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Unknown (relatively speaking) indie rock bands are turning down large sums of money from GM for licensing their music for Hummer ads. “It had to be the worst product you could give a song to. It was a really easy decision. How could we go on after soundtracking Hummer? It’s just so evil.” (via rw)
Time-lapse animated GIF of the Million Dollar Homepage…watch it fill up.
The delicate marketing of Brokeback Mountain. In Manhattan for example, analysis of the city’s various social microclimates was used to select the opening theaters to de-emphasize the art-house aspect of the film. (via dj)
Absolut is ditching their famous bottle ads campaign (which is 25 years old) in favor of references to pop culture sans bottle. (via do)
Very high on the list of things that don’t need to be advertised is Tetris. Chances are you remember this Tetris commercial from the 80s anyway. “Use your thumbs, use your eyes, find yourself Tetrisized!”
This blog cites a Target store advertising on Google Maps (by painting their logo on the roof), but it’s more likely that the bullseye is there for the benefit of airline passengers landing at nearby O’Hare (as this slightly wider view shows). (via bb)
Hilarious real-world version of Million Dollar Homepage: Fill My Room. For each donation of a dollar, a block gets added to this person’s room until it fills up. (via cyn-c)
I was wondering much the same thing as Michael re: iTunes phoning home with your listening history. Isn’t that what we want? Our software watching and making recommendations for us…isn’t that helpful? Providing better, more targetted advertising (if we have to have advertising, it should be useful)? There are privacy concerns and companies should be clearer about what’s going on, but I don’t mind if the software I use is a little smarter.
What business are movie theaters in? The fast-food business, the advertising business, or the movie exhibition business? All three, but they take the movie exhibition business the least seriously.
The proprietor of The Million Dollar Homepage has sold 999,000 pixels (for $1 each) and is auctioning off the final 1,000 pixels on eBay (current bid is ~$30,000). (thx, jonah)
The Dayton Daily “News” has a full-page advertisement for King Kong right on the front page of the paper. That’s why they call it a journalism business, I guess.
Who doesn’t love advertising CMYK jokes? “A Clockwork C:0 M:60 Y:90 K:0”
Paul Ford has some fun at Business 2.0’s expense and invents Blogverthacking[TM] in the process.
Dooce puts ads on her site to feed her family (she’s supporting them *entirely* by writing her personal web site) and gets an earful of complaint in return. Thought this was particularly insightful about why no subscription fees or donations instead: “By using ads I’m making my livelihood my problem and no one else’s.” I’m not sure if that’s strictly true, but it resonated a lot with me.
Some fun images of advertising painted on fingernails. That’s some seriously intricate work…love the soda pop nails.
Merlin is collecting funny eBay ads from Google. “Looking for Handjob? Find exactly what you want today. www.eBay.com”. Dictionary.com used to have Amazon ads tied to search terms that would say things like “Buy crack cocaine at Amazon” or “Buy hookers at Amazon”. I for one welcome our new robot marketing overlords.
Watch Me Change is an interactive advertisement from The Gap that lets you specify the appearance of an avatar, who then performs a striptease out of Gap clothing. Gothamist has more info and a screenshot. Sorta NSFW, I guess.
Clever billboard advertisement that changes when it rains. Somewhat NSFW.
A single text link on the front page of wordpress.org is selling for $100,000 for seven days…for that you get only 17,000 daily pageviews. This Web 2.0 math makes 0.0 sense.
Ill-timed Dairy Queen advertisement for their “Earthquake” dessert. Officials say that the death toll has reached 22,000 from the eathquake that hit the northern parts of India and Pakistan on Saturday.
Bumvertising. More here. I don’t object to the idea if this idiot were paying them more. Hire them to wear a sandwich board and pay them $6 an hour.
Fun bunch of Flickr photos from mleak depicting bugs and slugs shilling for the man: Pepsi Ladybug, Nike Water Strider, FedEx Grasshopper, Coke Slug, and Adidas Spider. (via bb)
The Army’s Be All You Can Be ads don’t really work all that well, despite being the 25th largest advertiser in the US. Recruiting is actually correlated more closely with the economy…the economy goes bad and the number of recruits goes up. Here’s a better way to spend that ad money: give it to incoming recruits as bonuses…the same strategy Amazon uses in offering free shipping to customers rather than spending that money on TV ads. (thx garrick)
I quite enjoyed Sagmeister’s presentation on happiness…where else but a design conference would you find a talk on that topic?[1] Early in, he suggested that visualizing happiness with design is easy (photos of someone laughing or a smiley face will do it) but that creating design that provokes happiness in the viewer is something else entirely. He then shared three designs that have made him happy recently:
Sagmeister wrapped up his talk with a list of things he has learned and how he’s used that list in a recent series of projects:
“Complaining is silly…” is my favorite, both as advice and his implementation of the design. A few of these are in this video shot by Hillman Curtis.
[1] Ok, maybe at a clown conference, but still.
One of the pre-conference events was a talk at Fenway Park followed by a tour of the ballpark. Janet Marie Smith, VP of planning and development for the Sox, kicked things off with how the team (especially the new management) works really hard to preserve the essential character of Fenway while at the same time trying to upgrade the park (and keep it from getting torn down). She talked about the advertisements added to the Green Monster, which was actually not a purely commercial move but a throwback to a time when the Monster was actually covered with ads.
Lots of talk and awareness of experience design…the Red Sox folks in particular kept referring to the “experience” of the park. One of the speakers (can’t recall who, might have been Jim Dow) talked about how other ballparks are becoming places where only people who can afford $100 tickets can go to the games and what that does to the team’s fan base. With Fenway, they’re trying to maintain a variety of ticket prices to keep the diversity level high…greater diversity makes for a better crowd and a better fan base and is quite appropriate for Boston (and New England in general), which has always been an area with vibrant blue collar and blue blood classes.
Janet also referred to the “accidental” design of the park. Like many other urban ballparks built in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, the placement of the streets constrained the design of Fenway and made it rather an odd shape….these days larger plots are selected where those types of restraints are removed. And over time, the game has changed, the needs of the fans have changed, and the fire codes have changed and the park has changed with the times. In the dead ball era, the walls of the stadium weren’t for hitting home runs over; their sole function was to keep people on the street for catching the game for free, so the Fenway outfield ran over 500 feet in right field — practically all the way to the street — where there’s now 30 rows of seats. Jim Holt observed that American butts have gotten bigger so bigger seats are called for. Fire codes helped that change along as well…wooden seats, bleachers, and overcrowding are no longer a large part of the Fenway experience (save for the wooden seats under the canopy).
The design talk continued on the tour of the park. Our guide detailed how ballparks are built around specific ballplayers. Yankee Stadium was the house that Ruth built but it was also seemingly (but not literally) built for him with a short trip for his home run balls to the right field wall. Boston added a bullpen to make the right field shorter for Ted Williams. Barry Bonds does very well at PacBell/SBC/WhateverItsCalledTheseDays Park. And more than that, the design of Fenway also dictated for a long time the type of team that they could field, which had some bearing on how they did generally. Players who played well in Fenway (i.e. could hit fly balls off of the Monster in left) often didn’t do so well in other parks and the team’s away record suffered accordingly.
Dear The Onion, please stop paginating your stories. I know you’re trying to increase your ad real estate, but it’s annoying to have to click to read more, especially on shorter stories. From now on, when I link to stuff like this excellent Errol Morris interview, it’s going to be to the handy one-page print version with zero ads. NY Times, Salon, WaPo, Wired News, that goes double for you.
This guy is selling 1,000,000 pixels on his site for $1 apiece. Minimum purchase is a 100 pixel block on which you can put a tiny banner and a link to your Web site or whatever. (via cyn-c)
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