Coach K turns pitchman yet again

The only thing that could get under the skin of University of North Carolina hoops fans during last year’s march to the NCAA title were the nonstop (and we mean nonstop) American Express commercials with Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski. Yeah, yeah, OK, you’re a teacher who happens to coach basketball. If we accept this and sign up for AmEx, will you please stop showing us that ad? Some even complained to the NCAA that the airing of the ads approximately every 10 minutes constituted unfair recruiting. (Not surprisingly, Dick Vitale stuck up loudly for his pal in Durham.) Now, Coach K is back as corporate pitchman, this time to hawk Chevrolet. (General Motors, by the way, just posted a huge loss, which makes you wonder if Coach K wants to align the Duke brand with Chevy. Just a thought.) Judging by last night’s coverage, Heels fans and innocent bystanders should take a deep breath and expect to see Coach K’s spot dozens more times over the next couple of weeks. Meanwhile, North Carolina’s News & Observer has mocked up several great alternate pitches for “Coach Kommmercial.”

—Posted by Brian Morrissey

Published on March 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (22)
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Who will battle the 15-pound hamburger?

They just couldn’t let the 6-pound burger stand alone in all its glory, could they? Trumping itself, Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield, Pa., has again become home to the word’s biggest hamburger, nearly tripling the size of its giganto-burger to 15 pounds. Anyone who can wolf down this megameal in fewer than five hours gets cash, a T-shirt, a hall-of-fame posting and doesn’t pay a cent for the monstrous pile of cooked cow. I wonder if Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, the 99-pound current national eating champion, will be the next to win at Denny’s Beer Barrel. Worldwide, competitive eaters fear this lightweight eating machine. The new mondo-burger also brings to mind the sickening sight of the guy with “determination” in the new Visa campaign who attempts to stuff a similarly ginormous burger down his gullet. Excuse us as we consider going vegan.

—Posted by Celeste Ward

Published on March 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Orville popping into popcorn festival

The star attraction in Clay County, Ind., at its annual Popcorn Festival in September will be none other than Orville Redenbacher, the long-deceased magnate of the eponymous popcorn empire, who will appear in a retrospective of his own commercials. (You can see some of the ads here.) Redenbacher’s daughter, Gail Redenbacher Tuminello, has what “is thought to be the world’s only complete collection of the advertisements,” according to a story in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. Her compensation for showing the ads is a little odd—she has simply asked the festival’s organizers to transfer the old spots from Betamax to DVD. You’d think a popcorn magnate’s daughter could outsource this task some other way. But we are neither a magnate, nor his daughter, so what do we know?

 —Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

Published on March 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

CBS has some fun with March Madness boss-fooling spreadsheet

I’m keeping an eye on the March Madness games on CBS Sportsline today, and one of my favorite features of the media player is its red “Boss Button.” The idea is, if you’re watching at work and the boss comes by, you can click on the Boss Button, and an innocent-looking spreadsheet magically appears. I’m working from home, so I don’t really need the Boss Button—but I clicked on it anyway, and below the sea of numbers are some fun little blurbs, made to look like the user’s notes. We wonder what CBS’s Charlotte, N.C., affliate thinks of line 25 (“Whose idea was it to open a plant in Charlotte?”). And line 24 is great, too: “What the heck is going on in San Francisco?”—something we’ve all asked ourselves at some point or other.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The ASA's intentionally bad ads

The U.K.’s Advertising Standards Authority has an interesting approach to raising awareness of its efforts to keep advertising standards high—producing a series of bad ads. Following bad ads created for print, TV and the Internet, the ASA has just released three radio ads which include bad editing, mispronunciations and the like. You can listen to them, and see the rest of the work here.

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

Published on March 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

And in the role of Paula Abdul ... advertising's own Mary Lou Quinlan!

Never got around to writing a post yesterday about Just Ask a Woman's Mary Lou Quinlan being one of the judges on Simon Cowell's latest show, a series called American Inventor, in which people—most of them truly desperate—go before an American Idol-like panel who decide whether their invention has what it takes to be … America's Next Top Model! (Oh wait, sorry, it all gets so confusing after a while.) Anyway, we were going to make a crack that Mary Lou, as the only woman on the panel, would be assuming the role of Paula Abdul—not realizing, until we watched the show last night, how right we were. The tears flowed, as one prospective inventor after another unveiled his or her life's work—be it a device to fill sandbags faster or an entire exercise system contained in a backpack or an edible snow globe. It was so damn emotional, we thought Kleenex might want to sign a product-placement deal. Now we're just concerned that, like Paula, Mary Lou will start getting relationship advice from Dr. Phil. BTW, JWT's Ed Evangelista, another judge, seemed to be channeling Donny Deutsch—well, Donny if he was wearing a suit. While Mary Lou's bio plays up that The Wall Street Journal apparently once referred to her as "the Oprah" of marketing, Evangelista's makes a truly strange claim—that he helped "to build Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer/EURO RSCG into a household name." Last we checked, people in the industry had trouble dealing with that name, so if a name that long and confusing was rolling off the tongues of people all over America, that's news to us.

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

Published on March 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2)

‘FHM’ viral seeks ‘Sexiest Women’ votes

Telling a guy in a chicken suit to jump up and down on a sofa is pretty fun, but wouldn’t it be more exciting, for guys at least, to interact with a barely clothed British model like Charlotte Marshall? FHM magazine thinks so, and has built a viral site around Marshall to get votes for its 100 Sexiest Women 2006 feature. On the site, in various come-hither poses and states of undress, Marshall asks visitors four questions about their ideal woman, and responds with customized answers presumably based on keywords. (It’s meant to be sexier than that sounded.) Then, based on the answers, she offers three options of women to vote for. Once you vote, you get to “enjoy some extra fun with Charlotte” in a handful of bonus clips. A special password, apparently seeded on laddie message boards around the Web, unlocks even more clips—possibly racier ones. Adotas has the inside story of the campaign in an interview with FHM’s Carlos Rodriguez. “Hundreds of keywords have been entered into the game to try and anticipate as many user responses as possible,” he says. That sounds a bit less expansive than the famous chicken, but for many guys, this so-called “High Street honey” will more than make up for it.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Pepsi unveils ‘MyDaDaDa’ World Cup site

It’s an unapologetic soccer morning here on the blog, as Adland points us to Pepsi’s new World Cup site, MyDaDaDa.com. The song can get pretty irritating after a few seconds, so make good use of the sound-off button. You can watch a commercial featuring a dream team of World Cup players and send cheeky voicemails to friends’ cell phones from any of three German characters, including what looks to be a busty Bavarian beer wench, who may send aflutter the flinty heart of even the most malevolent hooligan. There are various downloads and other stuff. As usual these days, Brazilian star Ronaldinho (shown in this photo where he belongs—in the center) steals the show.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let’s really have some fun and call them Red Bull New York/New Jersey

In a comical twist, one influential New Jersey fellow says he hates the MetroStars’ new name, “Red Bull New York,” not because of the “Red Bull” part but because of the “New York.” George Zoffinger, CEO of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, says he will try to block Red Bull’s rights to use Giants Stadium unless “New Jersey” is made part of the name. “Our lawyers are looking at this,” he says ominously. Never mind that the Giants and the Jets use Giants Stadium without any fuss. Meanwhile, among MetroStars fans, resignation may have set in concerning the name change. “There are a lot of positives [about the Red Bull investment]. We just don’t want to be a soda can supporters club,” the president of the team’s top fan group tells the AP. The team’s general manager, Alexi Lalas, puts it this way: “Branding is all fine and well, but when you have a company making this level of investment in a team, a league, in a sport, if the worst thing they want to do is rebrand something, it’s a small price to pay.”

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

90-year-old Sun-Maid ‘girl’ gets a face-lift

At 90, the Sun-Maid of raisin fame was starting to look a bit more like an old maid. So, the raisin brand called in makeover artists from Synthespian Studios in North Adams, Mass., and, voila! The Sun-Maid looks years away from being dried up. At her coming-out party this week, the Sun-Maid inspired trivia freaks to dig up her roots. Dig this: The Sun-Maid we’ve admired on raisin boxes all our lives was a painting of Lorraine Collett, who posed for the dried-fruit trademark 90 years ago. According to Sun-Maid historians, Collett was discovered drying her black hair curls in the sunny backyard of her parents’ home in Fresno, Calif., in 1915. “She was then asked to pose for a painting while holding a basket tray of fresh grapes. This striking image was first applied to packages of Sun-Maid raisins in 1916.” The original watercolor painting is locked in a concrete vault at Sun-Maid’s HQ in Kingsburg, Calif.

—Posted by Richard Williamson

Published on March 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (7)

Hollywood wants its own ‘Got milk?’

Speaking at the ShoWest conference this week in Las Vegas, Motion Picture Association of America president (and former Department of Agriculture official) Dan Glickman suggested the movie industry could stem recent attendance declines by coming up with a generic category-wide slogan along the lines of food-industry phrases like, "Pork. The other white meat," "Beef. It's what's for dinner" or the legendary "Got milk?" Notwithstanding the inherent implication that movies are becoming less like art and more like commodities (the complaint of many a critic), what would such a slogan be? Among the possibilities: "A mind is a wonderful thing to waste." "Home of the $10 popcorn." "Movies. The other waste of time." "See all that you can see." Or perhaps the most promising: "Come for the gratuitous
violence. Stay for the exploitative nudity."

—Posted by Gregory Solman

Published on March 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (6)

Apparently, nothing's the matter with Kansas

Political commentators who think there's something the matter with places like Kansas (state flag pictured here) have puzzled over the disinclination of lowish-income Red Staters to vote their economic interests (at least as defined by those commentators). The latest ACCRA study on the cost of living in various locales, summarized in a CNNMoney.com article, points toward a possible explanation of this seeming anomaly: A lowish income may be less of a disadvantage to Red Staters. Crunching data from various sources, the study yielded a list of the 50 most expensive and the 50 least expensive metro areas to live in. Of the most expensive, 36 are in states that voted for John Kerry in 2004; just 14 are in states that voted for George Bush (with Alaska and Nevada accounting for half of those 14). More strikingly, all of the 50 least expensive metros are in a states that voted for Bush. No wonder many Red Staters feel they can afford to vote their values rather than their pocketbooks.

—Posted by Mark Dolliver

Published on March 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

A sneak peek at the upcoming Pixies film

YesButNoButYes points to the trailer for loudQUIETloud, the upcoming documentary about the Pixies—or, as Kim Deal calls them, the four worst communicators in the world. The movie deals with the band’s reunion a decade after their acrimonious breakup. There seems to be a lot of hand-wringing and general dysfunction captured on film here, but hopefully there’s some concert footage too. The movie is being screened at the South by Southwest festival in Austin this week.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Go play in traffic with those tar-filled lungs

Not only does this ad present smokers with an uncomfortable truth (or at least, what we assume is a truth) about the state of their lungs, but its placement—out in the road, in the way of traffic—adds to the sense of danger. It’s clever, and of course, smokers will hate it. Link via Billboardom via Dead Insect.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (4)

Attik staffer named S.F.’s best DJ

In staff member Amy Yvonne Yu, San Francisco ad agency Attik has more than just an art buyer and traffic coordinator: It also has the best DJ in San Francisco, so named by SF Weekly and East Bay Express, two alternative newsweeklies. After clarifying the efforts she makes to keep her musical pursuits from affecting her job—for example, not booking gigs on weekdays—Yu details some of the perks her side-interest brings to her day job at Attik. “Since I do get all the promos from all the independent electronica labels, I generally have unreleased tracks six months in advance, so I can share them with [group cd] Simon [Needham] and say, ‘Wouldn’t this be hot for [insert client here]?’” Yu will compete for a national title in the Ultra Music Festival in Miami on March 25.

—Posted by Celeste Ward

Published on March 16, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

What would St. Patrick’s Day be without a corporate-sponsored gynecological visit?

Invasion of privacy means nothing to a Florida woman who has agreed to have a Web-hosting company sponsor her trip to the gynecologist on St. Patrick’s Day. “During her visit to the doctor, she will be wearing a temporary tattoo of the Globat.com logo on her chest, and will then hit the clubs handing out St. Patrick’s Day-themed Globat.com T-shirts, hats and stickers,” says the press release. It’s unclear whether she will be allowed to funnel copious amounts of green beer to deal with the embarrassment of the situation. The lucky woman’s name is “Shimmer,” and she’s described in the release as “a long-time eBay celebrity” from Fort Lauderdale who is “not new to extreme marketing.” Why does that not surprise us? In fact, says Globat.com’s CEO, “She’s shown she has a lot of skill in unique promotions.” Say no more. At least it’s for a good cause: cervical-cancer prevention awareness. UPDATE: Globat.com’s other current stunt is its impending sponsorship of a live birth. From the Web site: “The mother-to-be, Asia Francis, is a 21-year-old resident of St. Louis, Missouri, and was expected to give birth in mid-April, but is now expected to give birth earlier. The due date is March 14, and everyone is excited to meet the baby girl, Samiah Wynn Francis!” This is the kind of company that keeps GoldenPalace.com up at night.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (6)

News flash: Microsoft discovers sense of humor

According to iPod Observer, Microsoft has ‘fessed up and admitted its marketing staff was behind the short film that reimagined the pristine iPod box as if it were created in Redmond—where, of course, it becomes a cluttered mess. (An AdFreak reader, commenting to our earlier post about the video showing up on iFilm, had also said that it was, indeed, created by a rogue band of Microsofties.) The most interesting thing about this may be that Microsoft seems OK with people getting a laugh out of the company’s design deficiencies. Said a spokesperson: “"While MS did not release the video, it's natural to share funny things with friends. … We're happy to see others enjoy the laugh as well."

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

Published on March 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Get your Mother’s Day fun facts here, with plenty of time to spare

Following the example of retailers who put up Christmas displays right after Labor Day, the Census Bureau this week posted its “Facts for Features” about Mother’s Day—even though that day doesn’t arrive until May 14. Perhaps they’d confused Mother’s Day with Administrative Professionals Day, which comes next month. Anyhow, among the fun facts about mothers in the U.S.: 81 percent of women age 40-44 are mothers, down from 90 percent in 1976. The average age at which American women give birth for the first time is now 25.2, the highest on record. With women having fewer children, a higher percentage of births are now of first children. Forty percent of births are of firstborns, 32 percent are of second kids, 17 percent are of third kids, and 11 percent are of fourth-or-more-borns. Women in Utah are currently averaging 2.6 kids apiece in their lifetimes; those in Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts average 1.7. As numerous commentators have noted since the 2004 elections, red-state fertility rates are markedly higher than blue-state rates. An op-ed piece this week in USA Today by Phillip Longman notes another aspect of variations in fertility: “In the USA, the 17.4 percent of baby-boomer women who had one child account for a mere 9.2 percent of kids produced by their generation. But among children of the baby boom, nearly a quarter descend from the mere 10 percent of baby-boomer women who had four or more kids.” By sheer force of their offsprings’ numbers, he argues, the prolific parents will transmit their values to the future more surely than those who have just one kid—let alone those adults who have no kids at all.

—Posted by Mark Dolliver

Published on March 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jack Black bored already after first ‘Nacho Libre’ confessional

The first of the “Jack Black confessionals” promoting the upcoming movie Nacho Libre is up on iTunes. (You can find it in the iTunes Music Store by searching for the film title.) Jack seems bored for most of the video’s 3:27, chewing on a licorice root the whole time (to help him quit smoking) and announcing at one point that he needs to stop filming and “take a crap.” He says Jared Hess is a genius and Mike White is a genius, then stops short of actually going to the set, because he wants to save stuff up for more confessionals. I’m not sure it’s really worth downloading these things, particularly on a DSL line like mine.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

AOL, Gillette develop most obnoxious NCAA printable bracket

I’ve always been amused by the idea of corporate-sponsored NCAA brackets, but this montrosity from AOL—brought to you by the Gillette Fusion razor!—will take my printer’s color-toner cartidge to the limit. (Click on the image to see a larger, even uglier version.) The people at ESPN must be kicking themselves for going with a modest “Presented by Pontiac” message. Of course, the best bracket of all might be the one from the NCAA itself. In case you were planning on misbehaving, it has this helpful note at the bottom: “This bracket should not be used for sweepstakes, contests, office pools or other gambling activities.” Sure, we’ll just print it out for reference.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Washington, Utah residents rise up against new tourism slogans

Coming up with a state tourism slogan is a terrible job. Every resident of the state is essentially your client, and no matter what you come up with, plenty of people are going to demand that you be tarred and feathered. The public bitching has begun in earnest in Washington state, which has chosen the enigmatic “SayWA” as its new motto. Speaking to the Associated Press, one major tour operator in the Pacific Northwest brings up his own past drug use to make his point: “Thirty-five years ago I smoked dope and probably could have come up with something like that. To me, it’s better to have no slogan than to come up with something like that. There’s too much scratching the head about ‘What does that mean?’” There’s also some scratching the head going on in Utah, which is going with the comparatively brilliant line, “Life elevated.” In a letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, one Salt Lake City resident writes: “What an insipid, inane piece of drivel! … What the slogan says to me is, ‘My state paid a lot of money to an untested marketing agency, and all I got was this lousy, trite mantra.’ The next time Utah wants a new slogan, they should do what has worked here so well in the past: hold a competition among the elementary and home-schooled children of the state. It will be a lot less expensive, and a lot more relevant.” There’s no reasoning with these people. UPDATE: Palm Springs’ new slogan, “Give in to the desert. You’re surrounded,” is getting more heat this week, too. Says one business owner in the region: “The slogan connotes crystal meth and violence.” That can’t be good.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Get your free cup of Starbucks, and don’t get trampled by the crowds

All 7,500 U.S. Starbucks stores should be very zoo-like this morning between 10 a.m. and noon, as the chain hosts its first-ever National Coffee Break. That means free cups of coffee for anyone who braves the crowds. Now, I live and work in probably the only Manhattan neighborhood (Inwood) that lacks a Starbucks, but even I may be in luck: The company reportedly will be delivering coffee to far-flung locales “using innovative, mobile-sampling ‘Venti Vans’ and insulated coffee backpacks.” When there are coffee backpacks involved, you know they’re serious. The chain estimates it will give away half a million free cups during the two-hour event, which seems to make this promotion about as costly as a 30-second Super Bowl spot.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

PETA to Kilmer-Purcell: Fish-bowl boobies do not a habitat make

SS+K creative director turned author Josh Kilmer-Purcell is in hot water with PETA, thanks in part to his memoir I Am Not Myself These Days, which recounts his double life as a fledging art director/drag queen during the 1990s. According to the New York Post (see second item down), PETA was none too pleased to learn that Kilmer-Purcell’s chief gimmick as 7-foot siren Aquadisiac was to fashion fish-bowl bazooms from water-filled snow globes and stock them with live goldfish. In response to the decade-old transgression, the animal-rights group has launched a “Fish Empathy Project,” decrying the costume and likening it to sitting in an enclosed bathtub filled with sullied water. I have a hard time mustering up sympathy for goldfish, whose 30-second memory promises a new adventure every half a minute. If you’re looking for a victim in Purcell’s story, pity instead the poor trouser snake, which has its own habitat issues where drag constumes are concerned. That ought to get your knickers in a twist. 

—Posted by Deanna Zammit

Published on March 14, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

One more reason to love (or hate) Marmite

Having grown up in the U.K., I can attest to the undying joys of Marmite, the black yeast-extract paste that every English kid is forced to ingest until he/she develops a lifelong masochistic attachment to the stuff. I’m also aware that almost every non-U.K.-bred human being with working taste buds finds Marmite revolting. (It’s a truism that unless you begin eating Marmite before age 2, you will never acquire a taste for it.) I don’t get to write about Marmite a lot, so it was my joy today to see some Marmite ad news over on George Parker’s AdScam blog. George doesn’t seem to like Marmite very much (something about a “shit-tasting concoction”), but he’s good enough to pass along the news that Marmite is unveiling a new squeezable bottle—quite a step for a product that makes you work hard for almost everything—and a $6 million ad campaign from DDB to support it. The ad, which doesn’t seem to be online yet, will show a man who has broken his arm trying to get the last scrapings out of his Marmite jar. (If only he had the new bottle.) The tagline remains, “Love it or hate it”—a great slogan that is put to good use on the Marmite Web site, which is actually two sites: one for Marmite lovers and one for Marmite haters.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 14, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Hayes finally gets upset about treatment of religion on ‘South Park’

Whenever we write about South Park and religion, people come out of the woodwork. Most recently, readers battled it out in the comments section of this post—about an episode in which a statue of the Virgin Mary was said to be bleeding out of its rear end. Normally, the sane point of view prevails: If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. Today, though, a very special South Park complainant has stepped forward: Isaac Hayes, who voices the character of Chef, has quit the show over what he calls its “inappropriate ridicule” of religion. The timing here is curious. Hayes says the show is disrespectful of religion in general; it must be a coincidence, then, that it recently lampooned Scientology, of which Hayes is a follower. Through Comedy Central, Matt Stone released a statement that reads, in part: “In 10 years and over 150 episodes of South Park, Isaac never had a problem with the show making fun of Christians, Muslims, Mormons or Jews. He got a sudden case of religious sensitivity when it was his religion featured on the show.” In honor of Hayes’ time on the show, we’d like to reprint Chef’s completely non-offensive thoughts about his balls: “Say, everybody have you seen my balls?/They’re big and salty brown/If you ever need a quick pick-me-up/Just put my balls in your mouth/Ooh, suck on my chocolate salty balls (Stick ’em in your mouth)/Put ’em in your mouth and you suck ’em and you suck ’em.” Now that’s good clean fun.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on March 14, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (8)