Hasta La Creative!

“It is, of course, unacceptable that someone puts graffiti on private property. We are often threatened, which made us react strongly to this.” says Sydsvenskans editor in chief Jonas Gruvö in an article at Sydsvenskan

Arriving at work yesterday morning everyone at the Sydsvenskan newspaper were met with the numbers 08.07.11 00:00:01 on the steps to their office building. A countdown? To what exactly? Those not hip to knowing it’s the release date of the iPhone in Sweden saw the countdown as something far more sinister.

You can see a nice huge image of the steps here at Resumé (I tried getting it, but could not afford it. Thanks Ove Jonsson @ Sydsvenskan for the help though) and it does look quite odd with ‘countdown’ numbers on the steps to a major newspaper like that.
PS Communication executed and created the spray-tagging campaign for Telia and struck in the middle of the night. Nils Djurklou, PR at Telia, apologizes for the tagging “This happened on their private property, which is very unfortunate. They [Sydsvenskan] saw it as a potential threat. We’ve apologized and removed the graffiti” he said to Resumé. Djurklou also stated to Sydsvenskan that the graffiti vanishes after a few days, and should only be placed on public – not private – property. Sydsvenskan has – sadly – decided not to report the tagging to the police. For once I’d like to see someone do that, just to see what the result might be.

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Must every media event be an advertising opportunity?

Advertisers backing the Euro 2008 think so! Check out this press conference. Como se dice…overkill?

Ah, I do love when banner ads go bad – even in such morbid cases as this one. CNN reports that the Sixth severed foot surfaces off Canadian coast and the banner ad adds some unintentional visual humor to it.

the Guardian channeled the Sun and issued a pun headline: Six feet under.

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Little green Footballs (and yes, that’s a reference to snot) got all upset when they saw Rachael Ray sporting a kaffiyeh in the latest Dunkin Breakfast Choices banner, writing: “Mainstreaming Terrorism to Sell Donuts”. I’ve spoken to someone who was on set, and there was a choice of scarfes a la the latest fashions to choose from, they simply picked one that looked nice with no political motivations behind it. But as the NYT says; Where Some See Fashion, Others See Politics: (They also say that the kaffiyeh is passé which anything that gets a writeup in NYT is, so throw it away already.) In Sweden the “palestina scarf” as we call it has been a staple of communist, punks, vegans and other alternative kids clothing since the seventies – these days even style guru Elin Kling sports a red one. The colors have different meanings here, pink if you’re feminist, green for vegan and so on – which has nothing to do with the orginal kaffiyeh. If you are in the US, British or coalition forces you’ll call it shemagh and it’ll come in army green. Either way, Dunkin’ Donuts decided to pull the offending Rachel Ray banner and issued a full apology. I’m guessing that the stylist won’t shop at Urban Outfitters again which is just as well.
Update: Offending rich media banner inside (though I can’t seem to make it work properly)

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WIPO has released their administrative panel decision in regards to the domain name Teflonminne, which I told you about here: DuPont’s Teflon does not want to go the way of Hoover – C&D’s Swedish bloggers for speaking Swedish.. Quick recap.
Dupont:

Complainant asserts that the word “teflonminne”, forming the distinctive element of the disputed domain name, is not a word of the Swedish language, as evidenced by the fact that the word is not included in The Swedish Academic Glossary (SAOL), being the most authoritative dictionary in regards to the Swedish language.

Complainant further holds that the domain name was registered and is being used in bad faith. Complainant argues that the domain name’s allusion to the non-stick attributes of the trademark establishes Respondent’s knowledge of the TEFLON mark.

Teflonminne:

Respondent argues that the term “teflonminne” is an established and frequently used word in the Swedish language.

Respondent further asserts that the word “teflon” may be used in other ways than to describe Complainant’s trademark. Respondent holds that several dictionaries categorize the word “teflon” both as a trademark, an adjective, a noun, a part of speech and defining its “metaphoric extention”.

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Have you heard that old myth about the McDonald’s burger makers? That there’s a team of specialist burger makers who fly around the world to make the perfect burger, shake and fries for every local ad shoot ever. We could make a movie about them, make it like Top Gun where a kid with extreme burger flipping talent gets to join the ten bestest burger flippers in the world and fly to exotic locations to make exotic burgers like the Japanese Teriyaki burger and of course, the Royal with cheese. I’m not sure what’s gonna kill Iceman yet, perhaps a freak fry accident.

Anyway, that myth isn’t true. There is no special team that creates those fab looking burgers for every ad shoot – sorry to kill the hopes of any aspiring McDonalds college kids. I just went there because in the world of global communication and global brands, perhaps there should be.

Take the latest spat that Coke got itself into. Somewhere in Germany, some “point” snack shop was carrying an old Coke poster from 2003 which shows Buddhist monks on a rollercoaster with the slogan: “Make it real” in the window still – and right now with the current newly inflamed China/Tibet wound it’s been misunderstood by a Chinese ex-pat living in Germany. A member of Tianya.com posted some photographs on the site and wrote:“Germany has started to really show adverts for Tibetan independence. Coca-Cola! Okay, I will remember. From now on I will not touch this shitty product! The three monks represent Tibetan lamas. They are riding a rollercoaster, which represents freedom. ‘Make it real’ means ‘make this [ie freedom] real'”. There are a couple of photographs of the offending old posters in situ here*. The Guardian reported “While one commenter suggested his interpretation was “far-fetched”, many more leapt to his support, pledging to stop drinking Coca-Cola.” Personally, I wish these people would stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

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There were quite a few interesting Karlssons Klister outdoor executions in Stockholm this week – sadly the best one (possibly) was taken down before I had time to photograph it. In that execution the entire inside of an bus-poster had been removed (no lights!) so you could look straight through it and the text read “in case of emergency, break glass”, inside the glass was a single real tube of Karlssons. Having broken a heel or two chasing after a bus I found it to be highly appropriate, and possibly even useful.

Here’s one that failed though. When advertising a super glue, the glue must work. The keys on the screen might have been “ctrl” and “z” but as you can see, now there’s only Z. They used double-sided tape, same mistake as the Sydsvenskan diary billboard made.

I saw another one as I was dashing to my train, a poster stuck slanted high up on the wall between the “real” poster sites at the central station. Didn’t have time to snap a shot, but the placement was funny.

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This is all getting a little silly.
Dupont has been sending out cease and desist letters to Swedish bloggers who have the domains Teflonminne.org and now Teflonminne.se – in the latter link you can read PDF’s from Dupont linked at the bottom of his post (see Hotbrevet, Bilaga 1, Bilaga 2.) All links are in Swedish only.

Dupont are simply defending their trademarked name “Teflon”, something Hoover should have done before it became a term simply meaning “to vacuum” in the UK, and in Swedish the trademarked named “Jeep” is now synonymous with SUV, so any car that has SUV qualities is called a Jeep even if it’s a Honda.

Obviously, Dupont don’t want this to happen, and the way some trademark laws sound it seems you have to at least make a show of defending your trademark in order to keep your trademark so one could gather that the C&D is really just for show. However, Teflon became a registered trademark in Sweden as late as in 1999, while the word “teflonminne” meaning “scatterbrain”, “featherhead”, or plain “confused” as it symbolizes nothing sticking to your memory has been used in colloquial Swedish for much longer than that and even the dictionary explains that common usage includes describing stuff that nothing sticks on as in “teflon politician”.

Not sure how their trademark-defending case will go, but I know this for certain – C&D’ing random bloggers to give up their rights of their domains is buying Dupont and “teflon” a boatload of bad publicity in Sweden.

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Obama is getting a little desperate, judging by the fact that he’s now advertising in Canada.

An election sign with a difference is making drivers on the Pat Bay Highway wonder if they missed the border.
The red, white and blue billboard proclaims “Obama for President” and underneath, just in case there is confusion, adds “United States of America.” The full-size billboard was paid for by Dean Park residents Reg and Karen Mooney with the dual purpose of provoking family debate and putting in a personal push to get troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I guess there’s dumber things to spend your money on, though I can’t think of any right now.

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