Ms. Adler, a longtime reporter for NPR on myriad subjects, was a Wiccan high priestess and the author of “Drawing Down the Moon,” a 1979 survey of contemporary pagan movements.
Is Special Agent Mulder looking to defect? In a decidedly unexpected career move, David Duchovny appears in this two-and-a-half minute rah-rah-Russia commercial for Siberian Crown beer.
The spot’s schmaltzy patriotism and odd humor combine with Duchovny’s earnest-yet-goofy acting style to create an entertaining viewing experience for the A-B InBev brand. Will you be hitting replay? Da! (It’s topped 2 million YouTube views since posting late last week.)
We open on a stateside rooftop party among the beautiful people where the X-Files and Californication actor gets distracted by deeper thoughts: “There is another country where I got my family name from. And sometimes I wonder: What if things turned out differently? What if I were Russian?” (He’s actually of Ukrainian/Polish/Scottish extraction … but close enough, and those probably fall under Putin’s mental map of Russia, anyway.)
What follows is an extended montage that plays out like a Saturday Night Live spoof of a Central Committee propaganda reel. Our hero takes on a host of stereotypically Russian personae, including a cosmonaut, a hockey star (missing a tooth, naturally), a ballet choreographer and, most unsettlingly, the bass player in a Russian rock band, having a bad hair day on both his head and upper lip.
The intended tone seems to have been muddled in translation, or maybe the spot just feels awkward when viewed with American sensibilities. At times, the concept’s clearly played for laughs, strictly tongue-in-cheek. Then, suddenly, it gets all heartfelt and serious. (“I found out that being Russian, I’d have many things to be proud of.”)
Duchovny’s performance heightens this schizophrenic effect. His approach is best described as Shatner-light: hammy, but on the lean side. He manages to be wink-wink self-conscious and intensely self-important at the same time.
It’s also, of course, an awkward time for a Western icon to be aligning himself with Russia, whose government is perennially one of the world’s least admired and is currently facing increased sanctions over its support of rebels in eastern Ukraine. But clearly this is not an ad aimed at foreigners, and Russians seem to be feeling just fine about how their government’s being run.
All told, it’s the kind of dubious escapade Dana Scully would’ve debunked (“Mulder, this commercial—Nyet!”), so it’s a good thing she’s not around to spoil the fun.
Jesse Ventura had sued the estate of Chris Kyle, a former member of the Navy SEALs, saying his book included passages about him that were defamatory.
The imprint, called Alloy Entertainment, released its first three titles and new titles will be released through Amazon Publishing’s Powered by Amazon program.
Dunkin’ Donuts has partnered with Discovery Channel’s beloved Shark Week to bring you the offering above, the Shark Bite donut, a yeast confection iced with a red-and-white pattern resembling a life preserver.
The partnership extends to the Dunkin’ logo on the Shark Week homepage—it’s mostly the same, except it shows a missing bite and the slogan reads, “Shark Week runs on Dunkin'” rather than “America runs on Dunkin'”.
The donut is going out to select stores across the country, says Harold Morgenstern, svp of national ad sales for Discovery. “Very rarely does Dunkin’ Donuts change its logo,” he said. The deal is part of a larger Discovery partnership for the restaurant: “They’ll be in all of our higher-rated premiere shows across the network,” said Morgenstern. “For Shark Week, [Dunkin’ is] new. They’ve been on and off the network for quite some time.” Morgenstern says the partnership will also include a billboard in Times Square and ways for fans to interact.
“We’re going to have ‘Take a Bite, Take a Pic,’ encouraging fans to take a bite and take a picture of it [for social media]. During Shark After Dark, we’ll show some of those and have some prizing involved,” he said.
Accordingly, we thought of some suggestions for future donut/show integrations.
Nude Donut (Naked & Afraid) — It’s free, but you don’t get a napkin.
Crab Surprise (Deadliest Catch) — A box with 11 mousetraps and one donut inside.
Lucky Donut (Gold Rush) — Available to groups of 10 or more. One customer gets a delicious donut of his or her choice, and everyone else gets cold french fries.
Hide-a-Donut (Moonshiners) — Actually a flask.
Experimental Donut (Mythbusters) — Explodes.
We expect to hear back from Discovery about these suggestions any moment now. Shark Week comes back Aug. 10; you can get your life preserver donut at Dunkin’ from Aug. 4.
The PEN American Center announced its annual literary award winners today, with a ceremony to follow on Sept. 29.
Ah, the barter system, humanity’s oldest economy. And it’s alive and well in the modern marketplace—at least if you’re using slow-cooked meat as currency.
Canadian restaurant chain Montana’s Cookhouse & Bar has created an entire ad paid for with meat to promote its Best of BBQ Sampler. The crew offered Montana’s smoked meat spread to a wide range of merchants in exchange for goods and services ranging from massage and yoga lessons to a manicure and permanent tattoo.
Even the ad agency (One Twenty Three West) and production company (OPC Family Style) agreed to work on the project in exchange for barbecue.
When the crew went door to door, not everyone said yes. But they seemed to have a pretty good success rate, and it’s good to know that if I’m ever strapped for cash and need an MMA lesson, I can always bring a billfold full of brisket.
CREDITS:
Agency: One Twenty Three West
Client: Montana’s Cookhouse & Bar, Cara Operations
Creative Directors: Rob Sweetman, Bryan Collins
Art Directors: Rob Sweetman, Paul Riss
Copywriter: Bryan Collins
Account Services: Christina Tan, Scot Keith
Production Company: OPC Family Style
Director: Max Sherman
Director of Photography: Kiel Milligan
Executive Producers: Harland Weiss, Donovan Boden, Liz Dussault
Producer: Dwight Phipps
Editor: Oleg Jiliba
Sound Design, Music: Six Degrees
Two more journalists from Rupert Murdoch’s defunct British tabloid the News of the World were charged with phone hacking, weeks after the paper’s former editor was jailed for the crime.
Vintage will release English translations of the spy thrillers by Gérard de Villiers, the French novelist who died of cancer last fall.
The numbers don’t lie: When a YouTube preroll ad comes on, users are primed to click the “Skip Ad” button the very millisecond it appears on screen. Research says 94 percent of preroll gets skipped shortly after the first five seconds (which are unskippable). And frankly, that number seems low.
The seemingly obvious solution is to make the first five seconds so compelling that people have to watch the rest—rather than just post your TV spot and hope for the best. Embracing the former, ad agency Nail in Providence, R.I., did a simple experiment. It tried to come up with an unskippable YouTube preroll ad.
See the results below.
It’s not very subtle, and it uses a trick from an old National Lampoon magazine cover. It’s also super low budget. Yet it got a view rate of 26 percent, which is impressive. And it made a few bucks for charity along the way.
What do you think? Is it worth building ad executions specifically to work better as YouTube preroll? Or is that just too much of a bother?
Here is Nail’s blurb about the dog video:
As marketers, it’s time we change the way we do YouTube preroll.
The current model seems to be to simply throw your TV commercial in front of any video a loosely defined demographic happens to be watching.
What a missed opportunity. The skip rates are unbelievable (94 percent is a generous estimate). And when there is no skip button, you can practically feel the resentment oozing through the Internet. Hardly the temperament most brands want to inspire from their customers, right?
Yes, content is king. But here, context is also king. (A gay royal couple if you will.)
Think about what we know at that moment: we know what they’re going to watch, we know what they just Googled, we know where they are, we know what device they are watching on, heck, we know they can skip the ad. All of this information is an opportunity to customize a message that respects the viewer and the platform.
We need to stop repurposing content designed for other channels and start taking advantage of the amazing abilities YouTube is throwing at us.
It’s like we’re NASA and we’re only using the Hubble Telescope to look at our neighbor’s boobs.
YouTube ads should be designed for YouTube. They should use the tools and features given to us and interact with the user and the platform in a way that can’t be rivaled. They should be self-aware. They should talk to one person at a time.
What the heck are we talking about, you ask?
OK, here’s an example. We wanted to raise awareness and money for an organization near and dear to us: the ASPCA. We had virtually no money but had given ourselves a serious challenge: can we make a skippable YouTube that virtually no one skips?
Did we do it? You tell us.
Advertising Agency: Voskhod, Russia, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Creative Director: Andrey Gubaydullin
Copywriters: Anton Rozhin, Christopher Atwood, Darya Ovechkina
Production: Daddy’s Film
Directors: Yaroslav Chevazhevskiy, Egor Gavrilin
DOP: Vlad Opelyanc
Published: June 2014
“Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise,” a novel by Oscar Hijuelos, who died last year, will be published in 2015.
Leave it to an ad guy to write his own hilariously entertaining obituary, and have it go viral in the days after his death.
Kevin J. McGroarty, who died last Tuesday at age 53, had worked in advertising since 1983 and ran Rhino Media in West Pittston, Pa., until 2006, according to the obituary in the Wilkes Barre Times Leader—a 500-word mini masterpiece that gets off to a flying start with the line: “McGroarty achieves room temperature!”
Every paragraph is amusing, though the high points include:
• He was preceded in death by brother, Airborne Ranger Lt. Michael F. McGroarty, and many beloved pets, Chainsaw, an English Mastiff in Spring 2009, Baron, an Irish Setter in August 1982, Peter Max, a turtle, Summer 1968; along with numerous house flies and bees, but they were only acquaintances.
• McGroarty leaves behind no children (that he knows of), but if he did their names would be son, “Almighty Thor” McGroarty; and daughter, “Butter Cup Patchouli.”
• He would like to remind his friends: “Please, don’t email me, I’m dead.”
• A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 10 a.m. Monday in St. Cecilia Church of St. Barbara Parish, 1700 Wyoming Ave., Exeter, following a brief rant of how the government screwed up all of the Bugs Bunny cartoons trying to censor violence.
God bless him. Read the full obituary below.
Obituary: Kevin J. McGroarty
WEST PITTSTON, Pa.—McGroarty Achieves Room Temperature!
Kevin J. McGroarty, 53, of West Pittston, died Tuesday, July 22, 2014, after battling a long fight with mediocracy.
Born 1960 in the Nesbitt Hospital, he was the bouncing baby boy of the late Lt. Col. Edward M. McGroarty and Helen Jane (Hudson) McGroarty, whom the New York Times should have noted as extraordinary parents.
He was baptized at St. Cecilia Church, Exeter, which later burned to the ground, attended Butler Street Elementary, which was later torn down, and middle school at 6th Street in Wyoming, now an apartment building.
He enjoyed elaborate practical jokes, over-tipping in restaurants, sushi and Marx Brother’s movies. He led a crusade to promote area midget wrestling, and in his youth was noted for his many unsanctioned daredevil stunts.
He was preceded in death by brother, Airborne Ranger Lt. Michael F. McGroarty, and many beloved pets, Chainsaw, an English Mastiff in Spring 2009, Baron, an Irish Setter in August 1982, Peter Max, a turtle, Summer 1968; along with numerous house flies and bees, but they were only acquaintances.
McGroarty leaves behind no children (that he knows of), but if he did their names would be son, “Almighty Thor” McGroarty; and daughter, “Butter Cup Patchouli.”
McGroarty was a veteran of the advertising industry since 1983. McGroarty was a pioneer in Apple computing, purchasing one of the first in the Wyoming Valley in 1985. He would like to remind his friends: “Please, don’t email me, I’m dead.”
McGroarty was a founding partner of Pyramid Advertising, and finally principal owner of award-winning Rhino Media until 2006. He was also an adjunct instructor at Luzerne County Community College, from 2005-2009.
He will be laid to rest at Mount Olivet Cemetery, section 7N. He asks to please make note of his new address. McGroarty’s headstone reads: “I’ll Be Right Back,” one of his favorite sayings. He leaves this world with few regrets, one being told in grade school, his adult life would see the Hershey candy bar rise in cost to over a dollar. He maintained given the resources and initiative, he would rally the good citizens of the Commonwealth to a revolution that would force that price to its original 35-cent market value, a dream he was not able to fulfill, by his own admission the reason: “I was distracted by many beautiful women.”
In lieu of flowers, friends are asked to please give generously to the Pennsylvania State Police Troop “P” Camp Cadet Fund.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 10 a.m. Monday in St. Cecilia Church of St. Barbara Parish, 1700 Wyoming Ave., Exeter, following a brief rant of how the government screwed up all of the Bugs Bunny cartoons trying to censor violence. This will be presented by his attorney, Bret Zankel, Esq. Friends may call from 9 to 10 a.m. Monday in the church.
McGroarty leaves behind a thought for all to ponder, given years of gathering wisdom from different religions and deep study of the Greek philosophers: “It costs nothing to be nice” and “Never stick a steak knife in an electrical outlet.”
Arrangements by the Metcalfe-Shaver-Kopcza Funeral Home Inc., 504 Wyoming Ave., Wyoming.
L’architecte français Vincent Coste a imaginé cette superbe villa à Toulon appelée Maison A3. Permettant d’avoir une vue incroyable, et pouvant ainsi observer aussi bien le lever que le coucher du soleil, cette maison invite à se prélasser devant la piscine en plein soleil.
Category: Career Oxygen
Summary: Tired of hoping to win the Resume Lottery in order to generate interviews?
There’s a long-proven formula used by direct mail marketers that you can adapt for use in generating interviews. Known as AIDA, it lets you get interviews based on factors that you can win on, rather than those that are commonly used to screen you out.
As a way to express our ongoing commitment to moms and babies everywhere, we present the story of our promise. Inspired by a Japanese legend that making 1,000 origami cranes signifies a hope granted and a promise fulfilled, we brought our scientists and their families together to create 1,000 origami storks, delivering our promise to who matters most –you and your family.
Advertising Agency: BBDO, USA
Production Company: Light of Day Productions/VFX
Producer: William Goodrum
Media planning / buying: J3
Change is the only constant. In digital media terms though, change is more than a constant, it’s a constant storm.
Grace Bonney, founder of Design Sponge, waxes nostalgic about blogging days gone by. Let’s listen and learn.
Six to eight years ago, most bloggers were living in our own version of the ‘Conde Nast heydays’ without knowing it. We were getting great rates for advertising, having to do (relatively) little to get those ads and could keep our advertising and content wells completely separate.
I must admit, AdPulp was in a better position six to eight years ago. We had more readers and more income.
For those interested in digital media survival, Bonney suggests a way forward:
The concept of a homepage is becoming somewhat obsolete. Readers will consume content where it is most convenient to them. So it is up to bloggers to now track down their audience and find them wherever they are (on Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
Correct. This, in part, explains why I’ve been allocating more time to AdPulp’s Facebook and Twitter pages.
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AdPulp’s Facebook page is the default gallery for the work coming in from press agents and from agencies directly. If you don’t already, please follow AdPulp on Facebook and Twitter.
As a writer and editor, it’s interesting to engage an audience that is quantified, not by number, but by name. In other words, I can look through our followers on social media platforms and see who is interested in our content. This is gratifying and informative.
Writers are used to addressing the black hole, otherwise known as the audience. Knowing who is out there, as one does in the theater and now in social, brings the enterprise to life in a way that page views alone do not.
The post What You Can Bring To the Content Party: Digital Endurance appeared first on AdPulp.
Le designer Alessandro Isola aime détourner, combiner et moderniser des objets du quotidien, leur insufflant une allure unique et moderne. Voici la fusion d’une table basse et d’un tapis, idée judicieuse qui allie l’utile à l’agréable, pour une pause lecture ou café réussie. Plus d’images dans l’article.
Advertising Agency: Kemper Kommunikation, Frankfurt, Germany
Executive Creative Directors: Faris Aadam, Christoph Tratberger
Creative Director: Alexander Wolf
Copywriters: Frank Bastian, Oliver Becker
Published: July 2014
Category: Career Oxygen
Summary: Have you lost that lovin’ feeling for your job? How do you know if it is just a phase, whether it is your job or role, or instead maybe the industry that you are in? If you are not as jazzed about your work lately, one of the things you want to consider first is — how bad is it? Is it just a passing phase and hopefully something you can address, or do you need to change positions or your long-term career direction?
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
