When the kid waves his hands, magic red light streams around the word "FIBER." The homeowner raises his eyebrows and talks about how Time Warner has been using fiber optic cable for the past ten years. The FiOS kid can only respond by making more magic FIBER signs in the air. After Time Warner dude thorughly defeats FiOS boy with his low prices and great service, he offers a bowl of fiber cereal to the grimacing boy, whose magic red light is now smoking and spluttering. "Ooh, you're looking a little bunched up," says TWC Man, "need some help?" We LOLed. Too bad there's a big difference between having a fiber optic backbone (TWC) and fiber optics that plug directly into your house (FiOS, faster). Full transcript, inside... More »

advertising

Tivo Says E-Trade Commercial Was Most Watched Super Bowl Spot

Tivo has announced that E-Trade's talking, trading, barfing baby was the most watched ad by Tivo subscribers during the Super Bowl, followed by the Pepsi spot where Justin Timberlake got hit in the crotch, followed by the Doritos ad where a giant mouse wailed on a man eating chips. Tivo "sampled 10,000 households using anonymous, second-by-second audience measurement data" to come up with the rankings. More »

advertising

South Carolina Will Place Ads Inside School Buses

South Carolina will begin selling ad space inside their public school buses—11-inch strips above the windows are now for sale, and "Interested school districts get about $2,100 per month per bus." More »

bad judgment

British Store Stops Selling "Lolita" Beds For Little Girls

Woolworths in London has pulled its Lolita bed from its online store after complaints from parents. A Woolworths spokesman said, "What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either. We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."
More »

advertising

Great Ad Campaign For... A Cemetery?

These three hilariously morbid print ads are for Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, by Canadian ad agency ACLC. Although they're a couple of years old now, it's probably the first (and only) time we've ever seen irreverence brought to the eternally grim concept of funeral pre-planning—we're not sure any American corporation would have the cojones to try a similar tack.
More »

groceries

Microsoft Testing Ads On Shopping Carts

If you buy groceries at ShopRite, you might start seeing special shopping carts with little monitors attached later this year, when Microsoft and MediaCart roll out a new loyalty program that tracks shoppers' purchases and displays targeted advertising while they shop. Ostensibly, the monitors will also provide useful information, such as the location of products within the store, access to recipes, and personalized shopping lists. We'll be curious to see whether any of these services are actually implemented in a useful way or are just used to disguise the advertising. More »

badvertising

Disturbing Cheese Ads With Luis Guzmán And His Fellow "Cheddar Hunks"


Okay, we're just going to say it: calling men of a certain age "cheddar hunks" just sounds like they all smell like stinky feet. That's a table I want to stay far, far away from. Nevertheless, Cabot Cheese of Vermont has launched a new television campaign featuring Guzmán and his Stinky-Feet-Friends sitting around drinking beer and eating cheese. It's weird. And though we have always liked Cabot Cheese, now it's going to be hard not to think of middle-aged toes (and werewolves) whenever we go cheddar shopping. Urg. More »

badvertising

Copywriter Mom Uses Her Advertising Powers To Humiliate Son Via Classifieds

Here's a perfect example of the power of the written word in advertising: Jane Hambleton's splashy classified ad to sell her son's car worked so well that now everyone knows she caught him with liquor in his car and sold it as punishment. More »

ad-supported models

New Downloadable Movie Book Tests Yahoo/Adobe Ad System

Remember the announcement in November that Yahoo and Adobe were testing out a new ad system inside pdf documents? (No? It only got 1,200 hits.) Well, they are, and the big question then was how Yahoo and Adobe would determine what sorts of ads were placed in the documents, and how they'd appear. Now there's a free (or rather, ad-supported) downloadable book—"200 documentaries you must see before you die"—that lets you test the new ad system out for yourself. More »

marketing

Ads For Gays Focus On Exactly What You'd Expect

Ad Guy #1: Okay, these gays have money. How do we get it?
Ad Guy #2: They like wangs! And cross-dressing!
Ad Guy #1: Done! [They high five.]
 
Radar takes a look at eleven gayish ads that range from over-the-top crass to "Well, if you want to see it that way" coy. For the most part, since it's just another specialty demographic, the ads are no more interesting than the ones created for Ebony or Rumspringa! Magazine. A few, though, are head-shakers. Our vote for the most ridiculous: Air Canada's promise to shove an airplane up your butt. Because gays like that.
More »

online advertising

New Microsoft Patent App Provides "Enforceable" Ads That Can't Be Skipped

Last year Microsoft filed a patent application, published yesterday, that explains a method by which embedded advertising can't be skipped. From the application abstract: "Enforcing rendering advertisements and other predetermined media content in connection with playback of downloaded selected media content. Playback of selected media content is made conditional on acquisition of a playback token that is generated in response to playback of the predetermined content." More »

advertising

Some Of The Year's Worst Ad Concepts

Suicide—even if it's performed by a robot, and then only in a robot's nightmare—just doesn't move products. People don't respond to suicide. Or football players acting all grossed out by seeing two straight dudes accidentally touch lips. Or a digitally reanimated zombie Redenbacher with skin so lifeless you'd swear he just climbed out of a casket at the funeral home. These were among the big losers picked by Stuart Elliot at the New York Times this year as he reviewed the advertising world's more unconventional spots of 2007. More »