Yesterday – in our Cool, Innovative Advertising? post – we wrote about advertisers that “got it”, who managed to briefly make the world a cooler, more surreal place for their intended audience/suckers. Of course, sometimes that daily dose of surreality isn’t the masterstroke of some hip marketing guru, but the result of butterfingers with a bolt gun. The lads over at Billboardom have a great story about an ad campaign in Toronto in which a luger, frozen counter-gravitationally in time, uses a Mini Cooper to luge down a building. Except the Mini went plummeting off the side of the building, cratered, then erupted into what one can only hope was a fiery explosion 10 stories down. Absolutely awesome. Thankfully, no one was hit by the car on the way down, which is good news from a humanitarian perspective but leaves us twitching at our computer with a line about the impact of advertising on the average consumer that now, alas, can never be used.
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Cool, Innovative Advertising?
Sometimes, with a lurch, I realize that – every moment of the day – I am constantly surrounded by the insentient equivalent of dozens of plaid-suit and bear-grease hucksters, doing jumping jacks and breathlessly screaming for me to look at them. Wherever I go, they are there. Even weirder, I realize I’m so used to these obnoxious guys following me around all day that I don’t even notice when, for example, they scream at me to look at something so surreal or stupid its actually kind of awesome. Like a load of porridgy-eyed Dubliners omnibusing to work in the morning in a giant locomoting can of Heinz Baked Beans. Or a massive inflatable robot hovering from the corner of Tower Records in Boston, with his laser eyes ominously glowing.
Opening Up the Corporate Monologue So The iPod Silhouettes Can Tell You They’re Gay
The Bubble Project, a rather fun public vandalism project wrapped up in a Sunday Times’ worth of overwrought anti-corporate mumbo-justification.
Snack Nails: Egregious Self-Inflicted Product Placement
Even worse? It probably cost more than the sum total of those snack products to actually get that done. Also, we are entertained that in the vast array of soda pop brands, she had to get both Diet and regular Dr. Pepper. (Thanks, instantenemy!)
Panexa: The Right Choice, The Safe Choice
Gelf Magazine has an interview with Carrie McLaren of Stay Free!, a Brooklyn-based media outlet that “explores the politics and perversions of mass media and American (consumer) culture.” Which is to say, hippies gnawing on at the trunk of the freedom tree.
Time To Make the Doughnuts…In Heaven
Michael Vale, the Dunkin’ Donuts man, has passed away here in New York of complications from diabetes. In honor of his service in inciting us to snack, we will forgo any jokes about putting sprinkles on his ashes.
eBay Takes the Blame for Everything
This guerrilla campaign by eBay in Brussels shows how marketing obviates the need for facts and figures when a hastily-slapped sign can say so much more. These stores went out of business, for god-knows-what reasons—perhaps a death in the family, or a shortage of mayonnaise—but that didn’t stop eBay from taking the credit.
