'Tis the season for 'sexist' U.K. commercials
Considering how much advertising gets squeezed into the holiday season, life for the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority must be hell from October to mid-March. They're already fielding complaints about this Marks & Spencer's Christmas ad, whose final scene is supposedly "offensive and demeaning to women" because the actor, Philip Glenister, likes seeing hot girls in their underwear. Shocking that a guy in a bar could be so crass. As usual, the aggrieved come off like they've never watched TV before. This ad is juvenile, but hardly demeaning. Now GoDaddy, that was demeaning. —Posted by David Kiefaber |
|
Published on November 20, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Paris Hilton's photo touts 'vacant' billboards
Paris Hilton is upset enough about her image being used to advertise vacant billboard space in New Zealand that she's considering legal action. Her lawyers say Wellington-based billboard company Media5 had no permission to use the photo on the unsold board. Media5 is semi-apologetic, noting that they chose Paris because "she has a proven ability to laugh at herself." So much for that. If it helps them any, we're certainly laughing. |
|
Published on November 11, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (4)
|
Nicolas Sarkozy, child star of a detergent ad
Much like two of his wives, it turns out French president Nicolas Sarkozy is a former model. He's shown here in a Bonux detergent ad, which has just surfaced. The ad is from 1967. Sarkozy was 12 then, but it's assumed the photograph was taken well before publication. Bonux was apparently the Cracker Jacks of detergents, so it made sense to put a child in the ads. Sarkozy's father, Pal Sarkozy de Nagy Bocsa, worked as an illustrator for Bonux at the time. His side gig was making young Nicolas feel like a complete loser. But while a bit embarrassing for the president, this glimpse into his past suggests future work for him once he leaves office. He could recreate that very picture as an adult for Airbus. —Posted by David Kiefaber Previously on AdFreak: |
|
Published on November 3, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Germans attach tiny advertisements to flies
Since skywriting is no longer acceptable in advertising, German agency Jung von Matt has settled for "flyvertising," attaching tiny ad banners to flies and letting them buzz around a convention center during the Frankfurt book fair. Neat idea, but the obvious flaw is that flies are the most annoying things ever, and may not be something you'd want people associating with your product long-term. (The client here, Eichborn, is a publishing company whose logo is a fly.) Reports from the convention indicate that the flies had some trouble staying aloft and kept landing on people. Gross. The banners were attached with an adhesive that naturally dissolves, so as not to hurt the fly. But this could still be considered flysploitation, and some advocacy groups have been rather touchy about flies lately. Via Adland. —Posted by David Kiefaber
Previously on AdFreak: |
|
Published on October 30, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (5)
|
'Tekken 6' ads rough you up nice and slowly
God knows it's impossible to make video games classy, but these teaser ads for Tekken 6 (tagline: "What will you fight for?") are determined to try anyway, with their super slow motion and choir music. And were it not for the women in their underpants fighting over shoes, they might have succeeded. There's also a Web site. The first of the two spots, posted below, is more subtle, although as Kotaku noticed, there's no actual gameplay footage shown. Which may be a good thing, since the graphics aren't a huge improvement over Tekken 4 or Tekken 5 anyway. If you're aching for a taste of gameplay imagery, here's someone fighting a giant panda. |
|
Published on October 28, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
GU student ripped for personal-assistant ad
Georgetown University sophomore Charley Cooper is taking a lot of flak for putting out an ad seeking a personal assistant. The ideal candidate will attend to tasks like organizing his closet, scheduling haircuts, managing his electronic accounts and doing laundry. It didn't take long for haters to begin hating. The Georgetown Voice accused him of "premature self-importance," and others complained that he was perpetuating the stereotype that Georgetown students are rich, helpless brats. I'd be joining in, but someone in Cooper's family has cancer, and that will earn my sympathy more than his full load of classes and part-time job will. Plus, he's paying $12 an hour, and I don't live too far from GU. —Posted by David Kiefaber |
|
Published on October 27, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Create a wrestler even you mother can love
The video game WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 is selling itself on the create-a-wrestler and create-a-move features it had last year, which is a bad sign that the gameplay is still as broken and unresponsive as ever. The wrestlers the kid created in the spot above are pretty accurate, though. Try playing online multiplayer sometime and counting the number of green-mohawked lunkheads you see. As for the kid's reluctance to get the CAWs out of the house, he'll probably burn the game in the yard once he sees his mom in John Cena's lap. Weird. |
|
Published on October 15, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Anti-cocaine PSAs rough on nose and heart
Pablo the Drug Mule Dog is back as the spokespooch of Britain's anti-cocaine PSA campaign. When we last saw Pablo, he'd been sliced open like a Tauntaun to transport booger sugar. But he recovered, and in the new ads he watches as a cokehead's nostrils argue with each other (I expect a few complaints to the ASA over that "butthole" comment) and a hopped-up heart beats its last. I'm still waiting for the anti-coke campaign that just shows before-and-after photos of Robert Evans. But Pablo is pretty cool. He's a lot more badass than McGruff, and has a better Web site, too. —Posted by David Kiefaber Previously on AdFreak: |
|
Published on October 13, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Jailvertising targets a very captive audience
Charlotte, N.C., is taking the idea of a captive audience to new and more literal places. Faced with budget cuts, the Queen City's county jail is selling advertising time on the monitors that inmates use to chat with friends and family during video visits. Don't worry, the jail says it will seek inmate-appropriate advertisers, like attorneys, and expects to bring in $77,000 a year from the ads. The whole idea rests on shaky moral ground, and it's true that opening correctional facilities to the marketplace could interfere with rehabilitation. But it's not like they can have a bake sale. Checking every cupcake for contraband would drive away business. —Posted by David Kiefaber Previously on AdFreak: |
|
Published on October 8, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
U.K. fire-safety ad filmed totally under water
The British government is raising awareness about house fires with the TV ad above, filmed entirely under water at Pinewood Studios. The message is that toxic smoke is much like water in its ability to hinder one's breathing and quickly incapacitate a person. But it makes for a bit of a mixed visual metaphor, as viewers inevitably think of a fire starting under water. That's not going to happen, unless you live in Lake Erie. —Posted by David Kiefaber Previously on AdFreak: |
|
Published on October 6, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
New ads deride NYC for attack on junk food
We haven't seen enough 1984 references lately, so let's thank the Center for Consumer Freedom (an advocacy group funded by food companies) for giving the world this sarcastic Big Apple/Big Brother poster in response to the New York City Health Department's nanny-state campaign against junk food. Granted, NYC's human-fat ad was a tad ghoulish, but it's hardly a stretch for a health department to publicly oppose unhealthy eating habits. In its broader campaign, which goes beyond NYC, the CCF is out to defend high-fructose corn syrup. It includes the commercial below, in which a man examines a police lineup of three sweeteners—high-fructose corn syrup, sugar and honey—but is unable to tell which of them caused his weight gain. Of course, the only reason anyone uses high-fructose corn syrup is because it's cheaper and easier to transport, but the truth often gets lost in hen fights like these. Via Gothamist. —Posted by David Kiefaber Previously on AdFreak: |
|
Published on October 1, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Strip-club ad refers to Caster Semenya saga
Strip clubs should know better than to be topical. This has been made clear yet again by Teazers, a South African club that recently put up the billboard shown here, featuring a naked woman and the headline "No need for gender testing!" That's a reference to South African sprinter Caster Semenya, who underwent gender tests after winning the women's 800 meters at track's world championships in August. (The tests determined that Semenya has both male and female sexual characteristics.) Not surprisingly, the billboard drew complaints, at which Teazers owner Lolly Jackson scoffed at length. He first said the Semenya situation was "the furthest thing from my mind" when he made the ad. Then he added: "I do not want anyone coming here [to Teazers] with the idea that we do not have women. We have women, 100 percent women here. I did a test on them, I am a professional, and they are 100 percent women." If that didn't turn people off enough, he then insulted both the advertising watchdog ("a bunch of idiots doing a worthless job") and the original complainant ("maybe she is fat and ugly"). The watchdog hasn't acted yet, but I hope they rule against him just to hear his response. —Posted by David Kiefaber Previously on AdFreak: |
|
Published on September 30, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Ad asks what kind of horrible drunk you are
The Swedish Web site IQ.se has an online test where you can determine which type of drunk you are, ostensibly as some kind of anti-drunkenness campaign. (If you can't understand the site, it's not necessarily because you're plastered. It's because it's written in Swedish.) Ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors made this spot to promote the site. Hopefully the test itself is more varied than this ad, which divides drinkers into three basic categories: violent asshole, amateur stripper and pathetic old binger nodding off in his food. If the test has any merit, it'll include vomiters, awkward huggers and ill-advised phone callers, too. —Posted by David Kiefaber Previously on AdFreak: |
|
Published on September 29, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (1)
|
Church ad banned for touting miracle cures
An ad for the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in England has been reported to (who else?) the Advertising Standards Authority for claiming that the church's holy anointing oil managed to pull a child out of a coma. The British Humanist Association, a fun bunch if ever there was one, specifically frowned upon the ad's testimonial and ratted the church out to the ASA, who ended up banning the ad because they felt it would "discourage seriously ill people from getting medical treatment." I wonder if they could retroactively levy the same ban on Lorenzo's Oil. God, that movie sucked. |
|
Published on September 25, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (5)
|
Monster can fix your rampant incompetence
The BBDO spot above, for job-search site Monster.com, explains why doctors shouldn't bring their untrained doofus friends to work with them. The same is true for crime scene investigators, as seen in the spot below. Instead, said doofi could use Monster's Career Mapping tool to find something suitable for them, connecting the joke to the product with a refreshing bit of relevance from a company whose ads aren't normally boiling over with it. What job those two dumb friends could qualify for is another matter, but we think the doctor could use his for medical testing. —Posted by David Kiefaber
See also: |
|
Published on September 22, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
James Dean grows old in new financial spot
South African agency King James resurrects James Dean (with the help of an actor who trained for months and wore heaps of prosthetics and was always filmed in soft focus without close-ups) in this spot for financial-services company Allan Gray. The ad considers what Dean would have done if he'd been "given more time," a worthy question that unfortunately ties back only tenuously to the services Allan Gray provides. The agency pulled out all the stops, even using a replica 550 RSK Porsche Spyder, one of only two available, to shoot the accident scene. Still, any speculation on Dean's life that doesn't see him in rehab for something is idle fantasy. |
|
Published on September 17, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (4)
|
Brains are for losers, says new Wrangler ad
According to Wrangler jeans, all that's standing between you and brain damage, broken limbs, paralysis, frostbite and death is your pesky brain. This new ad from Fred & Farid, extending the agency's Grand Prix-winning "We are animals" campaign, wants you to shut off that annoying voice of caution in your head and just do it, whatever the consequences. I'd love to know who boxes or climbs mountains in Wranglers, though. Shouldn't everyone in this ad be rustling cattle or, in keeping with the current Wranglers crowd, waiting in line for Melvins tickets? |
|
Published on September 15, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
Dokken battles chicken for Norton anti-virus
Did the Family Guy manatees write this set of ads for Norton's 2010 anti-virus software? Because using '80s band Dokken and a chicken to illustrate how viruses attack your hard-drive may be the most random metaphor I've ever seen. That Dokken air-humps the chicken until it explodes in the spot above wasn't too surprising, but the chicken pulling a switchblade on them in the spot below caught me off guard, though it too supports my manatee hypothesis. (There's also this third Dokken/chicken spot, as well as another series with street fighter Kimbo Slice.) Oddly enough, the least random thing about this campaign is Dokken, who had a comeback album last year that critics liked, although the accompanying tour must not have gone well if they're doing shit like this now. —Posted by David Kiefaber |
|
Published on September 10, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (4)
|
Fruit-sex candy wrappers upset British man
Finally, a semi-legitimate marketing complaint out of the U.K., where British dad Simon Simpkins (really, that's his name) has strongly objected to the bawdy packaging of a German sour candy called Haribo Maoam. And he's right—the lemon and lime on one box, which Simpkins almost bought, look like they're doing it. As if this hot citrus love weren't hilarious enough, Simpkins tops it with what might be the funniest sentence ever spoken: "The lime, whom I assume to be the gentleman in this coupling, has a particularly lurid expression on his face." Good thing he didn't see the lime-cherry flavor. In fact, the lime guy seems to be on all the wrappers, hooking up with all sorts of fruit. "This jovial Maoam man is very popular with fans, both young and old," says a rep at Haribo. And he's probably not going anywhere. The packaging's been around since 2002. |
|
Published on September 8, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (4)
|
Why are Sam & Max always near Stuckey's?
Fans of Sam & Max (read: people with taste) have noticed that the pair's adventures frequently take them near a Stuckey's (or the derivative Snuckey's) roadside store. The Stuckey's people have caught on to this, and they interviewed Sam & Max creator Steve Purcell last month to ask why. Turns out back when Steve was a kid, Stuckey's was a "recurring oasis on the horizon" during road trips, so he built the experience of nagging his father to stop there into the game. Makes sense, given that many of the characters' quirks come from Purcell's childhood. Hopefully the iconic home of pecan logs will make it into future Sam & Max games, and it would be nice if Stuckey's returned the favor by selling stuffed jackalopes in their stores. —Posted by David Kiefaber |
|
Published on September 3, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Old Spice appeals to a range of douchebags
In this funny new spot from Wieden + Kennedy, Old Spice finally explains why it makes so many differently scented products: to satisfy the wide variety of smug, preppy douchebags within its target market! The guy reclining in his leather armchair has some nerve putting his own masculinity in the context of skiers and beach bums with hot girlfriends. Still, one can't help but admire the attitude, and jokes based around the absurdity of overzealous manhood will always be funny. I hope they make more of these ads, and this song plays in the background of all of them. —Posted by David Kiefaber See also: |
|
Published on September 1, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
South African dairy births animal super race
The "Rediscover Dairy" project from South Africa's milk producers is aimed at teaching the public about the natural health benefits of milk, cheese and yogurt. But there's nothing natural about the ads. The only thing I take away from the spot above is that I should never give milk to chickens. Ever. I've had nightmares about this sort of thing. (I'll file that away in the same part of my brain as "Don't feed mogwai after midnight.") The bionic, cheese-eating seagull below is also disconcerting, and a danger to fisheries. And what can you say about this withered, yogurt-obsessed tortoise? Sad. |
|
Published on August 27, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Rogue resort's racy ad has nudists flustered
You know, one never hears about nudist-colony associations until something weird happens. This time, a clothing-optional retreat in Florida called Paradise Lakes Resort has had its membership in the American Association for Nude Recreation suspended over its racy advertising for a G-string pageant. The AANR says the ad, showing a hot blonde chick straddling a motorcycle, "sexualized the nudist experience." It was probably naive of them to expect anything else from a place that sounds like a strip club and holds G-string contests, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that. Really, we just hope this goes to court. The jury will have no idea where to look. See also: |
|
Published on August 26, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Brad Pitt serves a sumo in Softbank's spots
In the grand tradition of Americans doing wacky Asian ads, Brad Pitt is back with a few more commercials for Japan's Softbank. In the new spots, directed by Spike Jonze, Pitt plays a personal assistant to sumo champ Musashimaru. The tagline is, "Serving you in any way necessary," which in Pitt's case involves Pitt feeding sushi to the 520-pound Samoan (in the ad above) and daintily carrying him when his shoe breaks (in the ad below). In reality, Softbank's slogan is quite literal. It's is a diversified corporation that owns a financial-services company and the Fukuoka Hawks baseball team, and is the official carrier for the Japanese iPhone 3G. Clearly, they have enough money to hire Western talent (including, previously, Wes Anderson) to wipe the mouths of their yokozuna when the moment arises. |
|
Published on August 25, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (0)
|
Don Draper covetously eyes BMW's 3 Series
Because the world needed more people talking about Mad Men, BMW sponsored the season premiere and put together this classy, mostly period-accurate ad for Vanity Fair, from GSD&M Idea City and photographer Anton Watts. But as Jalopnik points out, Don Draper drives a Cadillac Coupe de Ville. He certainly wouldn't drive the car featured in that ad. That thing might as well have been a spaceship in the early '60s. Of course, we could see these kinds of anachronisms more often if BMW gives the show any more money. Mad Max Men, here we come! See also: |
|
Published on August 24, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
