How to Scrub Your Online Reputation, Without Looking Like a Jerk

In the early days of your brand or business, there will be success and there will be failures. Part of establishing yourself as a marketable entity is going through the gauntlet of public opinion. It must be something instinctive in people; there seems to be a lot of people who delight in taking shots at […]

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Matching the Person to the Job is Vital to Your Company’s Performance

Have you ever wondered why companies take so long to hire someone? It’s because the decision to hire is not something that should be taken lightly. Not only does hiring the wrong person mean that they’ll have to go back to the drawing board, it can essentially drain time and money. Utilize Several Resources Most […]

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How to Track Your e-Commerce Business Performance Efficiently & Benefit from Analytics?

Online marketing techniques and standards are constantly changing. Something that seemed extremely innovative last year, becomes obsolete today, giving place to the brand new digital engagement experience. If you are a web-store owner, you have to live with this harsh reality, whether you like it or not. In order to survive and lead your e-Commerce […]

The post How to Track Your e-Commerce Business Performance Efficiently & Benefit from Analytics? appeared first on AdPulp.

Inside the Anti-advertising Movement That's Recruiting Ad Agency Workers to Destroy Billboards

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: To understand Brandalism — a movement that illegally replaces outdoor ads from billboards and bus stops with art — you need to look back to the UK summer riots of 2011.

For five days that August, thousands of Britons demonstrated their frustration at the establishment by rampaging through city-centers, looting or destroying whatever consumer trinkets stood in their way. Overall, across the country, the rioters caused around £100 million…

Pepsi's New '1893' Soda Further Blurs Booze, Soda Marketing

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: The line between soda and booze marketing is getting about as blurry as a Sunday morning hangover. Witness the debut ad for Pepsi’s new 1893 premium soda brand, which uses a sommelier character who peddles the beverage like a fine whiskey or wine.

The ad is meant to be humorous. But it underscores a serious marketing strategy by PepsiCo…

Data Shows One US Presidential Candidate Clearly Has the Best TV Ads

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: As candidates are knocked out of the US presidential race, TV ads are becoming even more important for those wishing to stay relevant. And the campaign by Democrat underdog Bernie Sanders is using the medium most effectively, according to data from Ace Metrix.

In fact, the Vermont Senator took gold, silver, and bronze in Ace Metrix’s ranking of the top presidential ads of the quarter.

Emotional Advertising: How Brands Use Feelings to Get People to Buy

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: Ads that make people share and buy can usually be summed up in one word: emotional.

That should be no surprise. Studies show that people rely on emotions, rather than information, to make brand decisions — and that emotional responses to ads are more influential on a person’s intent to buy than the content of an ad.

Have You Heard the Buzz? It’s Electric!

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: Imagine earning $7.5 billion in one day. Plug it in, plug it in! And we are not talking Glade! Remove the “e,” and we ARE talking glad, as in all over the highway. Finally Tesla has launched the new affordable electric Model 3 and shocked everyone.

Fourth in the model line, Tesla has not only built another sustainable car that works in today’s world but created one priced for the mass market.

The people vs. Kellogg’s

adbusters_124_kelloggs_long
In 2012, the company, alongside the Grocery Manufacturers of America, Monsanto, Kraft, and a handful of obvious others raised a combined $46 million to lobby against a California ballot initiative that would have required the labelling of all GMO food products.

In 2013, Vermont successfully passed a state law requiring the same – a law that was immediately challenged by industry groups.

Then, in 2015, they took the fight to Congress, attempting to sneak language which forbade mandatory GMO labelling into a must-pass omnibus spending bill. Legislation that would have struck down state laws in Vermont, Connecticut, and Maine in favor of a “voluntary labelling” system which would have gleefully codified corporate dishonesty.

“How much does nourishment weigh?” they once asked us. “With just a spoon, forefinger, and some Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, you can discover for yourself.”

So why then is Delicacy With A Wallop working so desperately to keep consumers from discovering anything? Why should a smattering of deeply entrenched corporate interests get to decide how much we know about the food we eat? Obfuscate. Inveigle. Deceive. Send lobbyists to every state house to keep consumers in the dark about the true source of their Snap, Crackle, and Pop.

How much does nourishment weigh? Evidently less than the sum total of letting us make our own judgements.

True, GMO crops have been with us for more than 20 years. Have they yet led to richer flavor? Increased food security? Lower costs? Not so far. But they have led to unintended consequences: Insect toxicity and the decline of monarch butterfly populations. Increased herbicide resistance. Superweeds. Increased allergic response. True, the public backlash against GMO products have cast them in a negative light. But this isn’t about a ban on crops. This isn’t about the end of genetic modification as we know it.

This is about Informed Consent.

“Trust us,” they say. “Would we lie?” All the while stuffing decades of false claims into their pockets.

Mercifully, Congress didn’t bite. But make no mistake: they will try again. They’ll spend, they’ll flail, they’ll fight to deliver the best to you each morning, with the least possible information.

And we need to be ready. We need to act. Right now, today, we need to turn our backs on corporate obfuscation and say Good Morning to something better.

How much does transparency weigh?

— Jesse Donaldson



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McDonald's Monopoly Game Has a Surprisingly Wild History

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: For nearly three decades, the joys of board games and french fries have intersected every year for a brief, cheerful window. Since 1987, McDonald’s has teamed up with the makers of the Monopoly board game to create McDonald’s Monopoly, a promotion turns peeling stickers into a high-stakes game.

The People vs. Dole

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In 1977, the USA banned the use of pesticides containing DBCP. The science was definitive: Sterilization. Cancer. Birth defects.

In spite of the ban and their prior knowledge, the Dole Food Company continued to spray the poisonous chemicals on its South American plantations.

Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten stood up to Dole. His feature-length documentary Bananas!* captured the court case between the corporation and a handful of its Nicaraguan laborers. The movie laid bare the details of Dole’s environmental and humanitarian abuses.

Dole took offense. Attempting to muzzle the documentary, the company hired a team of lawyers to sue Gertten and halt the distribution of the film. But as word got out, the Swedish people rallied behind the director’s freedom of speech. Protecting Sweden’s constitutional right to open expression, citizens noisily backed Gertten’s entitlement to uncensored press. The public outcry caught the attention of the national government. Inspiring a unique screening in the country’s parliament, Gertten’s case united the Left and the Right. The Swedish people started to boycott Dole products.

“I’ll tell you a funny story,” Gertten told Adbusters from his US hotel room. “After the film came out, I was staying at a hotel in Stockholm – the biggest Nordic hotel chain. And they had Dole bananas for breakfast. So I took a picture with my cell phone and put it up on Twitter and Facebook. It took, I think, three hours. People started to tweet and call the company, and subtly they withdrew all Dole bananas all over the country. In every hotel. Whenever you see an unethical banana being sold or given away, you can just post it. People are suddenly so aware.”

These acts were not part of a coordinated campaign – but they had wide-reaching effects. These potent local challenges forced Sweden’s largest supermarket chains to question their allegiance to Dole products.

“The big corporate superstores have special people who analyze what’s going on in the world,” the filmmaker describes. “They know that politics can destroy their business. If there is a suggestion of some ingredient that causes cancer, or some new thing that’s happened on the West Bank, for example, they are ready to move. This is what happened with the public response to Dole.”

Bananas make up 1% of a supermarket’s total sales. 1% is, as Gertten puts it, “a hell of a lot. It’s a very lucrative business.” As customers began to boycott Dole products, Swedish supermarkets saw their revenue slashed. Major chains threatened to withhold their business if Dole did not clean up its rotting public image. Some stores, like the Swedish hamburger chain “Max,” cut ties to Dole altogether.

And it’s about time.

For more than a century, Dole’s corporate modus operandi has been exploitation, theft, environmental degradation, and sanctioned murder. Despite basing its international brand on “The Dawn of the Nutrition Age,” Dole is a company whose founding family helped overthrow the Kingdom of Hawaii in favor of American sugar interests. It is a company that has, for more than a hundred years, consistently paid its foreign workers at the level of indentured servants. It is a company that has hired Colombian paramilitary groups to kidnap and execute labor leaders thought to be working against their corporate interests.

Dole got a bloody nose in Sweden. But the company continues to monopolize the universal market share. Now we need to take the Swedish response global. We need a worldwide boycott.

Grassroots activism inspired corporate change in one country. We can do it again internationally.

— Kate Wilson



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Olympic Top Partner Gillette Reveals Rio Advertising Campaign

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: Only four months remain until the official start of the Rio Olympic Games 2016 and brands are beginning to unveil their marketing plans related to same. Gillette, a Top Olympic partner, has released a new :30 second spot as part of its new Olympic campaign as well as its global roster of athletes. Expect other brands to follow in close proximity as the days dwindle down…

Opening the Door

This article was originally published in Adbusters #39 the Jan/Feb 2002 issue. The digital version of this issue has recently been made available for purchase.

adbusters_39_zapitista-dollOpeningTheDoor
Zapitista Doll

On the weather report, another record-breaking hurricane is chewing up the coast.

You drive out through the suburbs and discover a shantytown, the kind you’ve always associated more with Somalia or Haiti than your own hometown.

One more overtime shift at work, and your company health plan will automatically sign you up for Prozac.

On TV, there’s another war.
Around and around and around.

Even the most entrenched believers in the new global order have a mounting sense that some fundamental mindshift is needed. The contradictions of late-capitalist life put increasing pressure on our psyches to synthesize the data, yet insights come only in fits and starts. They appear like desert mirages, dazzling us with their promise and then dissolving into sand.

And suddenly we are all wondering: What would it be like to drink deeply? Can we in the First World have a revelation? Would we recognize one if we had it?

A few pioneers have been working with these questions. In the past, political radicals have been as quick as reactionary conservatives to dismiss maverick consciousness researchers. But suddenly, the discoveries of mind explorers like Stanislav Grof, Jean Houston and the recently deceased John Lilly, seem to have a penetrating cultural significance. The currency of the times is revelation and epiphany.
Grof, a former Johns Hopkins professor and chief of a Maryland psychiatric research center, has scoured ancient and modern methods of consciousness change in order to develop techniques that can trigger revelatory experience rapidly and in a broad spectrum of people.

In his Holotropic Breathwork technique, a combination of intense breathing, expressive music and focused bodywork causes dramatic psychological transformations in most people. Within minutes, those who try it begin to experience things more acutely (much the way people often say they do in the midst of abrupt life changes). Colors look brighter, memories appear more detailed, symbols and words provoke pluralities of interpretation. Sensitivity to sensations in the body and brain is heightened; old patterns are suddenly seen in a new light.
For serious explorers, this is only the beginning. As their sensory experiences evolve, mind explorers frequently find that the psychological and the physical become intertwined, and watch amazed as each influences the other. Incorporeal presences may seem as real as the walls, walls may seem permeable, or normal material reality may dissolve into flowing energy fields. The mind and body’s instruments of perception come to be understood as critical components in constructing a sense of reality.
(What is music without our eardrums conveying it, our memories labeling it?) Even if such experiences are discounted as “hallucinations,” there is a lingering sense that normal reality itself could be one of those illusions – the ultimate meme, prolonged interminably by its social infectiousness.
Even this is merely one stage. As revelation extends, “time” as a psychological process can stop; explorers report a sense of intense connection to their body’s internal cellular activities, to collective memory, or to other beings or the entire human race. Some feel the inextricable unity of good and evil, oppressor and oppressed, or find themselves dissolved into a universal consciousness.
It all sounds wild and chaotic, and yet, for many of us, oddly familiar as well. Under the pressure of stress, despair or confusion, more and more of us are peering over the brink of breakthroughs of this type. Grof suggests it’s “archetypal” – as the human crisis deepens, our consciousness tries to promote healing by uncovering repressed truths. We resist the shift: Who wants to lose their grip on everyday life? We dread an exile from so-called “consensus reality,” imagining an impoverished, eternal loneliness of insanity. But in fact, those who’ve gone all the way down the rabbit-hole of epiphany come back with a view of a world that has truly and profoundly changed. Grof alone has compiled records from thousands of such people.
Without any coercion, the overwhelming majority emerge with a non-violent attitude, reverence for nature, anti-materialistic values, a keen interest in spiritualism (though not organized religion), a holistic approach to health, and an intense desire for social change.
Why?
Because one common effect of these non-ordinary states is pure awe. Even a faint glimpse beyond the spectacle and into the vastness of existence transforms into breathtaking experiential reality. This almost invariably creates deep humility before the infinite complexity of nature. Unsurpassed levels of compassion emerge from the intimate identification with other people, creatures and things. Visceral immersion in the entire human collective makes it almost impossible not to consider the effects of every personal action on the global community and future generations.
Often, the end result is confusion. But rather than growing depressed or anxious or paralyzed by it, revelatory explorers tend to become irrepressible skeptics. For them, no moral perspective, dominating mood or intellectual conclusion can pass for absolute “fact” or “objective truth” very easily, or for long.
Revelation is a radical deconstruction of the senses of self and reality. It allows entirely different impulses to influence your actions; it shortens the distance to spontaneity and authenticity.
As long as revolutionaries have existed, they’ve sought ways to fundamentally change how people think and see the world. Frustrated, they fall back on reform: the attempt to persuade people to follow prescriptions for change.
Consciously or not, most people resist.
But when someone’s whole sense of reality shifts – say, when they realize that death is closer than they had allowed themselves to think – radical new decisions come effortlessly.
The First World is a culture preparing for revelation. We are watching, alarmed, as rips appear in the fabric of our reality. At the same time, we are quick to forget, ignore, or send in reinforcements. How many are ready to step through the hole?

-Rob Wipond



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Advertisers are Facing This One Major Issue on Mobile Devices

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: Advertisers are doing all they can to reach consumers directly on their mobile devices, but they’re hitting a major roadblock that’s preventing them from reaching their full potential.

A new report from the Media Rating Council (MRC) cited by Adweek notes that mobile ads take five seconds to load on average.

The Shared World

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After learning my flight had been detained four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.”  Well – one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,” said the Flight Agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem?  We told her the flight was going to be late, and she did this.”  I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. “Shu dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying.  She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “You’re fine, you’ll get there, who’s picking you up? Let’s call him.” We called her son, I spoke with him in English, saying I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends.  Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her?

This all took up two hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions.  She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies – little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts – from her bag – and was offering them to all the women at the gate.  To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo – we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend – by now we were holding hands – had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in.  The shared world. Not a single person in that gate – once the crying of confusion stopped – seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

— Naomi Shihab Nye



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Engaging Content: A Bespoke Examination of the Linguistic Assault on 'Advertising'

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: (You’re about to see way more “scare quotes” than you’ve ever seen in your life. If you’re already feeling queasy, please, close tab.)

We all know by now that advertising is no longer “advertising.” It’s “content.”

But it’s not just “content.” It’s “organic” content. Or “authentic” content. Or “holistic” content — which is apparently different than “integrated” content. Or “optimized” content. Or “bespoke” content. (You think I’m making that up?)

Take Off Your Headphones: Agency Offices Go Eerily Quiet

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: The strangest thing about walking into an agency these days is that you can hear a pin drop.

The confluence of open-floor plans, rampant headphone use, and a generation of phone-averse millennials has created a workplace where silence, not noise, is the new normal. Ironically, the library-like environments can be traced, in no small part, to agencies latching onto trendy ideas…

The World is Over

TheWorldIsOver

This article was originally published in Adbusters #39 the Jan/Feb 2002 issue. The digital version of this issue has recently been made available for purchase.

It’s noon, Thursday, Eastern Daylight Time, and every human being on Earth has just vanished in one huge and completely unselective rapture. Had there been any warning, people might have parked their cars on the roadside or landed their planes, but no, so immediately the world’s roads become flaming wreckage-strewn ribbons, while crashed jets punctuate the landscape with fireballs. To witness the scene around, say, a freeway circling Dallas, Texas, one would have the impression of a landscape on which 10,000 black tethers have been lashed to the sky.

And then things go quiet, at least for a few minutes – the quietest few minutes the planet has known for centuries, but this doesn’t last long, as everything has been left running. Dams continue to generate electric current, and gas pipes continue to deliver gas and fuel rods remain inserted in their cores. Gas stoves, heating systems, security lasers and Bunsen burners cause houses, businesses, prisons and hotel rooms the world over to burst into flames, followed by oil wells and forests and, most critically, nuclear power stations, beginning with less sophisticated and undermaintained models in the former Soviet Union, as well as those on the Asian subcontinent. The smoke they produce is certainly thick, but the isotopes they release into the jet stream and air sheds is in levels inconceivable to even the most nuclear-paranoid. By midnight, most of the Northern Hemisphere is shrouded in a black, acrid curtain, and sunlight will from now on reach the surface in patches. The Southern Hemisphere fares slightly better in an On the Beach sort of way, but the mist of angry isotopes from the north begins arriving around the 24-hour mark.

Fail-safe mechanisms the world over trigger nuclear volleys that hit targets in no particular order of vengeance.

The first city to go is Liverpool.

The next is Murmansk, after that is Minot, North Dakota.

Then go Sacramento, Montreal,

the outskirts of Rome, Italy; Auckland,

New Zealand; Anacortes, Washington;

Jerusalem; New Delhi, India; Cocoa Beach,

Florida; and so forth.

On Day Two, there are 104 separate nuclear bombardments, and the bombardments arrive at random from then on. Some of the missiles hit their targets, and some merely land or detonate wherever. One cluster of warheads stockpiled in Annapolis, Maryland, detonates simultaneously, chewing out a crater so large as to reveal magma within the Earth’s crust.

Also by Day Two, oil tankers and cargo ships have begun to run aground and fracture, at once coating the oceans with a thick crude crust – also in flames – as well as dissolving untold quantities of heavy metals, solvents, running shoes and canola into the waters.

Colossal lightning activity in both hemispheres triggers fire even in those areas most remote from what was once the human civilization. Residue from pesticide and pharmaceutical facilities quickly sterilize most European, North American and Asian rivers: The Mississippi is now a gummy, acidic broth, not unlike hot-and sour soup, but cut with burnt rubber.

Soot and debris from global burning has landed on the glaciers and ice packs of both poles, the darkness logarithmically accelerating the pace of melting. Railroad derailments across the planet release containers of chemicals into biosystems, wreaking broad-scale freshwater havoc. Oilrig fires the world over mimic those of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War.

Rains composed of what is essentially battery acid scour the world. Insects have their brief moment of glory as the incredible rainfall triggers a massive hatch, with locusts and grasshoppers battling each other over what remains of plant life, most dramatically in the central Canadian and central African plains. The few remaining bird species – gulls and corvids and a few penguins – are in severe trauma. Many reptiles have entered a state of deep hibernation, never to reawaken.

Carrion eaters, though, have their field day – viva maggots! –and their smaller organism volume makes them far less vulnerable to death by radiation. They too, though, will shortly succumb.

Much of the northern Canadian and Siberian permafrost tundra endures erratically yo-yoing temperatures, during which isotopes and heavy metals briefly enter the biosystems only to be frozen and rethawed again and again, the end result being a toxic pudding sludge.

Extreme weather is already the norm. Ozone holes quickly crawl down past the 60th parallel. On the island of Spitzbergen in the Arctic Ocean, the first window of direct contact between the Earth’s surface and outer space occurs, flash-freezing and drying marine life within the top 10 meters of the ocean surface.

A high proportion of deciduous trees has shed their leaves.

Most birds and mammals are now extinct.

Only deep marine creatures are relatively untouched,

but it’s only a matter of time before toxins from above flitter their way into the bathyal depths.

A few miles outside of Vladivostok harbor, a marooned Russian warship carrying multiple fusion warheads accidentally triggers a simultaneous on-the-spot detonation; in a gargantuan belch of steam the Pacific Ocean floor is suddenly made visible to orbiting satellite cameras. Outer space then briefly scours the detonation site, freeze-drying the embers while freezing ocean waves in mid-surf. Beyond the space hole, tsunamis ripple outward to crumple much of the Japanese, Korean and Kamchatka coastlines, and later, for what it’s worth, the charred west coast of North America, from Alaska to San Francisco.

By Day Six, warehouses of solvents in most large cities have ignited and/or exploded and drained themselves into the rest of the world. There is no habitable space remaining on the planet’s surface, nor any potable water. Mammals are extinct, save for a few rodents eating vending machine snack food within underground missile silos in Colorado, Siberia and Bonn, Germany. Around noon the last whale floats to the ocean surface off the southern tip of Chile; the last bird, a migrating Sandwich tern, falls to the ground over southwest Africa. Even plankton, sensitive to UV radiation, are undergoing a rapid dieoff.

What can be said? The world is over.

Earth is now not much more than a waterlogged, barbecued briquette.

And all it took was seven days.

Not even that, really.

  • Douglas Coupland


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A Sneak Peek Into SnapChat's Advertising Revolution

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: When it comes to social media marketing and advertising, the top channels have long been Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Before this trifecta became cemented as the foundational pillars of social media marketing, the field was barely a thought for most companies.

Ad Buying on Facebook Just Got More TV-Like

Category: Beyond Madison Avenue
Summary: Broadcast advertisers will now find familiar terminology when making video ad buys on Facebook.

That’s because Facebook wants to make ad buying on its platform more TV-like for broadcast advertisers. The company said Wednesday that target rating point video buys on Facebook or Instagram can now leverage day-parting and Nielsen DMA targeting, two features that were previously unavailable. DMA targeting allows marketers…