Archive Category: Advertising

Wrap it up!

Dave Chappelle’s (NSFW) “Wrap-it-up box!” is my favorite spoof commercial in this list of the 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of All Time on Nerve.com. It’s a great post - they’ve tracked down and embedded the video for all 50 of the parodies. Saturday Night Live appears to lead the pack in terms of volume. Who else misses Dave Chappelle? I know that I do. [Nerve.com]

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Suffering From P.D. (Projectile Dysfunction)?

Attention gamers: do you have a hard time firing? Perhaps you’re suffering from a medical condition called P.D. (Projectile Dysfunction). But worry not, there is a cure: Stroyent (humanifil killemal).

Here’s the viral ad from Enemy Territory: Quake Wars: hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | Stroyent website - via AdFreak

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A Dentist with a Sense of Humor: Sorry, We’re Open!

Dr. Arthur Dunec, a dentist in Toronto, Canada, has a sense of humor: his office has the sign "Sorry We’re Open" to welcome his patients!

Link

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Roller Coaster + Sheet Music = Zurich Chamber Orchestra Ad

What do you get when you combine sheet music with a roller coaster? This neat award-winning ad from the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, by Euro RSCG Zurich. Looks like the ad people played RollerCoaster Tycoon!

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via AdFreak

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Baby Car Logo

Dentsu ad agency in Brazil created a series of clever advertisement for Minichamps, a diecast miniature car collectible: "baby" version of the logos!

Link - thanks Haendel Dantas!

Previously on Neatorama: Evolution of Car Logos

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Chaos in the Print Shop

(YouTube link)
This ad for Clustarack print shop racks would make Rube Goldberg proud! Link -via Metafilter

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Iron (Wo)Man Subway Ad and Other Mash Ups

Remember the Star Wars / Murakami / Beer Ad Mashup post on Neatorama before? Well, Jeff Simmermon of And I Am Not Lying For Real has more: Link - Thanks Jeff!

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Ford Ka Ad

(YouTube link)
I think the point is that you can get a lot of people in the vehicle. The Ford Ka is manufactured in Spain and Brazil. -via Digg

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Google Video Billboard Ad

To advertise its Google Video service in Germany, the giant Internet company put up a "see-through" billboard made like a Google Video window and then filmed the way people interact with it.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via AdFreak

And am I the only one who noticed the irony of this clip being on YouTube (also owned by Google)?

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That’s One Way to Shop …

Remember the people who throws those cans around with amazing precision? Well, thanks to viral videos, they’ve apparently managed to parlay their skills into making an ad for Max Havelaar, a non-profit foundation organization promoting Fairtrade.

Regardless of the ad’s message, which is in French anyway, you can still enjoy the visuals: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

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Ninja Recruitment Ad

Part of Cracked.com’s gallery of 30 Video Game Villain Recruitment Posters. Via Hip Today.

Previously: How a N.Y. Butcher Became America’s Most Famous Face, i.e., Uncle Sam.

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Real Sarah Marshalls Mad Over Movie Ads

A lot of people liked Judd Apatow’s latest comedy "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," which billboards peppered many cities in the US with sayings like "YOU SUCK, SARAH MARSHALL" and "MY MOTHER ALWAYS HATED YOU, SARAH MARSHALL."

Needless to say, the real life Sarah Marshalls weren’t amused:

one of the several thousand real life Sarah Marshall’s in the U.S., this one from Greenfield, Massachusetts, has been seriously irked. "I was shocked to see all the billboards and posters that hated against me and people with my name," she says. “It’s just so bizarre.”

To say the least. "My friends are kind of picking on me about it,” she says of the in-Sarah’s-face promotion campaign for the Judd Apatow-produced comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall [watch the movie trailer and see interviews with the film’s cast]. “I had a neighbor who said they saw all these ‘I hate Sarah Marshall’ signs, and I saw the TV commercials.” That’s when the snit hit the fan for this Sarah Marshall and she decided to mount her own campaign. Call it “the Marshall Plan.” She made her own sign. It said, “YOU SUCK JUDD APATOW.” (Source: Fancast by Quendrith Johnson, Photo: Sarah Marshall (duh!) at Fancast - Thanks Linnea!)

Another Sarah Marshall complains about the choice of words in the ads:

"When you’re walking down the street, it gets a little wearing even though you know it’s not you and has nothing to do with you," said Sarah Marshall, 34, who lives in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. "You see . . . words like ‘hate’ and ’suck’ with your name over and over again. It just doesn’t feel pleasant inside."

Her mother, 70, who has the same name, says she cannot wait until the movie debuts and the signs are taken down. "I’m very, very upset," the upper East Sider said. "I’m an old person. It’s today’s lingo and today’s jargon but it’s a little rough for my taste." (Source: NY Daily News article by Jessica Durando, Photo: Antonelli/News)

But not one particular Sarah Marshall was quite happy with all the attention: a professor of art at The University of Alabama, who owns SarahMarshall.com, is thankful of the 20,000 people who have (mistakenly) visited her website since the movie was promoted.

Now, in her own "Marshall Plan," Sarah Marshall (the professor) is asking all Sarah Marshalls of the world to unite in respond to the ad campaign!

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Human Snake: Life Imitates Computer Game

Here’s an excellent stop-motion video, called "Human Snake" by Get Out and Play. Yes, a viral ad by N-Gage for Nokia, but still neat nonetheless - check out the "making of" in their website:

1,000 people. No effects.
Snake is a mobile gaming classic - in fact it is the most played computer game of all time. So why not get out and play the snake for real?

And no, we are not using any special effects or computer graphics. It is just 1000 people moving in the street - frame by frame and step by step.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks Christophe and Badjuk!

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Vintage Ads of Fictional Futures

Mark Rayner of the Skwib blog and author of the novel "The Amadeus Net" (plot: turns out that Wolfgang Amaeus Mozart is immortal and has been making a living by selling "lost" works of Mozart!) has a fun photoshop contest: a vintage ad poster of a product from a fictional future!

Here are the top ten finalists: Link - Thanks Max!

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Darth Goes For the Brew: a Star Wars / Murakami / Beer Ad Mash Up

Jeff Simmermon of And I Am Not Lying for Real blog saw this Star Wars ad on the subway that someone had "mashed up" with bits and pieces from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit:

Those great big billboard ads you see on the subway are nothing but giant peel-and-stick Coloforms, really. I love the accidental collages you see when people randomly pick and peel those thing like they’re great big scabs, and I just knew it was a matter of time before someone started making art out of them.

Then I saw this ad for Star Wars that had been chopped and remixed with bits from a beer ad and a poster for a Takashi Murakami exhibit and I heard a horde of angels singing a song titled “Shit Yeah!”

Check out the Princess Leia/Iron Man poster ad mash up too (why, the possibility is endless, you creative vandals!) : Link - Thanks Jeff!

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What a Difference Eyeglasses Make …

Bespectacled four-eyes take heart! Here’s a clever print ad for Oogmerk opticians in Belgium by LG&F ad agency reminding you that sometimes four eyes are better than two!

More at AdFreak: Link

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Trivia: Marlboro Was a Woman’s Cigarette

Marlboro was originally branded as a woman’s cigarette.

Filtered cigarettes were considered feminine as reflected by Marlboro’s original slogan "Mild as May." In the 1930s, Marlboro even changed the cigarette tips from ivory to red so they wouldn’t smear ladies’ lipstick.

In 1955 Philip Morris & Co. tried to change Marlboro’s feminine image with the "Tattooed Man" campaign, where a rugged cattle rancher, a Navy officer, and a flyer (all with muscular, tattooed hands) were shown holding a cigarette. Supposedly the tattoo was suggestive of "romantic past." Later, ad genius Leo Burnett used the image of a cowboy to prove that the cigarettes weren’t for sissies, and thus "The Marlboro Man" was born. (Source)

There were many Marlboro Men, but two of them - Wayne McLaren and David McLean - died of lung cancers. The original Marlboro Man, David Millar, Jr., died of emphysema. McLaren became an anti-smoking activist before he died, and Philip Morris denied that he ever appeared in a Marlboro ad. Later, the company admitted that he indeed appeared, but not as a Marlboro Man.

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Scenes from the Morgue: Retro Pulp B-Movie Ads Galore!

Neatorama reader Melia Gleason wrote to us about Scenes from the Morgue blog by Chad Plambeck, a blog dedicated to retro-pulp movie ads that appeared in the The Grand Island Independent newspaper published by the company she works for.

The term "morgue," Melie explains, is the archive department. It’s where a copy of every issue of the newspaper is kept. Usually, this is located in the basement.

Link (don’t miss the "Yuk" Buffet one) - Thanks Melia!

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Awareness Test

Go ahead and take the Awareness Test. Trust me - it’s worth it - and trust me that it’s not of the genre to calm you down and then terrify you with a screaming monster head or something. Scouts honor. I promise. Nope. YouTube.

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Flogos: Ad Clouds

Next time you think that a cloud looks like a company logo, it may not be simply your imagination.

Inventors Francisco Guerra and Brian Glover created a process to make "clouds" (basically soap based foams mixed with helium) in practically any shape you’d like (like the Mickey Mouse ears to the left).

They named their creation floating logo clouds "flogos": Link

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New Sony Ad: Foam City

Here’s Sony’s new commercial, Foam City, where the company blanketed the streets of Miami with loads of soapy foam to sell electronics. Yeah, I don’t get it either …

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]

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Gymnastic Ad

(YouTube link)
Try to figure out what these acrobats are illustrating before it’s revealed at the end of the ad. Whatever they are doing, they’re good at it! -via Digg

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Are Ad Blockers Thieves?

Michael Alan Miller wrote an interesting post in his blog about ad blocking - and why he doesn’t consider this "stealing":

Look, when I visit your website, I didn’t sign any contract that says I have to do anything in particular. I am in no way obligated to view your obnoxious ads. I understand completely that your website, like many others, depends on ads for revenue. I don’t care. I have no interest in being marketed to, cajoled into consumerism, insulted by unexpected sounds, and otherwise annoyed by asinine affixations found on your page.

If there were some way to fund deserving website by micropayments, I’d gladly sign up for that. For example, if I were charged $0.02 every time I visited Ars Technica (one of the worst whiners, link goes to a comment of one of the prime whiners), I’d sign up for this in a heartbeat. Why micropayments haven’t taken off yet, I have no idea, as ads are just not a good model for most of the Internet. Don’t get me wrong; I do want to support sites that I like. I learn much from them, and depend on them for many things in my life. However, I will not view ads, ever, if I can help it.

Do you think blocking ads is equivalent to thievery?

Link - via reddit (interesting sets of comments there as well)

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Ads Using Trees

Nope, that’s not a guy peeing on a tree. It’s a cardboard ad to show the lack of public restrooms in New York City.

Part of a neat compilation of "Ads using Trees" over at CrookedBrains: Link

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What Happens When You Drink & Drive

This clever public service sign about drinking and driving was found in Mumbai. This is only a detail; see the full picture at Ads of the World. Link -via Dump Trumpet

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Absolut-ly Controversial: Mexico In An Absolut World Ad

Swedish Vodka maker Absolut is stirring up a little nationalistic pride in Mexico with their new ad depicting what Mexico would look like in an "Absolute World". But it is stirring a few feathers in El Norte, that’s for sure:

The U.S.-Mexico border lies where it was before the Mexican-American war of 1848 when California, as we now know it, was Mexican territory and known as Alta California.

Following the war, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw the Mexican territories of Alta California and Santa Fé de Nuevo México ceded to the United States to become modern-day California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Arizona. (Texas actually split from Mexico several years earlier to form a breakaway republic, and was voluntarily annexed by the United States in 1846.)

The campaign taps into the national pride of Mexicans, according to Favio Ucedo, creative director of leading Latino advertising agency Grupo Gallegos in the U.S. Ucedo, who is from Argentina, said: “Mexicans talk about how the Americans stole their land, so this is their way of reclaiming it. It’s very relevant and the Mexicans will love the idea.”

But he said that were the campaign to run in the United States, it might fall flat. “Many people aren’t going to understand it here. Americans in the East and the North or in the center of the county — I don’t know if they know much about the history. “Probably Americans in Texas and California understand perfectly and I don’t know how they’d take it.”

Link - via AdPulp (who said "Lou Dobbs is now totally switching to Grey Goose.")

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Gym Ad on a Construction Site (Concept)

Michael Griffith of the Savannah College of Art & Design had this great idea of converting a construction site for a high rise into advertisement for a local gym!

Found at Ads of the World, who has a couple more pics.

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Google Ad Targets … Male Virgins?

Photo: contrari-wise [Flickr] (biggify)

Thanks to the laser-like focus of Google Adwords, advertisers can now target … male virgins! (They’re just World of Warcraft players …) Found at Contrariwise Ramblings - thanks Contrariwise!

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I’m Walking

(Revver link)
I’m Walking is an ad for a seal to certify Germany’s organic farm produce. Six chickens take part in a wacky hurdle race. Written and produced by Bodo von Braunmuehl. See a hi-res version at Soulcage Department Studio. Link -via Ursi’s Blog

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118 118 Spoof Ads: The Original Sweded Clips?

Okay, okay - this one is an oldie but still a goodie. Remember the famous 2003 Honda ad "Cog" (some say the best Honda ad ever)? It took 606 tries to shoot the 2 minutes-or-so clip - no trick photography or computer graphics was used. If you don’t remember (or want to see it again), here it is:

[YouTube Link: Honda Accord "Cog" Ad]

Well, here’s the spoof version (well, "sweded" but this was done well before the term was invented), also made without any computer graphics, but I’m pretty sure didn’t take 606 takes to make:

[YouTube Link: Honda Spoof Ad]

BTW, 118 118 is a telephone directory service in the UK. They’re quite famous for having spoof ads featuring the two mustachioed men (the "118 118 twins"). Here are a couple of their ads:

[YouTube Link: 118 118 A Team]

[YouTube Link: 118 118 Flashdance] Disturbing! You’ve been warned.

And lastly, here’s another spoof of Honda’s ad. This time the famous Honda Choir ad (first clip is the ad, the next clip is the spoof):

[YouTube Link: Honda Choir Ad]

[YouTube Link: 118 118 Choir Ad Spoof]

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