My wife works in advertising so we find ourselves talking about ads pretty frequently. More specifically the company she works for does advertising for health care and life style companies. Claire can joke about the commercials that her company and companies like hers make. You know – the ones where if you don’t listen closely, you may end up with a missing arm, heart disease, birth defects and death. A woman is walking through a forest of flowers, can’t see a damn thing, but then they peel away the cloudy sticker on the camera and PRESTO, she can see! “Thank you Claritin”. Her company did not do that commercial, but I’m still pretty sure they do produce commercials that can cause mild cases of diarrhea.
Claire came across this ad titled “Stop Babies and Puppies” and sent it my way. According to them (the AICP) “there is a menacing force overtaking the ad industry – advertising cliches”, these clichés especially include babies and puppies. The AICP (Association of Independent Commercial Producers) is now taking submissions to their award show.
On the plus side, they have some creative content that makes me giggle. The first being that fancy flow cart that will answer the question “Is my ad a cliché”? Click here if you’d like to see it close up. They also have a “cliché” ad machine where you can create your own cliché ads using their videos of babies and puppies, put text over it, and edit them in the site. Lastly, they have posters, wallpapers, and stencils you can download to help support the cause of NO advertising with clichés – all of which I’m sure millions of Americans will download and use regularly (that was sarcastic – you’d see it on my face if you were sitting here with me.)
My good friend Aman sent me this video by Leo Laporte. The question was if the whole commercial was done in one shot or not. I won’t spoil it, just watch the video.
There is not much to say other than good ads on the Internet are passed around. Make a commercial, pay millions for it to play on TV, or pay nothing for it to play on the Internet. Watch it get views. Creativity is winning the game again. Thanks Old Spice.
There are so many reasons why this ad campaign by American Apparel works so well. Ok, really there are two reasons. Reason number one, lots of butts. Boy butts, girl butts, everyone’s butts. Second reason, voting and ranking. Not only do you get to click through the photos, you get to vote 1 – 5 on the quality of butt. One can only assume (pun intended) that this could become addicting. In addition to the addictiveness of ranking peoples butts – you have the opportunity to share butts on Twitter and Facebook. Twitter offering a link back to the voting page so your Twitter followers can start voting, and Facebook leaves a post on your wall so all your friends can see a butt that you particularly liked. (Insert Butt-Facebook joke here.)
Why would you put a picture of your butt up on the American Apparel site you may ask. For $300 – duh! Plus, you can put that on your resume!
What really blew my mind was how I came to find this campaign. Someone I follow on Tumblr took a screen shot of the campaign, just like I have above. But (no pun intended) nowhere on that photo does it say American Apparel. This means that their ad campaigns are strong enough that just from their imagery and type of underwear, I was able to guess that this was coming from them. I went straight to their site, and there it was. Crazy.
Hurry up and post a photo of your butt – don’t lose this chance to have your butt seen by thousands of people and win $300 in the process!
Please link your photo in the comments section (or don’t – ewwwwww).
Somebody totally has the job of making these web pages. The pages that only exist as a place holder for a trailer. Someone is pumping these things out, I know it – probably in India.
By far the best part about the Hot Tub Time Machine page (which I fully plan on seeing) is when you click on photos. Please go to the site and do it now. From the time you click on “photos”, until you actually view any photos, is ten seconds. Ten seconds of a nonsensical animation, with things spinning and falling all over the place. What’s the deal with the squirrel? The photo page loads and you have the option of looking at a whopping two photos. Two… Really?
Great, now I’m hungry. Snickers is making buzz with a teaser for a commercial their supposed-to-air during the Super Bowl. Teasers, they’re such a tease. Remember all the ads for “The Hangover”? They freeze frame in the commercial right as it looks like Ed Helms’ character is going to vomit all over someone. This commercial is like that – only, it’s not so much a tease like, “what’s going to happen next!?” It’s more like, “really, a teaser for a chocolate bar commercial!?” I have two thoughts about this. 1) I don’t care what happens next because there wasn’t enough suspense; thus I don’t care if I see the commercial during the Super Bowl. 2) It’s the only commercial I’ll actually be expecting to see during the Super Bowl, thus I’m thinking about it, and it’s good marketing. Oh yeah, and did I mention I’m hungry now?
A lot of campaigns have been hitting up Facebook this past year. Basically they lure people in with a gimmick, that is then passed along to your friends, usually with some status update to the effect of “Check out my English to Snacklish name”. You type in a word, or name and it changes it to a tasty treat. My wife Claire’s name became Clairamel Scott. Again, good marketing, now my wife is hungry too.
