The We Are Gigantic site’s contact section says “We’ve moved” and a telephone number leads a company called Tremendous, which, following We Are Gigantic, is pretty funny.
Madonna debuts her new single "4 Minutes (to Save the World)" in a new Sunsilk commercial that hits the screens around the world today. The song is from the singer's forthcoming album, "Hard Candy," due April 29. The track will also be premiering simultaneously on multiple radio stations worldwide at noon GMT and will be available as a download tomorrow via the Madonna Store.
Adweek is running an article by Alex Bogusky, wherein he reflects on his welcome to the lovely hamlet of Boulderado.
When we decided to move a portion of the agency to Boulder, Colo., a very surprising thing happened: The mayor’s office asked to take a meeting.
I was excited and a bit nervous. Boulder has done an amazing job managing its growth.
Well, these people I admired so much opened the meeting with a great line — one that made me gulp. “Boulder isn’t looking for any new businesses,” they said. “We have enough and as a city we only allow 1 percent growth per year.”
Oh shit, I thought. Boulder is a closed game and they’re not going to let us play.
Then something amazing happened: They said, “But.” My heart soared like an eagle. There was still a chance. And then what they said after the “but” blew me away.
“But yours is a creative company working in the field of creativity and employing creative individuals, and that is exactly what we want to invite more of into our community.”
Oh, baby. I was home.
As I was attempting to be the quintessential creative mind yesterday, sitting in a coffee shop with my apple laptop & black sketchbook, i carelessly gazed around the coffee shop only to notice something I hadn’t given much thought to: advertising was everywhere. The Coffee sleeves had ads for an upcoming movie, courtesy of BriteVision. There were table toppers for local events and restaurants. There were even ads under the table glass. And then the dozens of concert, performance, festival, etc. flyers in the window. It was as if when I wasn’t looking, someone bombed the coffee shop with advertising. And then I realized maybe I just haven’t been paying attention.
It’s one thing to see one “new media channel” evolve or to discover a new medium, like human skin, corneas, the ocean, or on an escalator, but as a consumer (and a human), it’s only good up to a certain point. Ad after ad after ad, in the same environment, certainly changes the effectiveness. As new technology evolves and allows us to place messages in new and often unheard of locations, the question has to be asked “is it necessary?” Just because we can, does that mean we should?
On the subject of the coffee shop, where branding never seems to cease: we now have ads on the top of the cup. Yes. the top. (or we could, potentially). Inventor Oleksiy Pokalo has created a fairly simple device that can “print” a logo on top of your cup of coffee.
Just on the off chance that your coffee shop doesn’t have enough logos floating around as is. What’s next?
LONDON – Whitbread, the leisure group, is in talks with the owner of budget hotel chain Travelodge over a merger with its Premier Inn brand.
While we’re not sure what making a bed has to do with a hospital’s ability to successfully perform a hip replacement or being ranked tops among all hospital responding to a heart attack, we do like this new commercial from Boston-based Winsper for Exeter Hospital.
According to Adweek, Pepsi-Cola North America is launching an original online series to support Mountain Dew this summer.
The soda giant will serve as its own studio for a serialized action-adventure production from film writer-directors Shawn Papazian and Art Brown.
To encourage online engagement, viewers will able to alter the storyline by selecting from a menu of options after each episode that take the series in different creative directions, akin to the Choose Your Own Adventure book franchise.
LONDON – The Prime Minister’s director of political strategy, Spencer Livermore, is to join the SSF Group as a senior strategist working across Saatchi & Saatchi and Fallon.
Carat has revised its outlook on the global advertising market, offering a gloomier forecast for the year.
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Outdoor advertising company Biggles Banners is launching a campaign this summer targeting holidaymakers in coastal towns and beaches in the UK.
LONDON – WPP is launching an outdoor trading tool handing local advertisers access to poster sites that would otherwise be considered too niche for national brands.
LONDON – James Murdoch has lured BSkyB’s group director of communications and brand marketing Matthew Anderson across to News Corporation.
LONDON – Programming distributor Channel 4 International has promoted senior sales executive Patrick Roberts to the role of vice-president of international sales.
LONDON – Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web, has said that he would cancel his account with his web provider if it started to track his internet activity.
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, here’s a look back at one of the great Guinness commercials of all time: 1999’s “Surfer†from AMV BBDO in London. In crafting the spot, art director Walter Campbell and copywriter Tom Carty were inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and, especially, by Walter Crane’s 1893 painting Neptune’s Horses, which shows ghostly white horses galloping atop a crashing surf. In a phone interview years ago, Campbell told me, “We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could bring that [painting] to life.’ †The spot was directed by Jonathan Glazer, the hot-shot music-video director who would go on to direct Sexy Beast the following year. The ad, which British viewers voted the best TV commercial of all time in a 2000 poll, is renowned for its violent Hawaiian surf footage. As Campbell put it, “Instead of making the kind of surf film where people say, ‘Hey, I’d like to do that,’ we wanted to say, ‘Maybe you should think twice about coming out here.’ †Campbell and Carty’s other triumph for Guinness was 1998’s “Swimblack†spot. See that one here.
—Posted by Tim Nudd
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — Fans of Fox's "24," facing an unusually long gap between seasons, can rejoice — Unilever and Degree for Men antiperspirant are coming to the rescue. Degree is breaking the second year of its "24"-inspired webisode series "The Rookie" today in conjunction with the News Corp. network. Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Chad Johnson, who's been a Degree pitchman for two years, will play "Agent Ocho" in the series of six weekly three-minute shows.
LONDON – Ingvar Sviggum has been appointed vice president marketing sales and service for Ford of Europe, effective 1 April.
This week’s Advertising Age is nearly entirely devoted to issues surrounding digital marketing and web advertising. I highly recommend it. There’s a lot of good stuff to read, and the Ad Age staff did a great job covering as much of it as they could. It’s both a high-level look at the state of digital as well as a dive into specific topics.
Here’s a bit of one article, written by Matthew Creamer:
What you’re about to read is not an argument for making over web marketing as a factory for destination websites or for making every brand a content player. This, however, is a call to give some thought to a question that’s not asked enough about the Internet: Should it even be viewed as an ad medium? After all, in some quarters of the broader marketing world, the habit of looking at advertising as the most important tool in the marketers’ toolbox is undergoing intense interrogation. Consider the growth of the word-of-mouth marketing business, premised on the notion that people not corporations who help other people make consumer decisions. Or look at the growing importance put on public relations and customer-relationship management both in marketing circles and even in the c-suite.
The same conversation should be going on around the Internet. Trends like those listed suggest the possibility of a post-advertising age, a not-too-distant future where consumers will no longer be treated as subjects to be brainwashed with endless repetitions of whatever messaging some focus group liked. That world isn’t about hidden persuasion, but about transparency and dialogue and at its center is that supreme force of consumer empowerment, the Internet. But when you look at how the media and marketing business packages the Internet — as just more space to be bought and sold — you have to worry that the history of mass media is just trying to repeat itself. Rarely a fortnight goes by without some new bullish forecast for ad growth that works to stoke digital exuberance within media owners that often drowns out critical thinking about the medium itself.
Yeah, that critical thinking stuff sometimes gets lost when there are mountains of money changing hands.
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.
