Hasta La Creative!

BBC’s editor Mark Mardell weighs in.

Read more on Adbusters.org

A l’occasion du prochain album de Daft Punk – « Random Access Memories » prévu pour le 20 mai, dont le premier single « Get Lucky » a été récemment dévoilé, le photographe Maciek Kobielski a pu immortaliser pour Obsession Magazine les 2 français déguisés en robots dans leurs tenues Yves Saint Laurent.

This is pretty interesting. The Spanish child advocacy organization, ANAR, launched an outdoor campaign that uses lenticular technology to deliver different messages to children and adults. Lenticular technology is that thing that makes what you see change based on the viewing angle.

Grey Spain created messaging that only children — or anyone under 4′ 3″ — can see and a separate message for those who are taller. The message seen by taller folks is “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.” The message seen by shorter children is, “If somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you.”

The differing messages reinforces the underlying fact that many times child abuse is, in fact, only realized by the child and not the adult. Nice work.

Canada’s Union Hearing Aid Centre has been doing a good job with its surprising, self-targeting ads. In a campaign last year, they had melodious piano music accompanying the most annoying, high-frequency sound ever — but you could only hear it if you had good hearing. Now, the company and DraftFCB Toronto are back, with a print poster in Toronto’s West End that emits that same sound when you walk by.

The poster [left] features copy that purports to test your eyesight, with the font getting smaller on each line. At the end, the tiny font says that if you got that far, you might have perfect eyesight, but really bad hearing — since they couldn’t hear ad’s semi-sonic frequency. A television spot does a similar thing, by getting people to test their hearing by pretending to test their eyes, instead.

In previous hearing-related campaigns, Go Outside magazine won the Radio Grand Prix at Cannes last year, for an ad that repelled mosquitoes.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

JC Penney is running a spot entitled “It’s No Secret,” in which the company apologizes for not listening to its customers and all but closes the book on its failed no-sale experiment. I want to get in a few words before that experiment becomes marketing history.

Penney didn’t fail to listen to its customers. They, like all of us, wanted to hear the truth. The company failed to deliver on it, and now it has announced that it’ll go back to lying … because that’s what customers want?

There’s an old saying that “retail is detail,” and that’s where the company failed. It did loads of things wrong, from trying to make the stores look like Targets and declaring Apple-like pricing, to creating advertising and merchandising that was visually lifestyle-rich, and utterly bereft of any substance or utility.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

A recent IPG Media Lab eye-tracking study of 4,770 consumers found native ads are seen 53% more frequently than banner ads — 4.1 times per session as compared to 2.7 for banners. As well, the study found 26% of people looked at native ads as compared to 24% who looked at editorial content.

The study’s co-author and IPG Media Labs VP of Consumer Research Strategy Kara Manatt notes native ads may be the happy medium marketers have been looking for saying, “Past research shows us that neither overly intrusive nor easily ignored ads are effective. This study validates that we are on the right path to finding that middle ground.”

And of consumer acceptance of the native advertising unit, 32% of respondents said the unit is something they’d share with a friend of family member as compared to 19% for banners. Great stat but we’d really like to meet one of those 19% who actually shared a banner!

While the advertorial has been around for a very long time, do you think it will survive and thrive in this current format?

Finlandia adopts a broad, tongue-in-cheek approach to selling cheese in a new campaign.

(TrendHunter.com) Creative professionals have gone from using a pencil and paper to a stylus and a drawing tablet, and here we have the next logical innovation for illustrative rendering. The iSpace Workstation is…