While fans of sports like soccer, golf, tennis and NASCAR are used to the sight of corporate logos on competitors’ uniforms, the major professional team sports in the U.S. — baseball, football, hockey, and basketball — have generally resisted allowing sponsors to slap their brand on a players’ uniform. But that could all change with a decision announced last night by the NBA. [More]
advertising
At What Age Is It Appropriate To Market Professional Waxing To Girls?
By 7.6.12
A salon with locations in Florida and New York has a great promotion — waxing for half-off the price of a normal treatment, with one stipulation: You’ve got to be 15 or younger. Say what now? The reasoning goes, according to the salon, that “girls get bored when they go out with their Moms to do errands.” Nothing less boring than getting hair ripped off. [More]
Study: Nearly Half Of Consumers Fooled By “Up To” Claims In Advertisements
By 6.29.12
When you see an ad that promises to save you “up to 30%,” do you assume that means that you will see a savings of 30%? You’re reading Consumerist, so you’re probably thinking “Duh, of course not.” But a new study shows that a large number of consumers are not discerning between conditional “up to” promises and unconditional performance statements. [More]
Disney Networks To Stop Airing Junk Food Ads To Kids
By 6.5.12
With growing public and regulatory interest in how not-exactly-healthy foods are advertised and marketed toward children, the Walt Disney Company is announcing today that any foodstuffs advertised during kid-focused TV programming on its many channels will have to meet the company’s nutritional standards. [More]
Is A DVR That Skips Entire Ad Breaks The 'Holy Grail' For TV Viewers?
By 5.11.12
Yesterday, Dish Network unveiled a new feature on its Hopper DVRs called Auto Hop, which allows customers to completely skip over ad breaks on certain prime-time network programs. The company’s CEO has already touted this as “the Holy Grail of television viewers,” but we’re wondering if that might be overstating the case a little bit. [More]
Atheist Group: Movie Theater Discriminated Against Us By Pulling Ad
By 4.30.12
An atheist group in Texas is claiming discrimination after a local movie theater backed out of an agreement to run ads for the organization during pre-movie slideshows. [More]
Oreo: Breastfeeding Ad Wasn't For Public Consumption
By 4.20.12
For the last day or so, the Internet has been wondering how an ad for Oreos featuring a breastfeeding baby and the tagline “Milk’s favorite cookie” ever got made and whether or not it was a real ad or just a cute prank. [More]
Microsoft Patents System That Would Let You Pay To Skip Commercials
By 3.20.12
It used to be that streaming a show online meant you had to deal with a minimum number of ads. But those online ad breaks are now growing longer and longer, and you usually don’t have a method for fast-forwarding past them. That’s why Microsoft has patented a system that would allow you to skip ads — for a price. [More]
Pepsi No Longer "Choice Of A New Generation," But Malt-O-Meal Is
By 3.12.12
For those of us who came of age glued to a TV in the ’80s, we knew that Pepsi was the “choice of new generation,” if only because commercial after commercial featuring superstars like Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie told us it was. But that distinction now belongs to the folks behind Malt-O-Meal, who snapped up the trademark after Pepsi let it lapse. [More]
More Businesses Should Under-Promise & Over-Deliver
By 2.24.12
There’s a tendency on the part of many businesses to sell their product or service based on a price, time frame or level of service that sounds great in marketing materials but which often requires an asterisk because it only tells part of the story. But these companies are playing a short con game that consumers will eventually figure out. [More]
Transformers, Apple Recognized For Their Achievements In Product Placement
By 2.14.12
Transformers: Dark of the Moon is probably the best Shia LaBeouf movie released in the last year that also features big robots. And while that alone might make it worthy of an award, the film has also been singled out for its efforts to cram brands down viewers’ throats. [More]
Clint Eastwood Denies Political Slant In Chrysler Super Bowl Ad
By 2.7.12
Last year, people around the country cheered Chrysler’s ad touting the phoenix-like rebirth of Detroit and American automakers. But it’s an election year, so the car company’s most recent TV spot, featuring Mr. Grizzle himself, Clint Eastwood, has been attacked by some as being propaganda for the Obama administration. [More]
McDonald's Apologizes For Saying Pit Bulls Are More Dangerous Than Its Chicken
By 2.6.12
Pit bulls have gotten a bad rap over the years and are too often associated with dog fights and violence, though that has significantly more to do with horrible owners than the rather pleasant pit bulls they mistreat. Somehow this escaped the people at McDonald’s, who thought that these dogs would be a good way to epitomize the idea of “danger.” [More]
Maybe Super Bowl Ads Are Too Cheap
By 2.3.12
The price of a 30-second ad slot during the Super Bowl goes up every year. In 2012, ad time is going for $3,500,000 per spot, or $116,666.67 per second. But maybe everyone involved is looking at this wrong. Maybe the eyeballs of the nation and the free publicity that comes along with buying a slot during the game are worth more than that, and networks should truly let the market decide. [More]
Microsoft Ad Attacks Google For Only Caring About Money
By 2.1.12
Once upon a time, a lot of people viewed Microsoft as the epitome of corporate omnipresence, as many of us wrote our 11-part fantasy series in Word, checked our Hotmail accounts while surfing the web on Internet Explorer, probably on a computer running Windows. But now we have Google Docs, Gmail, and Chrome, and Microsoft is taking out full-page ads warning consumers of how this other company is the one to be reviled. [More]
Best Buy To Use Super Bowl Ad To Try To Convince You They Know About Electronics
By 2.1.12
During last year’s Super Bowl, Best Buy tried to use not-at-all-a-flash-in-the-pan teen star Justin Bieber and slurring punchline Ozzy Osbourne in a failed attempt to announce its Buy Back upsell program that we’ve barely heard about since. For this Sunday’s big ad the retailer, inspired by the death of Steve Jobs and the fact that people seemed to like him, has turned to tech innovators to convince customers it’s not just a showroom for Amazon and Newegg. [More]
Senator Calls Out Spirit Airlines For Trying To Mislead Public About Airfares
By 1.26.12
You may recall that earlier this week, bottom-dollar carrier Spirit Airlines launched an e-mail campaign to convince customers that the new FAA regulations requiring truth in airfare advertising was really just a ruse by the federal government to hide taxes and tax hikes in airfares. Well, that didn’t go over well with Senator Barbara Boxer of California, who threw off the gloves and sent a bare-knuckles letter to Spirit in response. [More]
