After a fare hike whose implementation saw neither the subway's efficiency increase nor its piss smell decrease, the New York MTA has a plan to drum up some much needed cash to cover next year's $900 million deficit: whole subway cars wrapped in hideous advertising.
Entire cars have been turned into commercials before, but those ads were relegated to the the cars' interior. Now, even the sad bastards just walking past a midtown shuttle full of schmoes off to some other hellish destination in this filthy city will have to face pictures demanding they watch the History Channel.
It's like the graffiti the NYC government worked so hard to combat, just without all the annoying artistry and anti-commercialism.
MTV is at last acknowledging that the only people who still watch their station are pallid, sad hermits. Thus, their newest project: MTV Switch.
According to its Web site, "Switch is MTV Networks International's Global Climate Change Campaign. We'll be looking for the best ideas and innovations that can help us reinvent how we live in ways that are cool for us and the planet." Neato! What a hip and helpful way to continue pummeling the MTV brand into unsuspecting children's minds.
Judging by one of the Switch campaign's first ads, "Mud," MTV thinks the best way to promote getting outside and doing "cool" stuff for the planet is by playing to young mens' most base desires: big, wet breasts on stranded women. How cool and innovative, guys.
Mud after the jump. CONTINUED »
Even though sports are stupid and boring (which is total objective journalism talking, and def. not the personal opinion of this particular blogger), ESPN gets mad cred for having the funniest commercials ever. Something about sports and comedy go hand in hand apparently, which would explain the success of Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night.
But ESPN's good humor extends far beyond their network advertising dollars. Take for example, the signs posted in NY after the station's billboards for Monday Night Football, made out of real football turf, were stolen.
Sure, they threaten to burn your house down with bad vibes, but still: More clever marketing stunts like this and perhaps ESPN can just shuck the whole "sports" thing and become a comedy station?
The world of advertising has become a hovel of ineptitude as finance the world over very quickly crumbles, thus proving what we've known for years: ad people are cowards who will break under pressure.
At right is a Fox Business ad, complete with a lie about being LIVE when the bailout happened (the bailout didn't happen, of course). Then there's the world's banks, most of which are trying in vain to sound rock-solid as they collapse like castles made of sand.
And the political advertisers aren't doing any better. Twice now McCain's camp has screwed up by sending out ads that never should have been. First was an Internet ad proclaiming on Thursday that Senator McCain won Friday's debate, and next was an RNC TV spot whose main point assumed the bailout went through. Of course, McCain didn't win the debate and, again, the bailout didn't go through, but those facts didn't stop some marketing dolts from brainstorming them and then loosing them on a confused public.
Nice to see that in times of crisis people are quicker than usual to abandon facts and good sense.
Whoops, the GOP keeps failing on their ad campaigns, so whether you agree with them or not, you're just going to have to grin and bear it for awhile whilst we marvel at the incredible inanity of this wall street melting business:
Whoops guys, looks like while your back was turned, Paris Hilton(TM) managed to find another way to keep making money, adding a fifth fragrance to her line of perfumes. The ad for the scent features Hilton as the Green Fairy from Moulin Rouge(?) with tagline "Do You Believe in Fairy Tales?"
Unsurprising then, that the name of the perfume is Fairy Dust. What is surprising however, is that the bottle is not just a 6-ounce vial of cocaine.
So if you ever wanted to smell like an unnecessary cultural figure whose name is most associated with disgusting affluence and venereal diseases, now is your chance. Paris Hilton makes no promises that purchasing said item will make you her new BFF, since that is something one must audition for.
Is it unethical to run political ads during newscasts that discuss politics, especially if the newscasts decry the ads, calling them lies? Um, duh. Definitely. That's a ridiculous question. Then again, television advertising revenues have fallen precipitously as of late. And when there's money involved, ridiculous, easily answered questions have a tendency to become complicated gray areas necessitating really involved articles looking into the matter. Yuck:
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It used to be that air travel was a breeze. You could smoke up there, call the flight attendants "stewardesses" and get up to move around every once in awhile. But then the health nuts got lawyers and the terrorists won. Anymore, vacations are book-ended with gruff orders to "Remove your shoes" and "Not linger around the cockpit." Aren't you ready for a return to the glory days of air travel? Too bad, kid. It's 2008; these days, things only get worse.
Starting immediately, if you fly Spirit Airlines, not only will you be miserable the entire time you're waiting for your flight in the airport, once aboard the plane, you'll be inundated with loud advertising blanketing every surface imaginable. The tray tables, cups, seat backs and window shades will all be covered in ads for some bullshit a person should be able escape for a few precious hours while 30,000 feet above the Earth.
Like everything thrust upon you by corporate pricks, this is for your own good: "Spirit Airlines claims [the ads are] a way to offset high fuel costs so that it can preserve competitive fares for its customers." Wow! I hadn't thought of it like that! Oh wait, yes I did. It's just that my consideration of possible benevolence was completely smashed apart when I read Spirit's Clockwork Orange-ish press release, obviously conjured by one of the worst people in the whole wide world:
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Ha ha ha! The Red Roof Inn hotel chain, whose market research has shown that Red Roof customers are "big fans" of Nascar racing, is launching a new country music-based marketing campaign that tacitly admits exactly what many have suspected for years: that Red Roofs are low budget, simple and unbelievably boring, much like modern country music. Now, people on the run from the law lured into Red Roof Inns by "Red Roof Loves Country" print ads and billboards can then stay one step ahead of the cops with prerecorded wake up calls from country stars Phil Vassar and Little Big Town.
Of course, every thinking person knows the Red Roof Inn doesn't love country so much as it loves people who love country's money, something other companies have apparently also realized as of late. (Surprise! Folk in cowboy boots have cash, too, and that they can be suckered by good old fashioned hucksterism just as easily as Fiddy Cent fans.) Besides Red Roof's campaign, Coty has recently released a fragrance named after Tim McGraw and NBC has premiered a reality TV competition called Nashville Star.
Yahoo capitalism! Leave no demographic unexploited!
Oh whoops! How embarrassing when your company's tag line is proven to be a load of shit following a massive government bailout of your crumbling operations.
That's been happening a lot these days. In the long run, good for consumers, who somehow forget time and again that "advertising" is Lie-tin for "flowery bullshit," but bad for banks, who are being forced to rethink their marketing strategies in the wake of a Wall Street bloodbath that saw many of them neutered.
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If movies and television are rated to warn potential viewers they contain foul language, drug use and/or boobs, why can't they be rated to warn potential viewers they contain not so subtle ads for crap like Old Spice, also? This is the central question of a new piece in today's Slate. A piece in which Alissa Quart slowly unravels an argument, asks a lot of questions and then never really approaches a conclusion, as writers at Slate are wont to do.
Here's the story in a nutshell: The FCC has said that it would like a way to make sure the public is "informed of the sources of program while concurrently balancing the First Amendment and artistic rights of programmers." Quart proposes a rating of B for "branding." The problem is that the FCC currently has no control over cable and film and to get control would take an act of Congress. The end (surprisingly without any discussion of the concerns a rational person would have about the FCC having control over film and cable). Time for Quart to ponder:
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Were you under the impression that fun, exciting wars were reserved for disputes between races, religions, tribes and nations? Wrong, silly. Computer companies can do battle also. Sure, it's even more stupid and offensive than regular combat, but at least the only casualties are money and dignity.
The image at right that looks like it was taken from an Apple ad was, in fact, taken from a Microsoft ad. Is your mind blown? That's the point. After pulling their ineffective, strange Seinfeld-Gates ads only two weeks after they premiered, Microsoft is striking again with a hipper, slicker attack. Sick of being pigeonholed as the computer for boring old turds, Microsoft is co-opting Apple's "nerd" character to do its PC bidding.
In a new 15-second spot, the "nerd" announces, "Hello. I'm a PC. And I've been made into a stereotype." Viewers are then introduced to a decidedly un-nerdy group of happy PC users, including children, Deepak Chopra and Pharrell Williams. Cool, right? Fuckin' Chopra, man.
Like a sleeping giant, Google continues to plot in the shadows, patiently awaiting the day when Microsoft and Apple kill each other and make room for its total world domination.
"Display ads have fallen on hard times. The graphic ads that border a Web page are among the slowest-growing formats in the online-ad marketplace, and they are seen by many marketers as stodgy and ineffective. But some ad-technology and Web-measurement companies are trying to engineer a comeback for display ads, offering data that they say show display advertising is more effective than marketers think. Microsoft is the latest company to make this declaration, with new evidence coming next week that it says proves display ads are actually better than searches at triggering consumers." [WSJ]
In unrelated news, Microsoft has all but admitted defeat in the text web advertising industry, which Google basically owns, where most advertiser dollars are being funneled, and what's stealing all the business from display ads.
AdAge: "Coca-Cola is again the world's most valuable brand, according to Interbrand's just-released annual list of the Best 100 Global Brands." And it only spent $2.4 billion for the honor!
It's all fun and games until the conservative Christians hire lawyers.
Yesterday, after a months-long standoff, leftist king of the Internet Google acquiesced to the Christian Institute's demand that anti-abortion groups be allowed to advertise against searches like "abortion help" and "abortion." Initially, Google said they were going to fight the Institute in court, but it capitulated soon thereafter.
Now, frightened young women and men looking for information on Google are definitely going to be subjected to biased scare tactics. But the Christian Institute wants you to note that they won't be the visual scare tactics of the loonies who show up at marathons with posters of aborted fetuses. Mike Judge, a spokesperson for CI, promises they are "not a group of headbangers, and would set out [their] position in a pretty factual, pretty sensible way." Well, at least as sensible as one can be while telling a woman she needs to become an incubator for 18 years and nine months because she made a mistake.
All those Vitamin Water plugs during the Gossip Girl premiere were hella annoying, but they may be part of a dying trend: Product placement dropped 15% this season according to Nielsen, the guys in the know about stuff like this.
One reason given for the decline of not-so-subtle marketing is the writer's strike, which halted programs during the Jan-Feb season. But! The lack of scripted programming actually made way for more reality shows, which in general feature more carefully promoted Coca-Cola and Lean Cuisine menus then your average teen drama on the CW. Also: When will the writers strike stop being an excuse for every malady in TV? CONTINUED »
Here's something you, like us, may not have known: "the gay community has been extremely loyal to Levi's." Huh. Well now, to show its appreciation for years and years of the gay community's loyalty, Levi's is going to exploit them in order to sell more jeans. Hooray civil rights. CONTINUED »
This movie poster, for Kevin Smith's October release Zack and Miri Make a Porno, was deemed inappropriate by the MPAA, which doesn't just hate BitTorrent users but also regulates all movie advertising in exchange for slapping letters like "PG" and "R" on movies to keep kids safe. Because the poster, like those fake Puma ads, insinuated oral sex, they were not cleared for use by Hollywood's regulatory body. (This, after the MPAA agreed to downgrade the movie's rating from NC-17 to R.) So Kevin Smith went back to the drawing board, and came up with this safer, family-friendly version: CONTINUED »
Microsoft got a lot of crap when it spent $10 million on Jerry Seinfeld to produce a 90-second spot where he and Bill Gates squish shoes and walk in a parking lot together. The tech blogs hated it; Madison Avenue tried defending it; we decided it was semi-effective. But maybe Microsoft deserves zero sympathy after all, because across the board, its advertising is pretty terrible. Witness this creation: CONTINUED »
NBC isn't just cashing in on the ad dollars from the Olympics and the upcoming Super Bowl — it's cashing in on all the free publicity big numbers get from the media. Back when it sold $1 billion worth of Olympics television time, the trade press fell over itself to trumpet the numbers as the Second Coming. (We were right there with 'em.) Then NBC sold a few more measly million dollars worth of ad time, and again everybody was quick to cheer them on once more. And it's happening again. Now that NBC has the Super Bowl, it's hiked the 30-second fees, from the $2.7 million Fox charged last year to a cool $3 million for the 2009 games. And according to the trade press, NBC is selling spots like gangbusters! AdAge was first on the scene, and today the Wall Street Journal reports Anheuser-Busch and PepsiCo are taking a crack at blowing their ad budgets, while General Motors won't be, and FedEx is still making up its mind. But it's less about the enormous fees — at $3 million, advertisers will spend $100,000 per second — than the industry-wide jumping up and down for NBC's ad sales department. Yes, it's pretty amazing to see network television gobble up huge chunks of media spends on single sporting events, especially in this economic climate. But we've said it before and we'll say it again: For every million bucks NBC hauls in to its coffers, it earns a good chuck of publicity on top of that, gratis. Perhaps, though, it's deserved?
