I love the daft ingenuity behind what can justifiably be called a word of mouth campaign. The BBC reports that Saudi citizens have fallen for a hoax that has seen old fashioned Singer sewing machines fly off the shelves.
These ancient machines are supposedly coated in a non-existent substance that has several unique properties, including one that would enable it to be used to make nuclear bombs.
I’m sticking with the same two resolutions as last January: no alcohol for half the year (i.e. no beer in the mornings), and try and stop swearing in this blog. Unfortunately, really shitty advertising still fucks up some decent telly watching, even at Christmas.
Here’s something from the arse end of midnight, shown between episodes of Father Ted.
I have to try really hard to understand who would buy this crap: several hours’-worth of stolen music accelerated to 100rpm with a duh-duh-duh beat. Oh, hang on, I was in Basildon last week – the chav capital of Essex and dammit, wasn’t it just this kind of noise I could hear from every other motor?
Incidentally, if you see two chavs in a car and there’s no music on, who’s driving? The Police.
In advertising there’s smut and there’s smut, the difference being that when the message is delivered skilfully the fleshploitation becomes excusable. And then there’s the smut that you feel is just thrown in there because some sad old fart wants to justify sitting in a cloud of oestrogen.
There’s bound to be some kind of psychological description of that thing that happens when you’ve been caught doing something that’s slightly embarrassing and you try to mask it by exaggerating the infraction. A bit like a Tory MP caught with his trousers down on Clapham Common “Oh sorry officer, this knob? I was just examining it for ticks.”
And so to this questionable Danish (?) ad. Just why is there so much boobage? Why the awfully unimaginative soundtrack? Why does it have to run for nearly 3 minutes? And why does it remind me of that Boogie Pimps video?
Taking a cue from last week’s Charlie Brooker rant against advertising, here’s a prime example of an agency surfing the internet to use someone else’s ideas. Was artist Keith Loutit credited by RKCR/Y&R for their Landrover Discovery work? Whatever the answer, you can’t look at the ad and say “ooh that’s clever” and give the agency all the creative kudos.
Here’s an example of Loutit’s work.
Yeah, we all had a bloody good laugh at today’s story about the Ali-G-speaking chav girl who ordered a “cab-innit?” and, instead of getting a taxi, received a cabinet the following morning.
Read through the story and it mentions furniture firm Displaysense. Dig deeper and you find the story on a free press release service, with a company biog helpfully supplied. Dig even deeper and you find the same company reported in the press earlier in the year as having been the victim of an unusual assault by a non-existent member of the public who was caught having sex with one of its mannequins.
Both stories are bullshit. The story is clearly a PR plant, and it’s a sad fact that the papers are passing it off as true.
Displaysense deserve some praise for the stunts, because its job is to shift furniture. We should be less forgiving of Her Majesty’s Press, which loves to get on its sanctimonious high horse about shagging CEOs, lying politicians, ranting mono-limbed celebrities, neglectful parents and declining standards in public life. Stories like this serve as a reminder that they just need to fill the required number of pages with newsprint to sell, and sod the truth.
If you think this is unlikely, then its happened before. Anyone remember stories about Paul Hucker? He’s the chap who insured himself against the grief of seeing the England footie team getting knocked out of the World Cup. This was picked up by virtually every newspaper and reported as fact. As revealed by Guardian journalist Nick Davies, it was PR from a insurance company.
There's a potential copyright spat between WCRS and a bunch of US academics over the agency's road safety video for TfL (skip the intro). Brand Republic reports that the video is a direct rip-off of an academic experiment conducted in 1999.
Your resident chimpmeister draws your attention to an earlier CMM post where Sainsbury used the same concept (using shopping rather than balls as the vehicle of distraction). It would have been a coincidence too far if Sainsbury's agency at the time was WCRS but, sadly for conspiracy theorists, it was AMV BBDO.
Here's a monkey sticking a finger up its arse.
7 November 1948: "If you want to get rich, you start a religion." - L Ron Hubbard.
10 March 2008: "Becoming obscenely wealthy is a mortal sin." - The Vatican.
...estimated Vatican wealth: $15 billion.
Sitting alone in my cloud-level pod atop Giraffe Towers is a favourite pastime. I appreciate the opportunity to contemplate the important things in life, such as Is It True That Robert Maxwell Used To Stand On The Roof Of The Mirror Building And Piss On The Little People Below?
We've seen agencies rip each other off (M&C Saatchi / MFI - CP+B /Ikea), and ad agencies rip off TV (Fallon / Sony Balls - David Letterman Show). Now we have Big Media ripping of an ad agency.
Pissing On The Little People isn't quite how I'd classify the peculiar story that tells how Leo Burnett USA pitches a marketing idea to a prospective client, has it rejected and then sees said client run the idea anyway.
There's this wee radio snippet explaining how the much-covered Simpsons / 7-11 tie in idea was ripped off from Leo by Fox.
Ad agencies are like tax men, traffic wardens and street mime artists - they're there for the slapping, so it seems. Ownership of ideas is a hard thing to prove, but Leo's story sounds convincing. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.
Attention News of the World readers! You too can look like Professor Lembit Opik, or have hair like one of his Cheeky Girls. Don't worry - that "warm, tingly sensation" is perfectly normal. It just means that the natural snake oil is working your benefit cash into my pockets. Side effects might include loss of punctuation.
The trouble with some furniture store ads is that they promote the shop, but not the idea of living with the new stuff that you know you have to lug to your car (or even worse, wait for some pikey delivery men to bring to your home when it's least convenient), unpack and assemble.
The new MFI ads create a nice little bridge between the having and the buying: life going on in and around the swanky new bedroom / bathroom; and the presence of MFI's friendly staff who remind you that you still need to visit the showrooms to buy them.
Much chucklement emerged upon spotting this pic on a nice comic-related Flickr photoset. Being a sad, only child who used to get board games at Christmas despite not having siblings to play against, I frequently considered sending off for these odd creatures spotted in comics. The thing that stopped me was the currency - I didn't have a clue how to convert my pound notes into dollars.
(Please - no Sympathy. If I wanted any I'd find it in the dictionary nestling somewhere between Shit and Syphillis)
Since then, I've had two run-ins with Sea Monkeys. The first was as a gift for my second-born. Unfortunately, we never got to see them hatch because he ate them, obviously mistaking the eggs for sherbet. The second was at the office, with one of the planning department PAs deciding to grow her own little desktop colony.
And what a disappointment. The lazy little bastards didn't even try building a castle. Obviously peasant stock.
Bin.
This is what happens in the TV ad for Ocean Finance.
The latest Private Eye magazine includes an interesting revelation prompted by the current batch of seriously irritating Mac vs PC ads.
The latest Boards email highlights a Snickers ad from Impact BBDO Dubai. All very nice and clever, with the glowing men on traffic lights kicking several shades of fluorescent shit out of each other. I heartily approve.
But... a simple but rather twisted website, Traffic Light Wars, seems to have been playing with this idea for an awfully long time.
Coincidence or rip-off?
If it looks like a duck, walks like duck, and sounds like a duck, then it must be a duck. And never was a quack more profoundly obvious when nutritionist to the numpties, "Doctor" Gillian McKeith waddled by.
To the uninitiated, DrGMcKwack is a diminutive Scots-American best known for bullying fatties on the TV. Her method of attack in her TV show You Are What You Eat is extremely distasteful. It involves the ritualised humiliation of obese people - first by confronting them with a table-load of their favourite food and demanding repentance, and then by examining the product of their bowel movements. The message is simple: you look like shit, you eat like shit and even your shit's shit. One notable episode saw her make a fat woman cry by presenting her with a tombstone made out of chocolate.
Her gurning visage looms from sales promo cutouts at Holland & Barrett health food shops and from dubious-looking food supplements.
Any justification for her aggressive manner may be excusable if she were a blunt but benign doctor, except a doctor she most certainly isn't.
The ASA has at last said she must stop referring to herself as a doctor in her advertising (although at time of writing her website continues to plaster the undeserved title across the page) and, last week, Guardian reporter Ben Goldacre, who has long targeted this fraudulent woman, wrote his most devastating expose of McKeith. Goldacre managed to get his cat the same PhD qualification as McKeith, from the same "University".
For fuck's sake people, stop watching her wretched programme, stop buying her books and products. Let's all pray she disappears up her own arse, never to return.
Some quotes:
"I think it is obvious she hasn't a clue about nutrition" - Amanda Wynne, senior dietician of the British Dietetics Association.
"In my view Dr Gillian McKeith is a charlatan" - John Garrow, professor emeritus in human nutrition at London University
"McKeith is a menace to the public understanding of science. She seems to misunderstand not nuances, but the most basic aspects of biology" - Ben Goldacre, author of The Guardian's Bad Science column.
The great b3ta site has run a Gillian McKeith image challenge.
TBWA’s latest onslaught of Mac advertising in the UK includes this oddly-worded poster seen on the London Underground. It’s slightly misleading because it implies that there are no Mac viruses. In fact what it's really saying is that there were not 114,000 viruses for the Mac - a different claim altogether.
It’s true that the cuddly Mac is certainly more immune to such attack than is the PC, but it is still vulnerable.
Although I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do this, there have been cases recorded of Macs with Windows operating systems being hit. Macs have also been targeted by Trojan Horses (not technically viruses).
I find this focus on the Mac's better security slightly ironic. The main reason for its good security record is that virus writers can't be bothered. Were the Mac to increase its market share (it’s currently something like 5% compared to the various PC brands in the US), then virus creators just might regard Apple as a worthwhile target.
Carlton Draught's wildly popular Big Ad was a piss-take of over ambitious production. It was also an inspiration, it appears. The noisy horde flirted and hit it off with Kylie Minogue's eye candy crowd from her Slow video.
From this Antipodean union did spring the following bastard children, which are currently on air.
Midwifed by BBH, and showing on UK telly we have the naked Vaseline crowd.
Nipping at its heels is Sanex's orgy-in-waiting from AMV UK.
Finally, because there's a joker in every family, is Publicis Mojo's big Drumstick crowd.
Doesn't she have her mother's eyes?
Last month I posted a story about Coca-Cola Argentina's shameless stealing of a video from cheeky b3ta regular Joel Veitch. As predicted, this story wouldn't lie, but I was surprised to see it pop up on Sky News at 6:15 this morning. I nearly fell off my exercise bike.
In discussing past copyright battles, the original Sky report mentioned something I didn't know, which was that The Verve get no royalties whatsoever from Bittersweet Symphony, surely their best-known song, following a successful lawsuit by the Rolling Stones who accused them of ripping off one of their tracks.
One to remember for the next pop trivia quiz...
Rob Manuel, the ginger genius behind my web addiction, is unhappy. His b3ta site (read its Wikipedia description here) is required lunchtime reading for anyone tickled by creative piss-taking, mash-ups, and extreme toilet humour. According to Campaign, the site has a hit rate of 30 million per month. Some contributions to the site are breathtakingly creative; many are often politically incorrect. A lot of the satirical work that appears in its bulletin boards finds its way into newspapers and magazines, usually unacknowledged.
Mr Manuel has posted this video explaining how one of his associates' web videos has spawned a remarkably similar clone on Coke's Argentinian website without permission or reference to its origin.
Joel Veitch, a computer animator and commercials director contributed the Quiznos spongmonkeys, the Crusha kittens, and the Switch/Maestro penguins to the world of advertising. Veitch's work can be seen at Rathergood.com.
This could so easily be yet another story of how advertising has stolen ideas, unacknowledged, for its own ends (obvious refs: Honda Cog, Sony Bravia Balls). The fuss that b3ta are kicking up may indeed peter out and be quickly forgotten. There is, however, just a chance that this one could really turn around and kick Coke in the teeth. The b3ta community is web savvy, protective, imaginative, subversive and ready to cause mischief when roused.
This is the Coke link, and this is the original Veitch video with its similar animation, music and dancing.
See also: The stolen ninja - update
...flaccid.
Chimp Messiah rule #43 for guys on the pull: avoid nicking other men's chat-up lines.
Chimp Messiah rule #11 for making ads about sex aids: unimaginative promotion of penis rings can make you look like a prick.
It started with a promise... excitement... anticipation... then the revelation and.... pffffft. This is the much-hyped ad from Durex that has just aired on British TV.
The gag (always a good response at the end of a first date - boom boom!) is quaint but the effort falls limp because it's been done before.
My feeling of deja vu when seeing this for the first time was confirmed by Brand Republic's revelation that Durex's vibrating penis ring is buzzing to the same tune as a similar product by rival Mates, whose viral ad has been flopping around the internet for months:
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