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A bizarre Christmas commercial from Russia is under fire for showing Santa Claus trying to teach a single mother a lesson in being a better parent—by abducting her and dragging her through the wilderness by a rope and eventually pulling a knife on her. And the ad's creators seem baffled that anyone could have a problem with it. The spot, for Credit Bank of Moscow, was created by ad agency 3Sba. It is beautifully shot, which makes it even weirder—clearly no expense was spared in producing the film, yet how no one raised a red flag during its creation is baffling. Check out the ad here...
Ryanair, the Irish low-cost airline, is 24-hour £9.99 flash sale for people who "need a getaway" after the UK voted to leave the European Union. An ad for the promotion on Twitter takes on the famous "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys and replaces them with UKIP leader Nigel Farage, former London Mayor Boris Johnson, and justice secretary Michael Gove - the leading three figures of the Leave campaign. Ryanair, was firmly in the Remain camp - so much so that it had sent out a marketing email earlier on Friday morning - hours ahead of the official referendum results - to promote the sale, reading: "Celebrate remaining in Europe with 1 million seats from £9.99."...
Cannes Lions has its second cringeworthy moment, this time from a Bronze Lion winner. The outdoor ad, for Bayer from AlmapBBDO in Sao Paulo, reads "Don't worry babe, I'm not filming this.mov" and features aspirin boxes. Cindy Gallop, the former agency exec and vocal women's advocate, has again brought attention to Cannes Lions ceremony tweeting a photo of the ad and commenting, "Don't use this to sell aspirin, male-dominated ad industry [and] don't award it, male dominated juries." UPDATE: Bayer has asked the agency to discontinue the campaign....
Burger King took out a full-page, open-letter-style ad in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune this morning, calling for a truce with McDonald's and suggesting they join forces to create a "McWhopper" burger.
But McDonald's is having none of it.Burger King's idea was to "get the world talking" about the Peace One Day charity, which is lobbying for September 21 to become an official Peace Day. Fernando Machado, the fast-food chain's senior vice president for global brand management, said it wasn't just a PR stunt and that BK was hoping McDonald's would agree to sell the hybrid burger September 21....
U.K.-based trade body called for advertising agencies to strike against Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, citing “despicable” practices it says the Budweiser maker imposed on its members when pitching for work.In a recent pitch for work,
AB InBev asked agencies how low they would go on rates, how many free hours of work they’d offer and whether they’d wait for payment beyond the current 120-day period, the Marketing Agencies Association said Thursday in an e-mailed statement.
The world’s biggest brewer also asked agencies how much money they’d give back -- known as rebates -- beyond a minimum 5 percent the company already stipulates, to contribute to its corporate sustainability program, the MAA said. The organization called on agencies that work with AB InBev to strike starting April 7....
I can't believe this.Yes, advertisers lie. Or at least bend the truth a little. Everybody knows that, right?
WRONG. People expect to get what what they see on the billboard, but what they don’t know is that it’s impossible. I mean seriously, have you ever wondered why a Big Mac looks 1000% percent better on TV than what you get at the 2am drive thru?
A new infographic from Finances Online reveals just how far companies will go to make their products seem more appealing – from replacing actual ice cream with mashed potato for a more solid appearance to using motor oil for honey or syrup.
To show the disparity between common ads and actual products, Finances Daily compared popular food, hotel and fashion brands, revealing how different the ad images can look from actual items.....
Attaching a star to your brand is something that advertisers have done since the first rock retailer made a cave drawing of Thutronk the Hunter carrying one of his store’s special stones. And yet, science says that people just don’t care, and that it may have a negative impact on your brand.
New research from the folks at ad analytics service Ace Metrix, who released a similar study in 2011, claims to confirm that celebrified ads do not generally perform as well as ads with unknown actors who hope to someday be celebrities...
The results found that ads without celebrities continue to outscore star-studded ads in all seven facets of the Ace scoring system. It’s not a huge difference, with the overall average score for celeb ads virtually the same as regular non-celeb spots. But Ace says this underscores just how little a difference having a celebrity in your ad makes....
Fashion company Benetton caved in to pressure from the Vatican and pulled a Photoshopped ad that showed Pope Benedict XVI kissing a leading Islamic imam, the International Business Times reported Thursday.The Vatican responded with furious protests over the image in the company’s Unhate campaign, released Wednesday, which showed the Pope smooching with Egyptian Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayyeb.“This is a grave lack of respect for the Pope,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi fumed.
Ford isn't the only major company that has had to answer for a controversial ad it never wanted to go public. A series of Pepsi ads in Dusseldorf showed graphic images of a personified calorie committing suicide in various violent ways. The World Wildlife Foundation had to apologize when DDB Brazil created ads in which dozens of planes were shown flying at the World Trade Towers with the text, "The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11." WWF said it never approved the ads even though they were submitted to various ad award ceremonies. Click here to see when big brands had to answer for huge ad fails ...
JWT India created a series of disturbing ads for the FordFigo, one of which shows former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi flashing a peace sign from the front seat of a car that has three curvaceous women tied up and gagged in the trunk. Ford and JWT have both issued an apology. Ford did not approve the ads; the agency was just publishing some speculative renderings to show off its creative chops. JWT India is Ford's agency for the Figo in that country....
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The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates malicious advertising ”malvertising” costs the U.S. digital marketing, advertising, and media industry $8.2 billion annually. A few years ago malvertising was merely scamming the system: fake ads, fake traffic, fake analytics. Ad tech is a hacker's heaven, an unregulated labyrinth of circumlocution systems for bidding, placing and tracking ads. "All the code is awful and you aren't allowed to change it anyway," says Salon developer Aram Zucker-Scharff. "Usually ad servers claim they run some sort of checks, but considering just how many malicious or badly formed ads get through, it is pretty apparent they don't do much." The hacker's goal is to bill, aka bilk, advertisers for ads no human ever saw. Their fraud takes several forms: Ad stacking piles multiple ads on top of each other. Ad stuffing shrinks ads to invisible 1-pixel squares. Click farms send fraud users to real sites. Clickjacking sends real users to fraud sites....
Cannes Lions 2016 has its first truly cringeworthy moment, in the form of a party invitation seeking "attractive females and models only." The email went out to a number of festival participants who planned to attend The Wednesday Party, an event sponsored by digital agency VaynerMedia and media company Thrillist Media Group with a musical performance by Wyclef Jean. UPDATE: Thrillist founder and CEO Ben Lerer responded to the controversy via an internal staff email that appears in part at the bottom of this story. A female agency executive tells Adweek that she and two female colleagues received the email while having lunch in Cannes on Tuesday. One of them forwarded it to women's advocate and agency veteran Cindy Gallop, who subsequently shared it on Twitter and wrote, "It's 2016, @vaynermedia @thrillist. This is not how you party at @cannes_lions." The email was sent by events company iGetIn. Its key section reads (emphasis via the sender of the message): "Thank you for your interest in attending!! Please be aware that this specific list is for attractive females and models only." The note, which was also shared by members of the public Facebook group Cannes for Cannesseurs, then instructs male attendees to "contact the PR departments of the respective sponsors" if they want to get into the party. It requests that women interested in attending send "recent untouched photos and/or your Instagram/Facebook links for you and each of your additional female guest [sic]," adding, "once we have reviewed we will send you specific entry details." ...
Is Todd Gurley actually vegetarian? You have to wonder after watching this Carl's Jr. commercial starring the Los Angeles Rams running back. The spot shows Gurley supposedly biting into the California Classic Double Cheeseburger, but it's blatantly obvious that the burger isn't real—it's a digitally inserted photo that isn't fooling anyone.
Check out the YouTube comments—almost every one is mocking. "That CGI burger is as inflated as your prices," says one. Says another: "Feel free to send me some burgers at my email. Thank you. Also save them in photoshop so I can eat them at a higher res! Thanks!" The ad has 92 likes and 700 dislikes on YouTube, as of this writing....
Your target audience is sick and tired of interruptive ads. They want something more valuable, rich and actionable. The content has to be digestible information, whether it’s presented in the form of an article, a blog post, an infographic, video, memes, podcasts, or short reports. If you run a blog, your customers are most likely your readers. And if you’re an information marketer, your customer is someone who interacts with you in a certain way, in order to buy your product or service....
Once again, the Walmart website made a pricing error, and once again shoppers tried to pounce on it only to later have their orders canceled.
And as always happens in these situations, some of these folks are mistakenly claiming that this was a bait-and-switch scam.
This time, the deeply discounted item was a $100 Walmart gift card, which the site somehow listed as only $10.
So of course, people jumped at the chance to purchase these deeply discounted cards.
One woman tells Houston’s ABC13 that she ordered 80 of these cards (total face value: $8,000) for $800....
By now, you’ve probably read the New York Times piece that’s been making the rounds lately. If not, here’s the upshot: it concludes that Google AdWords isn’t practical for small businesses.
Unfortunately, it’s not the first time the Gray Lady has gone after AdWords, nor is it the first time that the paid search community has responded so vigorously in its defense. The real tragedy of the latest piece isn’t that AdWords has been singled out – it’s that the Times (and the business owners it interviewed) have once again missed the point....
Apple's new ads are failing.
Here are the 10 most effective ads of Q2 2013, according to Ace Metrix, a company that measures audience responses to commercials. The No.1 spot was by AT&T, advertising a Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, which can survive being dunked in a fishbowl. Samsung's own ad for the GS4 came in at No.8
Apple wasn't on the list...
Computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier has turned his back on the “information wants to free” meme to which he once subscribed, and he thinks advertising as a business model for media is doomed. It’s not just that Craigslist and other Internet businesses have snatched ads away from traditional media, he reckons; it’s that in this digital era, when Google and Facebook increasingly own most of the inventory, not to mention the ad servers and distribution channels, relying on advertising to prop up your media company just doesn’t make sense. youLanier, the guy credited with coming up with the term “virtual reality,” outlines this thesis in his new book “Who Owns the Future?” which examines the effects network technologies have had on our economy. In an interview with Nieman Journalism Lab, Lanier builds on that case, stating flatly that advertising isn’t a viable business plan for media businesses in the long term. He tells the publication...
After disturbing—not to mention unsanctioned—mockup ads appeared online, the PR pros in Ford’s Asia Pacific division snapped into action on a Saturday morning. Are you having a rough Monday?
At least you weren’t handling a fast-moving PR crisis all weekend.
That was the case for Ford Motor Co.'s public relations team as it crafted a response to a disturbing mockup print ad for its Figo model that staffers at an unaffiliated agency had posted to the Internet....
For starters, it’s trying way too hard to have it every which way, and trots out too much corporate blather and jibber-jabber. All that lawyer-approved disingenuousness shuts my circuits down. Most people watching would find it interesting to know that Coca-Cola owns over 600 brands, including teas, waters, sports drinks, health drinks, and the sweetener Truvia. I love the design of the tiny cans, and the big graphic calorie counts on the front labels of the sugared drinks. All good information. But you can’t have it both ways. Exactly how deeply concerned iscitizen Coca-Cola about "playing an important role" in addressing obesity, when clearly it is also using this very same message to lobby voraciously on behalf of high-fructose-syrupy, supersized drinks (which Mayor Bloomberg of New York City is threatening to kill) and against higher soda taxes? This will take “continued effort from all of us,” says the announcer, evenly. But speak for yourself, lady. It’s a bit presumptuous to ask your customers to exert any effort in your direction. The root causes of obesity are so complicated, with so many possible angles (never mind Coke’s role in that epidemic)...
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Yup this bizarre 5:07 min Russian spot is really great reputation management and destined to sell lots of loans, mortgages and banking services for Credit Bank of Moscow... NOT. Strategy missing in action although it's going viral...