Dissecting Scientific Claims in Ads
Guardian: "When I was growing up, the hard sell in adverts was sex. These days, however, sex is old hat, and the new hard-sell is science. And properly hard science at that, or so one might innocently presume. What soon becomes clear is that even when a manufacturer is not, strictly speaking, telling an untruth in its advertising, the "science bits" its telling you are highly unlikely to be the full story."
Turning Advertisers Into Content Producers
"Two niche cable networks are finding marketing bucks in one of advertising’s hottest trends: turning the advertiser into content producer. Rainbow Media’s IFC, for example, draws on its connections in the independent film industry to integrate brands into short-form film -- like promos for much less than it might cost a marketer to create a mini film on its own or through an agency. It doesn’t accept 30-second commercials but instead integrates sponsors into movie promos based on the supposition that trailers are the ads consumers are most interested in seeing."
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Advertising Age (free registration)
Study: Ads More Effective Than Product Placement
"New consumer research suggests that branded entertainment still has a long way to go to compete with the 30-second spot--especially when it comes to influencing people to buy products. Researcher FIND/SVP says that consumers would be twice as likely to buy a product as a result of seeing a TV commercial than they would after seeing a product in a branded entertainment scenario. Fifty-two percent of viewers would buy a product after being exposed to a TV commercial, while 23% would do the same from a branded entertainment experience."
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Media Post
Gallery of Advertising Parody
False Advertising is one of the many sites featuring Photoshopped ad-busts.
FedEx Furniture
A guy on a tight budget makes an entire furniture set out of FedEx boxes and puts the pictures up on a
website (may be slow or down), but for some reason FedEx is cease-and-desisting him.
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Wired
Star Trek Business Cards
Here.
iPod Ad-busted
I guess it was bound to happen; the iPod brand joins Coke and McDonalds as an icon of evil. From
Andrew Mason's Flickr photostream.
Vote for Favorite Ad Icon
Vote for your favorite advertising icon to be crowned during this year's
Advertising Week in New York. M&M's won last year. Needless to say, I'm rooting for the twins; their green matches this site's layout. And they are lovely.
The International Database of Corporate Commands
Think different. Think outside the bun. I think therefore IBM. Think what we can do for you. Think, feel, drive. Think ahead. Think daily.
It's the corporate mind control at its finest, and
The Institute for Infinitely Small Things keeps a running tab.
"It is the hypothesis of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things that these commands, largely and consciously ignored by a public over-saturated with advertisements, function at the scale of the infinitely small. Tiny events that do not disturb one's consciousness or disrupt one's identity as "free" agents, these commands seep under the surface of the individual and lay claim to the territory of the Deleuzian Virtual. Desire, memory, and future potentiality become territories for conquest and tactics for social and political control.
By compiling, tabulating, concretizing and enacting these commands in
the International Database of Corporate Commands (IDCC), the Institute for Infinitely Small Things seeks to better understand the mechanisms behind this deployment of power and its larger cultural ramifications."
(more slogans at TextArt.ru)
