I’ve had roommates who looked like this guy after a night out at McCormack’s. But seriously, the context here is more sobering: It’s a domestic-violence PSA ad from Saatchi & Saatchi in Singapore. (Click the image to see a larger version.) The text reads, “Your mother acts as though nothing happened. She makes dinner and sits at the table, staring into her plate. He stumbles in drunk, stands behind her and says, ‘I’m sorry. Do you forgive me?’ She sits silent for a long time. You can see the bruise over her eye turning purple. You can feel her sadness filling the room. She nods without looking up. He forces a kiss on her then smiles at you as if to say everything’s fine now. You stare into your plate.” Ugh. The tagline is, “No child should have to live with a monster.” See more executions here and here. Via Ads of the World.
Over the last few days, we've been reading about Virgin Mobile USA's plan to give people free cell minutes in exchange for spending an equal amount of time watching ads—subscribers could get up to 75 minutes per month of free calls, as long as they watch the ads served up on their phones and respond to them via SMS. (We're assuming that's to verify they actually watched). Virgin, according to this story, sees potential in the idea from a highly-desirable youth market that
will do anything—including watching ads!—to preserve cash, but a
Forrester analyst says cell calls are already so cheap anyway, it won't
make a bit of difference.
So, AdFreak readers, time to tell us what you think.
Hard-hitting spot here, including racist language and a brief moment of horrific violence, from McCann Portugal as part of Amnesty International’s efforts to tackle prejudice against immigrants in Europe. In Portuguese, with English subtitles.
Summer in the Hamptons. It’s fun. It’s sexy. It’s where spoiled publicity princesses mow down pedestrians who get in their way. And where high-powered New Yorkers go for the weekend to get away from the pressures of work. Or it’s supposed to be. Of course, some people never tire of work, or of thinking about the issues that preoccupy their industries. And that’s just what a couple of Manhattan-based PR guys—Ronn Torossian of 5W Public Relations and Joseph Anthony of Vital Marketing—are counting on. They’ve just launched a series of roundtable discussions and networking events to take place in East Hampton featuring luminaries from the worlds of entertainment, sports and business, which of course Torossian and Anthony spend most of their waking hours promoting. But don’t expect to able to just waltz right through the front door of the “super-luxurious house” (shown here, according to the e-mail we got) and start dialoguing. Invitations are hard to come by, Torossian tells Newsday. “You have to be culturally relevant in your space,” he says. OK, that leaves out about 99.9 percent of the people I pal around with. “The people we are targeting run major American companies” or are entertainers, he says. And for those who question whether the Hamptons is the proper setting for such weighty talks, Torossian responds, “Today’s big business is not just done at the boardroom. ... I don’t know the difference between business and personal.” Poor bastard.
A few weeks ago we wrote about the nominees for Commercial Closet’s 2006 Images in Advertising Awards, which honor outstanding representations of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community in advertising. The votes are in, and DDB’s “Guy Watcher” spot for Diet Pepsi, featuring Carson Kressley, has walked off with the award for Outstanding Commercial. The PFLAG ad with Ben Affleck, which we ran with the earlier post, won for Outstanding Print/Outdoor-Mainstream. As we mentioned before, the turnaround mainstream advertiser of the year award and the “Clean Up Your Act Notice” were kept secret until May 23 event. Those awards went to T-Mobile and Nabisco, respectively. Check out all the award winners here.
While advertisers try to figure out what (if anything) to do with “user-generated content,” they’re likely to see more of it as broadband connections become increasingly common. A new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project says the number of Americans who have broadband at home jumped from 60 million to 84 million between March 2005 and March 2006. Growth has been brisk among middle-class households “and particularly fast for African Americans,” as well as among people with low levels of education. The report notes that broadband users are significantly more likely than their dial-up counterparts to post material online. Thus, the spread of broadband is changing the demographics of user-generated content. When Pew first looked at the matter in 2002, such content was largely the province of “a ‘broadband elite’ of mostly male technophiles.” No longer. In the current research, broadband users in households with income under $50,000 were slightly more likely than those in higher-income households to say they’ve put content online. Of course, we can take it for granted that most of this content has nothing to do with advertising. But there’s a growing base of people who are candidates to make brand-related postings online—whether the brands in question like it or not.
Every four years, someone trots out a study that says men (in Europe and South America, anyway) overwhelmingly prefer watching World Cup soccer to having sex. Erotic retailers naturally wonder why it has to be one or the other. As the 2006 tournament nears, many of them are rolling out World Cup-themed sex toys and apparel. The thongs shown here, done up in the colors of Germany, Brazil and Italy, are among a large selection of World Cup sex products on sale at Beate Uhse, Germany’s erotic superstore. The company is also selling six “sporty vibrators,” tight-fitting soccer jerseys for women and an “erotic energy drink,” guaranteeing “an erotic home game that is a lot more exciting than any football tournament,” say the promotional materials. Not to be outdone, U.K. sex shop LoveHoney has introduced the England Victory Vibe, a vibrator emblazoned with St. George’s Cross. The product description pulls no punches: “G-oh-oh-ooal! Come on, England! Go 45 minutes each way with this mini orgasm machine and you’ll feel like you’ve won the World Cup of sex!”
Whatever they’ve been smoking up in Ottawa, Canada, it’s caused them to royally screw up the Arabic version of a billboard encouraging people not to drive under the influence of marijuana. “The first time, I thought it wasn’t Arabic,” one Arabic speaker tells CBC News. The problem? Both the sentence and the individual words in it are written backwards—left to right, instead of right to left. (You can see the fixed version of the ad here.) “This is an embarrassment for the city,” a councilman points out. The city says it used a professional translation firm to create the ad, and tested it on a focus group. The error, says a spokesman, occurred during production. Where have we heard that before?
A Columbus, Ohio, magazine called Alive! has set up this giant working iPod billboard in the city’s downtown area. The playlist is kept online, so passersby can look up the songs they hear while passing the ad. It also takes requests. It’s unclear whether Apple had to approve the use of the iPod image, or if it even knows about this. Via MacDailyNews.
“Read before diving,” says this humorous ad for a Brazilian diving magazine. (Click to see a bigger version.) Another ad in the series reminds me of the opening segment of Magnolia. And this one has a Planet of the Apes thing going on. All of the work is by Giovanni,FCB in São Paulo. Via Coolz0r and Ads of the World.
