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Target stores have come up with an extremely clever way to advertise both the items they sell and the upcoming Avengers movie-they’ve put together household items sold in their stores to form iconic images based on The Avengers.
The images are so densely packed with details that it takes a while to see all the products featured in each photo, which is what, in my opinion, makes them cooler than your average advertising campaign.
And I must admit that these ads make me want to buy some Avengers related merchandise, and I now have a mysterious craving for a Mr. Goodbar and a Dr. Pepper!
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Photographer Fernando Martins of Camera Clara Photography Studio is angry. Very angry.
Fernando is miffed that stock photography - those generic images of models that you can buy for cheap - are competing with his own high-quality photography business. So he decided to travel from Brazil to Denmark to track down Jesper Bruun, the model whose handsome face earned him the moniker of The World's Most Downloaded Man.
Watch:
[YouTube Clip - via The Atlantic]
No, it's not real: the video above is actually a clever ad for Camera Clara Studio. In this weird mesh of fiction meets real life (Jasper is an actual model) - sort of like an advertisement in form of a mockumentary - Fernando acts out the dream of photographers who has lost out on many jobs because of their archenemy, stock photography.
Well played, Fernando. Well played.
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In 2000, Daniel Suelo (previously on Neatorama) pulled his life savings - all $30 - from his pocket and put it inside a phone booth and walked away for good from money. He has since lived without using any currency.
That's right - Say hello to the The Man Who Quit Money.:
Daniel Suelo lives in caves in the canyonlands of Utah. He survives by harvesting wild foods and eating roadkill.
He has no job, no bank account and does not accept government welfare. In fact, Suelo has no money at all.
Suelo may have shunned all the trappings of modern American life, but he is not an isolationist.
Since abandoning money in 2000, the former cook from Moab, Utah has remained an active member of his community and avid blogger.
The BBC has the interesting story of Daniel Suelo, as told by Mark Sundeen who wrote the book: Hit play or go to Link [Vimeo] | Daniel's official website Living Without Money
Remember the first time you saw an ad for Sea Monkeys? I really wanted some, but never made the order. I figured the X-ray Spex were a rip-off, even in my childhood. Kirk Demarais was fascinated with those ads in the back of comic books, so much that he made a film about them, went to work for a novelty company, and wrote a book called Mail Order Mysteries. He talks about some of those products in an interview at Collectors Weekly.
Collectors Weekly: Isn’t it funny how when your parents tell you something is a rip-off, it just makes you want it more?
Demarais: Oh yeah. Suddenly, it was the forbidden fruit. I trusted my parents in general, but something about that, I thought, “How did they know?” They didn’t order it. It’s also the first time I ever encountered dishonest salesmanship. I thought, “With all the other commercials I see on television, you get what they show you.” Part of me had a hard time fathoming that people would just out-and-out rip you off, especially kids. That’s the coming-of-age lesson behind it.
Read the full interview, and learn the truth behind those tantalizing products at Collectors Weekly. Link -Thanks, Lisa!
I’m sure I don’t need to tell all of our American readers that your income taxes are due on April 17 (it’s usually April 15, but since that was a Sunday this year, we got a short little extension). While you might have made some seemingly strange deductions on your income taxes in the past, chances are that you’ve got nothing on these ballsy write offs, although, surprisingly, many of them have been accepted by the IRS.
Image Via kenteegardin [Flickr]/Senior Living
Fancy Dresses. The catch here is that the dresses that TV star Dinah Shore was able to write off could only be used on her show as they were so tight that she couldn’t even sit down on them. Being as how they could only be used for her work, the IRS let her keep the deduction.
Boob Jobs. Not just anyone can write off a breast enhancement, but if you’re a stripper who gets the surgery so you can make more tips, you might just qualify. After all, Chesty Love already won a battle with the IRS over whether or not her 56 FF enhancement should count, the court agreed that if she didn’t get them she could lose money to other dancers. This same principal applies to lingerie, make up, and other accessories that dancers in this trade might need for work, as long as they can prove the items aren’t being used for personal purposes outside of the club.
Image Via Caza_No_7 [Flickr]
Body Oil. It’s not just women who get to claim deductions related to their appearance. Professional body builders are allowed to claim (legal) products they use to keep their muscles looking great. While steroids don’t qualify, body oil and tanning sessions do.
Clarinet Lessons. Don’t get too ready to sign up for music lessons. This deduction was only allowed in one specific circumstance where a doctor recommended a patient take up the instrument because it has been known to help lessen the pain associated with an overbite. Since it was considered a legitimate medical expense at that point, the patient’s parents were allowed to write it off.
Swimming Pools. more …
Is this clever, aggravating, or both? The employees of Ebolaindustries, an Italian ad agency, go by pseudonyms (e.g. Mrs. Grey) on their business cards. If you want to learn their real names, you’ll have get out a microscope.
Link -via Super Punch
Say
it ain't so! Mike and Ike
(of the chewy fruit-flavored candy) are splitting up and fans are devastated.
Devastated!
WHEN beloved pairings split, fans may grow distraught, at the prospect of Simon without Garfunkel, Lennon without McCartney, or Martin without Lewis.
Now Mike and Ike, the brand of chewy fruit-flavored candies, is announcing its pair is separating, and hoping the development captures the interest of younger consumers.
Packaging that began appearing in stores recently has logos with either “Ike” or “Mike” scribbled out, as if by a felt-tip marker.
On the back of packages with Mike’s name crossed out, a handwritten message from Ike faults Mike for “spending way too much time on his music.” Packages with Ike’s name crossed out have a message from Mike faulting Ike for “spending way too much time on his graffiti art.”
Chew over this report by Andrew Adam Newman over at The New York Times: Link
Food and other industries have mascots that are walking and dancing versions of their products, so why not mascots for urine tests, syringes, and various body organs? These exist too, in walking, dancing, kid-hugging form! See eleven of the best at mental_floss. Shown here is Petey Cup, which is, well, you can figure that out or go read more about him. Link
Now that's smart advertising in 140 characters or less: smart Argentina created an ad with ASCII animation in its Twitter page. Each tweet is an animation frame (you can hit "J" on your keyboard to scroll down): Link - via Notcot
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"Come with a story and leave with another", says Colsubsidio Book Exchange of Colombia. To strike home the message, Lowe/SSP3 ad agency came up with these clever print ads.
The first one above mixes Snow White and Sherlock Holmes. Can you figure out these two below?
Enjoy another performance by surreal dancer Marquese Scott, known as Nonstop (previously at Neatorama). This was recorded in one take with no edits. They say there was no pre-planned choreography, but I suppose Nonstop knew what to do. Oh yeah, this is an ad for Peugeot, which explains how the car didn’t have to park next to other cars in an urban parking garage. -Thanks, Tiffany Maddox!
The Coke machine just wants to be loved. Is that so wrong?
The ad agency Ogilvy & Mather rigged this soda vending machine in Singapore to respond to hugs by dispensing free cans of soda. The idea is to encourage people to embrace Coca-Cola, in this case, literally.
What other products do you think should be sold this way?
Link -via DVICE | Photo: Ogilvy & Mather
Are you thinking of committing a few felonies? Plan ahead and hire a prison consultant so that you’ll be ready on the first day that you step inside. There’s a thriving industry of people who prepare recently-convicted felons for the incarcerated life. Some are former prison guards or wardens. Others, however, are ex-cons offering practical advice learned the hard way. For these consultants, lengthy criminal histories are a major selling point:
“Look at my résumé, I’ve got 10 years: high-security, medium, low,” said Mr. Levine, 50, who was in jail until 2007 on narcotics trafficking, counterfeiting and weapons charges. “These guys go in for a year and a half, maybe two. I’ve got more experience than all the rest of these guys combined.” [...]
Mr. Levine said he thought the competition would thin out over time because the competitors lack marketing smarts. Besides, he argued, he has the criminal CV to back up the marketing.
If they handed out diplomas for prison savvy, he said, “These guys have maybe an associate degree. I have like a Ph.D. or above.”
So shop around, because not every ex-con turned prison consultant is offering an honest deal:
Some prison consultants say that others are so lacking in expertise that their businesses are practically criminal enterprises.
Link -via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Flickr user pgbailey
Whether or not you’ve ever actually watched a full one, you’re certainly familiar with the show-length advertisements known as infomercials. But have you ever wondered how these comically bad ads came about? After all, unlike other forms of advertisement, infomercials were created specifically for television. Here’s the story of the paid programs we all love to hate.
If you’re familiar with old-timey radio programs, then you probably already know that many pre-television radio programs didn’t have ads so much as sponsors whose name and product would be plugged in between just about every song. Even those unfamiliar with these early radio programs may recognize the idea from the movie O’ Brother Where Art Thou, where there are frequent mentions of Pappy O’Daniel’s Flour Hour.
Interestingly, that character was actually based on a real life Texas governor with the same name who also had a flour company, Hillbilly Flour, that sponsored a radio program. As if the frequent mention of the sponsor’s name wasn’t enough, the real Pappy O’Daniel ensured that even his performers reminded people of the product, so he even helped form a band known as the Light Crust Doughboys (the Hillbilly Band in the video was created after the Doughboys broke up). Sure it was still not quite an infomercial, but I’m sure you can see that sponsored programming is certainly nothing new.
As television began to catch on, the same concept was used again, only instead of using music or radio plays, the sponsors could create entire TV shows devoted mainly to pitching their products while consumers watched the programming intently. One of the most famous early examples was NBC’s The Magic Clown, which was created and sponsored by Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy and featured regular interruptions promoting said candy (aside from the name in the intro, there’s basically a full commercial at 4:09).
The first real infomercial appeared around 1950 and was for a blender, although there is a heated debate as to whether it was for a VitaMix or a Waring blender.
more …
Totally rad! You can be a Nintendoid, too, with all this cool gear from Homer’s of Omaha! That is, if you were a young gamer in the early ’90s who bugged his parents until they bought such stuff. Clothing available in men’s and children’s sizes. Link
Have you ever thought that you could surely strike it rich if you could just come up with the perfect idea for a new startup company? Well, Nonstartr can help with that since it randomly generates ideas for new startups. Of course, there’s no guarantee the idea the site generates will actually be any good, evaluating the ideas is up to you.
Link Via Laughing Squid
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When Encyclopedia Britannica announced they would end the production of print encyclopedias, it spurred a flurry of sales. Of the 4,000 sets of the 2010 edition they had in stock, all but 800 have been purchased.
“We were averaging about 60 sets a week and the next thing we knew, we were selling 1,050 a week,” Britannica spokesman Peter Duckler said Thursday. “When people thought they were going to be around forever there was no rush to buy one and then suddenly, boom, and now there is a scarcity and it’s a collector’s item.”
Company officials estimate that the remaining encyclopedias will be sold by the end of this month. Link -via Consumerist
One street in the city of Timisoara, Romania, has two automatic teller machines that are all but unusable. One is in a wall six feet off the ground, requiring customers to bring their own step stools in order to use it. The other, just across the street, is so low that customers must kneel on the sidewalk to use it. A consumer group representative said,
“The high one was supposed to have a staircase leading to it but the bank forgot to get planning permission. And the bank with the low ATM say it had to go there because they are in a listed building and the only
access point was a basement window.“These are just excuses for treating their customers without respect,” said one.
The oddities may be blamed on bureaucracy and architecture, but it boils down to bad planning on the part of the banks. Link -via Arbroath
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Most groups purchasing lottery tickets know that you must share and record all the numbers for a group purchase and store the ticket(s) in a mutually accepted place. But the $640 million Mega Millions drawing last weekend enticed a lot of new players to participate. And Mirlande Wilson of Baltimore, Maryland, has a fight on her hands over who owns the winning ticket.
Wilson, a single mother of seven children, admits that she did contribute to the McDonald’s “office” pool, but swears that she purchased the winning ticket separately with her own cash. “We had a group plan, but I went and played by myself. [The ‘winning’ ticket] wasn’t on the group plan,” Wilson told the New York Post, insisting she alone bought one of the three tickets that will split the record $656 million payout.
Her co-workers disagree. Suleiman Osman Husein, a shift manager and one of 15 members in the pool told the Post, “We each paid $5. She took everybody’s money!” Further corroborating Husein’s version was a man identified by the Post only as Allen, who was also part of the pool. He said Wilson bought tickets for the group at the 7-Eleven in Milford Mill, which is where the winning ticket was sold.
Further complicating the case is a security recording at the convenience store where the ticket was purchased, which may show that the winning ticket was purchased by a man. Link
His name is Taxi Dave, he drives the Party Cab between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m., and he’s a one man mobile paaar-tay in Sacramento, CA!
Watch him strut and sway his way across the parking lot, performing the Taxi Dave Dance in order to attract new customers. Party Cab is in the house tonight indeed!
–via Videogum
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This certainly put a new spin on Eric Carmen's popular song Hungry Eyes. That's a real advertisement for Burger King Netherlands, which prodded customers to "get a tasty new look." Link - via BellaSugar
Student
loan for college? Puh-leeze - that's pedestrian. The new hot trend in
education loans is kindergarten student loans.
You read that right. Kindergarten.
Annamaria Andriotis of Smart Money explains:
It used to be that families first signed up for education loans when their child enrolled in college, but a growing number of parents are seeking tuition assistance as soon as kindergarten. Though data is scarce, private school experts and the small number of lenders who provide loans for kindergarten through 12th grade say pre-college loans are becoming more popular. Your Tuition Solution, one of the largest lenders in this space, says demand for the upcoming year is already up: This month, the total dollar amount of loans families requested rose 10% compared to a year ago; at that pace, the company expects its total funding to rise to $20 million for 2012-13.
Comments Off Chris Pratt, of Parks and Recreation fame, stars in this silly little spot for Star Wars Kinect on Xbox. One question remains-Is Darth Vader evil enough to cut down a Jedi wearing nothing but briefs and an undershirt?
–via Rampaged Reality
There’s a problem with getting pizza delivered to your home. Like so many other burdens in modern life, there’s just too much work required for the reward. Now there’s a solution. Red Tomato Pizza in Dubai offers a Bluetooth-enabled device that, when pressed, delivers a pre-selected pizza to your location. Watch a promotional video at the link.
I want to go to London if for no other reason than to get one of these cards stamped over and over again at Tapped & Packed. Especially since no one is steering the bike.
-via reddit | Official Website
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Lots of things go well with an ice cold beer in hand: pizza, ball games, bowling, and, of course, video games. Gaming while getting your buzz on can make the whole experience more enjoyable, and may help ease the pain of utter defeat on the virtual battlefield.
8-Bit Pale Ale knows your pain, and they’re hoping to appeal to drunken gamers everywhere with the pixel art designs on their can, but does their Pale Ale taste as good as the competition, or is it just a bad beer wrapped in an appealing label?
It’s a tacomergency! Flooded roads. Wildfires. Riots. But no worries, kids! The Tacocopter will get through and deliver essential nutrients to you:
Indeed, the concept behind Tacocopter is very simple, and very American: You order tacos on your smartphone and also beam in your GPS location information. Your order — and your location — are transmitted to an unmanned drone helicopter (grounded, near the kitchen where the tacos are made), and the tacocopter is then sent out with your food to find you and deliver your tacos to wherever you’re standing.
You pay online, so the tacos are simply dropped off at your feet by the drone helicopter, which then flies back to the restaurant to pick up its next order.
So far, the Tacocopter is available only to selected users in San Francisco. But after investors flood in, the business will surely expand.
News Article and Official Website -via The Agitator
Gundlach Bundschu Winery would like to share their take on the modern history of Merlot with you, and they’ve chosen to do so via comedy video. Bold move Gundlach, but the end result is a rather cheesy video that’s laughably bad at times.
Still, it’s an entertaining way to advertise your role in the expanding Merlot market, and I guess if you’re a few bottles deep it might be the most hilarious video you’ve watched all day.
–via Tastefully Offensive
Comments Off The mastermind behind this hilarious infomercial for the Cacto-Matic is none other than Thu Tran, creator and star of the IFC show Food Party and one heck of a funny gal.
Here she is peddling a fake product by using her powers of comedy and hallucinogenic sorcery, both of which have definitely put me in a buying mood!
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Got
cash? Not necessary in Sweden, who has gone (mostly) cashless:
Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes in 1661. Now it's come farther than most on the path toward getting rid of them. [...]
In most Swedish cities, public buses don't accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message. A small but growing number of businesses only take cards, and some bank offices — which make money on electronic transactions — have stopped handling cash altogether.
"There are towns where it isn't at all possible anymore to enter a bank and use cash," complains Curt Persson, chairman of Sweden's National Pensioners' Organization.
The upside? Crimes are down:
The number of bank robberies in Sweden plunged from 110 in 2008 to 16 in 2011 — the lowest level since it started keeping records 30 years ago. It says robberies of security transports are also down.
"Less cash in circulation makes things safer, both for the staff that handle cash, but also of course for the public," says Par Karlsson, a security expert at the organization.
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