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Nothing says “waiting for the bus” like the smell of baked potatoes. Okay, clearly that sentence didn’t make sense, and people usually don’t want to think about food while they’re waiting for the bus. And the sad truth is this bus stop is probably going to smell like the worst scents a human beings can muster in a few weeks anyway, so why bother with a gimmicky ad?
Well, the folks at McCain Foods are betting that these bus stop ads, with the scent of a baked potato available at the push of a button, will help them sell their Ready Made Jacket Potatoes.And there are coupons available, in case you decide to grab a box on the way home.
Maybe they’re on to something, but I’ve personally never wanted to think about food while waiting for the bus, and bus stops in my town tend to be akin to outhouses, without that crucial front door. But what do you think-are scented advertisements a good idea, or are they a real stinker?
You’ve heard of these people -because they wanted you to! Here are some pointers in the art of publicity from history’s greatest masters of hype.
KILL OFF YOUR RIVALS | Benjamin Franklin
During colonial times, the almanac business was cutthroat. The books were the bestsellers of their day -fun compendiums full of facts and witticisms. So, in 1732, Benjamin Franklin decided to enter the game with Poor Richard’s Almanack. In an early edition, Franklin jokingly predicted that rival almanac writer Titan Leeds would die on October 17, 1733 at 3:29 PM, the very instance of a conjunction of the Sun and Mercury.
Humorless, Leeds took the bait and ridiculed Franklin publicly. The response only generated more press for Poor Richard’s Almanack, turning it into a best seller. After October 17 came and went, and Leeds was still breathing, Franklin kept up the gag, claiming Leeds was dead and pretenders were writing under his name. Five years later, when Leeds finally passed away for real, Franklin thanked the imposters for stopping their ruse. By then, Poor Richard’s Almanack had made Franklin a rich man many times over.
STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANT … TURTLES | Salvador and Gala Dali
Though notorious in Europe, Salvador Dali and his savvy wife, Gala, weren’t famous in the United States until 1941, when they took the nation by metaphysical storm. To introduce themselves to Americans, the Dalis threw an unforgettably weird party in Pebble Beach, California, called “Night in a Surrealist Forest.” Dali decked the room with 12,000 shoes, 2,000 pine trees, 24 animal heads, 24 mannequins, and a wrecked car. His guest list ranged from A-list stars, such as Clark Gable, to wild animals, including a baby tiger. At one point in the evening, Bob Hope screamed when, after removing the dome from a plate, a toad leapt out at him. After the bizarre bash, Dali conducted an interview for American Weekly from a tall chair -its legs resting on the backs of four giant turtles. Gala claimed the chair “stimulates the artist’s creative powers.”
more …
If you don’t toss your cookies on a regular basis, you leave a trail behind as you surf the web. But making any sense of that trail is a science that may be beyond the reach of automated analytics -at least for now.
Ars Technica’s Casey Johnston has started a fun new game: find out what Google guesses is your age and gender. These “inferred demographics” are based on the websites you visit and are tracked by a Google cookie; they are used for advertising purposes. Given Google’s controversial announcement Tuesday that users will not be able to opt out of new privacy changes, learning what the company thinks about you seems particularly useful, and informative.
The Google ad preference page shows my interests, which is actually evidence of my work plus the interests of the three teenage girls who also use my computer, often without changing to their own Google accounts. Then it guesses that I am male, age 24-34. Wrong on all counts. How is this useful to advertisers? These analytics are based on categorizing individuals based on the perceived behaviors of groups. In real life, we call that discrimination and try to teach our kids not to do it. Either way, there’s a lot of room for error. How wrong are they about you? Link -via Metafilter
This optical illusion street art was placed on the road outside of Universal Studios: Japan to promote their new Flying Snoopy ride. The characters can only be seen properly crossing the road from the right perspective and then voila! Peanuts-Abbey Road parody! What a creative and cute way to advertise a new ride!
Continuing the parade of “dear god, make it stop!” inducing advertising for The Phantom Menace in 3D, a new animated commercial has emerged for Lipton Brisk Iced Tea that, I must admit, is beautifully animated and very cute.
There’s even a mobile app centered around the battle between Yoda and Darth Maul, which you can check out here. Now, why do I have the feeling that these ads are going to look a whole lot better than a 3d converted version of The Phantom Menace?
–via The Mary Sue
Photoshop Disasters is always good for a laugh -or a nightmare. I may be seeing this model and her “elbow that won’t quit” in my dreams for some time to come. She is one of the Top 10 Photoshop Disasters of 2011, but she’s not #1. Link
Timm Schneider a.k.a. Kong, the German designer behind the Cartoon Eyes Street Art and many other projects, has a new thing going. This time he’s putting up error messages on advertisements. The message reads:
An Error has occurred in your brain
This process has caused fatal boredom and therefore will be closed permanently. Please save all thoughts in progress and reboot your brain. [error code |-(42]
Man, Christmas seems to come and go faster each year! These ads harken back to a simpler time, a time when cowboys were all the rage, and gun ads were allowed to appeal to kids during the holidays.
It’s a nice bit of nostalgia, and a few of the pics in this gallery are definitely chuckle worthy. Just don’t shoot your eye out!
Link –via BoingBoing
Each year, America spends about $250 billion on marketing and advertising — more than the entire GDP of Thailand. Too bad most of that money is a complete waste. For an increasingly savvy, TiVo-equipped public, our brains seem to shut down whenever something registers as “advertising.” Which means all those marketing creatives at the big ad firms have had no choice but to, well, get more creative.
Some advertisers have relied on product placement (think James Bond stopping mid-gunfight for a refreshing sip of Heineken). Others have attempted to make their ads so entertaining that people will watch them in spite of the sales pitch. And then there’s the more mischievous route — the grassroots, take-it-to-the-streets method — and that’s where guerrilla marketing comes in.
Dirt-cheap and chock full of trickery, guerrilla marketing is advertising with a wink. The successful campaigns usually corral attention through subversive means before revealing their true purpose, and they distinguish themselves by being so clever that even once the bait and switch is revealed, there’s no negative outcry.
In other words, even though consumers know they’ve been duped, the reaction amounts to nothing more than a bashful, “Oh Pepsi! We can’t stay mad at you!”
And it’s with that good-humored and awe-inspired mindset that we pay homage to the best “gotcha” moments in advertising.
1. The Blair Witch Project
Arguably the most important aspect of a successful guerrilla campaign is staying one step ahead of the public. As consumers become more attuned to ad agency efforts, marketers have to figure out how to attack the mob from unexpected angles. The brand standard for catching the public off guard? 1999′s The Blair Witch Project. With no stars, no script, and a budget of around $50,000, University of Central Florida Film School pals Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez successfully scrubbed out the line between reality and fiction.
The film’s tagline set the stage: “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later, their footage was found.” Audiences were expected to believe what they were watching — shaky, low-quality videotape of three runny-nosed kids weeping in the woods — was an edited-down version of real recovered footage. And while it was certainly an inventive way to challenge the boundaries of cinematic storytelling (not to mention justifying the low-budget look of the film), Blair Witch didn’t exactly seem poised to rival Titanic. That is, until an inventive guerrilla marketing scheme was devised.
To ease the suspension of disbelief and stir up some buzz, Sánchez created a Web site devoted to the Blair Witch — a fictitious, woods-based specter who’d been snapping up Maryland kids for the last century. Although the legend was created out of whole cloth, it was soon snapped up by gullible Interneters everywhere, and a first-ballot hall of fame urban legend was born. Pretty soon, thousands of people were terrified of the Blair Witch. Even when the actors who played the “film students” started showing up (alive) doing interviews about the movie, many across the country refused to believe the Blair Witch wasn’t real.
From that point, the “I’ve got to see for myself” effect took over, and Blair Witch dominated at the box office. Considered the most effective horror hoax since Orson Welles’ The War Of The Worlds broadcast, the film grossed $250 million worldwide. Not a bad return for Artisan Entertainment, which paid only $1 million for the flick after its Sundance screening.
2. Acclaim Entertainment
Nowhere are the semi-criminal aspects of guerrilla marketing more important than in pitching to video gamers. Regular folks might occasionally enjoy being duped by an unusually clever campaign, but gamers seem to suck down daring and deception like a Big Gulp of Mountain Dew. The more the stunts flaunt the law, the more the gaming demographic seems to like them.
The undisputed high-score holder in this renegade arena is Acclaim Entertainment, a plucky little company that began as a one-room outfit in Oyster Bay, New York, and bloomed into a multinational juggernaut. Eschewing artistry in favor of an “all publicity is good publicity” philosophy, Acclaim stirs up the stuffy types — and then laughs all the way to the bank. One of its bedrock tactics is to offer people money for performing some insane stunt on behalf of its upcoming game. Prior to the release of “Turok: Evolution,” for instance, the company offered £500 to the first five U.K. citizens who’d legally change their names to Turok. (Almost 3,000 people tried to claim the prize.) Later, promoting the release of “Shadow Man 2,” Acclaim announced it would pay the relatives of the recently deceased to place promotional ads on the headstones of their dearly departed. The company said the promotional fee might “particularly interest poorer families.”
The latter campaign was, of course, shouted down. But Acclaim blew it off and said the whole thing was a joke — right after its name had been conveniently plastered all over the headlines. In fact, many of the company’s schemes are designed to die on the vine that way. Acclaim actually counts on law enforcement and city officials to shut down their antics — preferably as publicly as possible. In 2002, the company announced its plans to promote “Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance” using something called “bloodvertising.” Touting it as the bloodiest game of all time, Acclaim said it was developing bus shelter ads that would seep a red, blood-like substance onto city sidewalks throughout the course of seven days. Officials thought that might not be in the best taste, so the campaign was aborted, as the world looked on. Also in 2002, Acclaim offered to pay all speeding tickets incurred in the U.K. on the day its racing game “Burnout 2″ was released. Naturally, the bobbies balked, feeling that removing the consequences for speeding might encourage people to speed. Acclaim judiciously rescinded the offer, but, yet again, not before the name “Burnout 2″ was burned into the public consciousness.
3. Half.com
All of the games in the Katamari Damacy series have been strange to say the least, so I guess Namco Bandai figured “why not make a commercial as strange as our game?” Well, they have definitely succeeded with this billiards inspired promo, which features a pool shark slowly transforming into the Prince of the Cosmos.
–via Destructoid
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If you’ve ever wanted to own an advertising poster from the video game Fallout New Vegas in real life, you now have a chance to proudly proclaim your love of gaming and cover that massive hole in your wall at the same time!
Brian Menze designed these awesome posters, complete with wasteland wear and tear, and you don’t have to trek across the radiated desert to get your hands on one.
Link –via Super Punch
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As an attorney trying to use a billboard to attract new clients, it’s probably best to show the client why they should hire you, not how incompetent, insane or downright creepy you are. These guys and gals aim to show the entire city why their services should be avoided at all cost.
The advertising team behind Old Spice deodorant are continuing with their hilarious, tongue-in-cheek campaign by releasing a limited edition deodorant holding bear statue for the 2011 holiday season. So, if you’re worried about someone breaking in and stealing your deodorant, this guy and his toothy grin have got you covered.
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The Cleveland AAF (American Advertising Federation) challenged ad agencies to a competition to make a castle of canned goods. The object was to draw attention to the needs of local food banks. The canned goods used would later go to the Cleveland Foodbank, along with a donation from the Cleveland AAF. Melamed Riley used nearly 400 cans and built a facsimile of their local White Castle hamburger outlet and named it “Crave-A-Lot.” It has lights and even a drive-through! Their castle won first place. Link -Thanks, Rachel!
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This is what advertising would look like if we lived in the fantasy worlds we enjoy vicariously through video games. Products would be marketed towards adventurers and heroes, and the magical would be mundane as ad agencies try to increase sales.
My faves are the ads for hair care products featuring Final Fantasy characters and anime girls with rainbow colored hair. I guess they weren’t born with pink hair?!
Sure you might not need a tiny paper chair, but it sure is a lot more memorable than a tiny flat piece of paper. Oddee has a great selection of memorable business cards and while I love the chair idea, the breast augmentation one is certainly appropriate for a plastic surgeon’s potential market.
This video is an ad for the Korean chain Mr. Pizza. Viewers said this must be a product of a US agency, as Korean advertising is rarely humorous or self-deprecating. It seems they are right. Link -via Metafilter
It takes a lot of effort (and a lot of people) to make food look appetizing on film. Chain restaurant advertising on TV is overseen by tabletop directors, specialists you rarely hear about. There are only about a half-dozen accomplished tabletop directors in the industry, but they earn their pay by wrestling a winning performance out of a difficult actor: food. One of those directors is Michael Schrom.
Mr. Schrom has the eyeglasses of an architect and the relaxed, contented air of a man highly entertained by his job. On this day, he is filming for a national chain — one that also requested anonymity — capturing what he calls “flavor cues.” In one shot, a stagehand pours chocolate syrup over a sheet of caramel. (You can almost hear a voiceover purring, “Chocolate.”) In another, cream bubbles up in a cup of coffee. In real time, these moments barely register. In slow-motion playbacks, with a digital camera that shoots up to 1,600 frames a second, the images are almost erotic. Which is no accident.
“You’re using the same part of your brain — porn, food,” Mr. Schrom says during a break. “It’s going in the same section; it’s that visual cortex that connects to your most basic senses. What we’re trying to do is be the modern-day Pavlovs and ring your bell with these images.”
He has several food stylists who work in a huge kitchen next to his set. They start with the very same food and recipes used in the restaurants and stores.
In part, this is a truth-in-advertising issue. Everyone knows that in 1970, the Federal Trade Commission settled a complaint against the Campbell Soup Company after its ad agency slipped marbles into a bowl in ads featuring its vegetable soup, apparently to force more veggies to the surface. That put a scare into the industry that endures to this day.
Anything that flatters the food, of course, is fair game, and that includes gimmicks you’re unlikely to find in a fridge. Glue is used to keep spaghetti on forks and pizzas in place. The ice in a beverage might be made of acrylic and cost $500 a cube. The frost coming off a beer could be a silicone gel, mixed with powder and water.
The New York Times look at some of those techniques, and the people who make a living using them. Link -via Metafilter
The daily commute got a lot more interesting recently when life sized lightsaber hand rails that actually light up were installed in Tokyo trains to promote the Star Wars: The Complete Saga DVD release.
If they’d been installed in trains in America’s major cities, they would have been summarily ripped off and sold on craigslist Ebay, so I doubt we’ll see a promotion as cool as this in the U.S. any time soon. Head over to the link to see what Japanese commuters thought of this bold promotional gimmick.
Link -via DesignTaxi
Comments Off To promote their Prohibition Era show Boardwalk Empire, HBO has brought some vintage trains back to select subway routes in NYC. If you’re in the Big Apple in the month of September and find yourself in need of a ride, try to check out the express 2/3 track in Manhattan from 12 to 6 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Laughing Squid writer Scott Beale just happened across one on the inaugural weekend and took the above video. Vintage features include rattan seats, ceiling fans (!) and drop sash windows. Pretty sweet.
Link via Laughing Squid
We’ve all heard a marketing campaign at some point and thought, “that is just stupid,” but most bad advertising strategies just result in a few less sales than a successful campaign would have brought in. Sometimes though, a company will run a campaign that’s so idiotic that the company ends up losing thousands, if not millions of dollars. Take, for example, the Silo marketing campaign that said customers could get a new stereo for only “299 bananas.” When customers started actually showing up with bundles of bananas, the store had no choice but to give them stereos in exchange for fruit.
The saddest part? Silo couldn’t even get rid of the bananas (they had thousands of them sitting there, presumably attracting fruit flies), as the local zoos stopped taking them and the food bank didn’t take perishables.
Plenty of schools hire celebrities to speak at their commencement ceremonies, but it’s certainly rare for students to request an imaginary character to honor them with his presence. That’s exactly what a group of students from Creative Circus, a two-year advertising school in Atlanta, have requested. Remember, they don’t want Jon Hamm to speak at the ceremony, they’re requesting he show up at their graduation acting as Don Draper.
What do you guys think? Is this a realistic request or just plain over dramatic?
Advertising company Ogilvy & Mather put together a campaign for the plastic model company Tamiya featuring kits that you can use to illustrate your favorite conspiracy theory. This one is for the faked moon landing; others have to do with Roswell, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and the Kennedy assassination. Link
Creating eye candy for visual ad campaigns generally means using illustration to create something people will remember. Computer generated imagery has dramatically changed the design industry, and creative studio Serial Cut aims to show the world just how cool 3d design can be. With designs ranging from simplistic to absurd, most of which boast an impressively realistic look and shine, it’s no wonder they’re the talk of the town. Follow the link to see more slick cgi artworks by Serial Cut.
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Yes, it’s a bowling ball. It just looks like the head of a zombie! Artist Oliver Paass painted a set of these balls that were then placed in German bowling alleys to advertise a TV channel specializing in horror films. Link -via @johncfarrier
What makes a good advertising slogan? The Atlantic looks at how some slogans stay with us for decades while others flounder. It’s not always a matter of crowing about the quality of the product.
In the 1980s, British Rail tried to convince potential passengers that they were making significant improvements to their service with the slogan, “We are getting there.” Passenger experience suggested otherwise, and the much-ridiculed slogan proved short-lived. Ford’s “Quality is Job 1″ met a similar demise around the same time. There is nothing wrong with slogans acknowledging weakness and being aspirational, but they do have to pass the test of experience. Avis’ current slogan, “We try harder,” was originally coined in 1962, as “We’re No. 2. We Try Harder.” Positive customer experience ratified the claim and helped Avis achieve significant sales growth.
Included with the article is a gallery of big advertisers and their slogan histories. Link -via mental_floss
Comments Off We’re seen plenty of stop motion videos on Neatorama before, but one constructed entirely on a fingernail is definitely a first. Kia had the ad created for its Picanto model, which is, of course, small. The video took 1,200 bottles of nail polish, 900 fingernails, two hours of painting per nail and 25 days and nights to create.
If you’re interested in how Volkswagen Canada made this gorgeous ad, you can get a behind-the-scenes look here.
There’s a lot of green activity happening in this Coca-Cola billboard in the Philippines. The cola giant partnered with the World Wide Fund for Nature to create a 60×60 ft. billboard made of 3,600 Fukien tea plants, a breed excellent at absorbing air pollutants. The pots the tea plants sit in are made of recycled Coca-Cola bottles, the potting mix within is made of industrial by-products and organic fertilizers, and a drip irrigation system was installed to properly hydrate the plants.
I guess I can feel a little bit better about my caffeine habit now.
Keith Olwell and Elizabeth Kiehner are both New York-based ad execs who attended a TED Talk in 2008 revealing the economic sense of capuchin monkeys. The pair teamed up with Laurie Santos, the Yale University primatologist who gave the TED talk, to develop an experiment that tests the effects of advertising on monkeys. The solution? Branded capuchin food.
The objective, says Olwell, is to see if advertising can make brown capuchins change their behaviour. The team will create two brands of food – the team is considering making two colours of jello – specifically targeted at brown capuchins, one supported by an ad campaign and the other not.
How do you advertise to monkeys? Easy: create a billboard campaign that hangs outside the monkeys’ enclosure.
“The foods will be novel to them and are equally delicious,” Olwell says. Brand A will be advertised and brand B will not. After a period of exposure to the campaign, the monkeys will be offered a choice of both brands.
Santos plans to kick off the experimental campaign in the coming weeks. “If they tend toward one and not the other we’ll be witnessing preference shifting due to our advertising,” Olwell says.
But what kind of advertising might a capuchin–without language, pop culture, or an appreciation for human aesthetics–find appealing? The answer is simple, if wholly unrelated to the food in question:
One billboard shows a graphic shot of a female monkey with her genitals exposed, alongside the brand A logo. The other shows the alpha male of the capuchin troop associated with brand A.
Olwell expects brand A to be the capuchins’ favoured product. “Monkeys have been shown in previous studies to really love photographs of alpha males and shots of genitals, and we think this will drive their purchasing habits.”
