IVF mix-up at Hamley’s Toy Store

“I’ve never even met Mr. Daddy Bear,” said mum Miss Asbo Goldilocks, 22.

Agency: Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R; Client: Accantia Health & Beauty

Be quiet, white fella

Like dancing dads and teenage boys posing with their first pint, here’s something that just ain’t right: whities trying on cool rasta accents. Other blogs are reluctant to feature “bad ads”, but then what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t slag them off? I’ve developed a Pavlovian reflex with this monstrosity and have wasted baskets of fruit having chucked them at the screen whenever this appears.
I wonder if the original script required these actors to blacken up and sing old slave shanties. Hell, this is embarrassing.
“Touch me,” he says.
I’ll bleedin’ touch you, you buffoon.
Agency: the otherwise top-notch BBH; Client: The Woolwich

Couch potatoes: we are watching you

A study showing that 61% of babies under 1 year old watch TV or a video every day is covered by Stay Free, who rightly sneer at the possible justification of the lazy parents. It is just possible that the US is a slightly more TV-obsessed culture than the UK, but not by much: The Mirror recently reported a study from the University of the Bleeding Obvious informing us that children who watch TV for more than two hours a day at weekends are in greater danger of becoming fat adults.
You think that’s bad? 40% of parents are so reluctant to take responsibility for raising their children that they want headmasters to set bedtimes.
Being a tyrant, I find the thought of eugenics quite attractive, but I’d rather sit back with my bucket of popcorn and watch the reverse-evolution of mankind as cathode ray-addled numbskulls switch off from real life, than raise a hand to save you. It’s really rather comical.
The dominance of the TV could be seen as symptomatic of the decline of western culture, but I’ll leave that dissertation for others while I keep the engines running on my private jet.
(Dave, get on the hotline to the waiting monkey hoards)

Pull my finger

Shepherd Neame must be a fun place to work these days. Not only have they just seen a big rival shut its brewery doors but it is the place to go for laid-back advertising. Along with the amusingly xenophobic Spitfire ale ads (see here and here), it also brews the suspiciously named Bishops Finger, currently promoted by a series of press ads aimed at men who dream of romps in the hay with cheerful serving wenches.
I can’t say the name of the brand is especially attractive, but then again when you see a beer pump with Chimp’s Knob on the handle, have a pint for me.

Dead beautiful

Spotted in Maxim mag; one for necrophiliacs

Lakeside massacre of the deluded

Dave’s a dyslexic agnostic insomniac – last night he lay awake wondering if there was a Dog, which, he claims in his broken Latin, is as close a brush with divinity as he’s likely to have working with me, the cheeky sod.
Some people have delusions of divinity, except for me. I’d like to know which peculiar deity was in mind for a group of computer gamers who, in a fit of buttock-clenching self-importance, decided to conduct a cyber funeral for some unfortunate girl gamer who had died in real life. There are several versions as to who the poor girl was (one is that she was a Chinese teenager who had died of exhaustion after playing the Warcraft multiplayer game for several days non-stop).
Her many online friends – the result of online alliances where people tribe together into guilds - logged onto her account and took her virtual character to a frozen lake, where the memorial would take place.
Mistake 1: The friends posted notice of the funeral on Warcraft bulletin boards, asking other players to respect the cyber funeral.
Mistake 2: The venue chosen for the cyber funeral was in what is known in Warcraft circles as an Open Combat Zone.
The event was recorded. Here’s what happened.


Tags: Dave, Morons, Online

International relations all ale and hearty - part 2

Spitfire ale continues with the campaign that laughs at foreigners. The strategy is childish yet funny, and reminds us that for some people, especially Johnny Foreigner, the World Cup is taken as seriously as war, with the plucky Brits (i.e. English - the Scots don't count and the Welsh are never in it anyway) having to cope with devious Nazi-harbouring Argies, surrender-prone Italians and those pesky Yanks nicking their women.
The cartoon strips are by Graham Dury, whose distinctive style is familiar to readers of the un-PC Viz comic.
Agency: RPM3
[Click on the pictures to enlarge]

Donald Rumsfeld knows banana sex

A great philosopher once said: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.”
From where I was sitting at the time, it sounded like Donald Rumsfeld was talking out of his arse. But today my world flipped on its axis and his sage words make perfect sense. I have observed that there are things I knew I knew, and I thought I knew what I didn’t know, but I know now I didn’t know what I thought I knew, and things I think I thought I knew I now don’t know, I think.
Until very recently I would have counted on my banana supply, but I now know that bananas are going to be extinct.
But if that were not bad enough, it transpires that the French have gone off sex, which sounds improbable enough. And now (clutching head in disbelief) the First Direct bank is telling us that British women are unlikely to marry for money.
I don’t deny that having a hairy back and the ability to fling a piece of poo four hundred yards makes me attractive to the opposite sex and giraffes, but show me the female that says she isn’t impressed by a monster portfolio and a huge nest in the trees and I’ll show you a liar. As the great Mrs Merton said to Debbie McGee, “so what first attracted you the millionaire Paul Daniels?”, and this to a lady who married a man who looks like a monkey.

Survey collision: fat kids on the menu at McDonald’s

Some things just aren’t meant to be: McDonald's are dropping their healthy menus. Unsurprising really - if animals weren’t meant to be eaten then they wouldn’t have been made of meat.
The fresh fruit and pasta menus didn’t work because you go to McDonald’s for greasy burgers, not for a health rush. And so, the world’s greatest burger chain is going back to basics not with a whimper but with a glorious roar as a giant 40%-bigger-than-a-Big Mac burger storms onto the menu.
Meanwhile, if you’re wondering why today’s school class photos are wider than yesteryear, then the Department of Health probably knows: they are introducing obesity tests on 4- and 10-year-old schoolchildren. The incentive for the kids? McDonald's vouchers.*
*I made that bit up

Survey collision: lazy workers looking for Kate

An ntl:Telewest survey reveals that email and telephone habits can reduce productivity rather than increase it. Just over 2 hours per day are being wasted because of poor use of comms technologies. The finger is being pointed at men in particular, which seems a bit harsh considering how abrupt male social exchanges on the phone are (“Hello? See you at the Duke’s Head at seven? OK. Bye”) compared to women. This being a survey conducted by a telecoms firm, it didn’t delve deeper into internet habits, but I’ll venture that the internet is a bigger timewaster than phone or email.
And if you want to know what Britons are searching for, then The Times tells us that in St Albans they are obsessed with diets and gyms (the town has one of the highest concentrations of pubs and is quaint and posh); in Liverpool they want to know about fashion (planning the next shoplifting target); in Aberdeen money is a key concern (no comment); and in Gateshead they have a thing about Kate Winslet (who had to stop there once for a pee – the only major event in that town in the last 200 years).

Meanwhile, a US brand that gets it right

While the Nike behemoth rumbles on, trampling poor East Londoners and Wayne Rooney’s foot in its quest for World Cup glory, another US brand proves itself a little more likeable.
Budweiser has launched a new series of ads that gets the tone about right: self-deprecating humour at the expense of American ignorance about the beautiful game.
Continuing with the “You do the football, we'll do the beer” campaign by Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R, Budweiser introduce us to a pair of grinning gorms who commentate on the championship via Budweiser’s UK website.

Nike rip off logo from London’s poor borough

Witnessing good old-fashioned hypocrisy is a terrific means of getting the juices of righteous indignation flowing. Hypocrisy is compulsory behaviour for politicians but is slightly harder to stomach when big business squeals like a spoilt child when it thinks it’s being wronged, and then quietly turns around and does the very thing it was condemning.
And so we have Nike, quick to zap Olympian lightning at any sign of hubris against its brand.
Hackney is one of London’s poorest boroughs. Hardly awash with cash, it does nevertheless host a strong icon of the British working class: Hackney Marshes. It’s here, at any of its seemingly uncountable football (soccer) pitches that you can watch teams of pub louts, Cockney office boys and ‘ahs-yer farver roughnecks kicking seven shades of shit out of each other most Sunday mornings.
It was here that Nike set one of its best ever TV ads in 1997, when they filmed a collection of the big English premier league stars mixing it with the Sunday league riff-raff, gawd bless ‘em.

It was a superb piece of advertising by agency TBWA Simons Palmer – gritty, exciting, funny, and with the perfect music soundtrack from Blur – from an American brand that is associated with a multitude of sports; it needed to muscle in on territory dominated by the likes of Adidas and Umbro, who have traditionally had much closer ties with football.
Apparently without shame it appears that Nike have ripped of Hackney council’s own icon and emblazoned it on their own shirts. Not a close copy, mind, but the very logo itself.
In true British socialist style, the council is asking for reparations, to be ploughed back into developing sports for Hackney’s young. The mayor also wants “assurances from Nike that all this kit has been ethically produced”, gawd bless ‘im.
Witness Hackney council’s anger here.

Update (September 2006): Nike did it. Lost it.
See also: More jolly logo japes in London


Tags: Sponsorship / PR; Politics