This is f*cking brilliant. Everytime you visit the United Nations Free Rice site and play the word game, grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program.
There are reports of schoolkids from all over the world sitting in class playing this, increasing their vocabulary, and at the same time feeding other kids.
It’s only been launched a month or two, and already the number of grains of rice donated (in lieu of click thru advertising revenue on the site), is in the billions.
My only wish is that you could play within a banner or widget. That way people could embed the service within their own sites.
Go and play for five minutes and see how many dishes of rice you can send.
This ad for Betta Electrical is causing a bit of an uproar here in Australia. Church Groups have claimed the ad by Sydney agency De Pasquale is “tacky and offensive”. Still waiting on what the Rabbi and Mullah think of it, although I suspect their respective versions of the ad would have been slightly different, but let’s not go there.
Personally I’m outraged at the Church Groups outrage. These groups have a monopoly on hang-over prime time TV from 2.30am-5.30am each night and a 24/7 cable television channel in which to pimp their beliefs. Outrage is coming home at 2.30 in the morning after a night on the piss and the only thing on the box is wall-to-wall TV evangelists like Benny Hinn’s ‘Miracle Crusades’ or phone sex ads. Give me the phone sex ads any day, they make more sense and I reckon a few of those girls are miracle workers too in their own special way…
Anyway, enough ranting. Here’s the ad :
Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Cardinal George Pell said “The advertisement is interesting because it shows how commercialised Christmas has become,”
Indeed it has Archbishop, and it seems the ad is working.
Cardinal Pell is presented with a High Definition Plasma TV
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Novartis is awarding more work to Interpublic Group of Cos.' Deutsch, New York, which won the $25 million marketing account for the pharmaceutical giant's new Exelon patch following a review.
Yet another evidence that Europe is far ahead from us. Great commercial.
Here are 10 things that helped me grow in my first year.
CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — In the latest sign that fast feeders are following McDonald's lead, Wendy's is adding a double cheeseburger, christened the Stack Attack, to its value menu.
Established UK Brands Join the LinkShare Affiliate Network
LONDON – December 18, 2007 – LinkShare, a global pay per action (PPA) affiliate, search and lead generation marketing company, is celebrating a successful first year in the UK, having gained a total of – 40 new customer partnerships (25 of them exclusive) since its official launch in August 2006.
Lidy Jacobs‘s fluffy “sex rabbits” are often presented in groups and are interactive. They are attached to the ceiling with straps of fabric and are left to hang loose in space.
Virginis Sanctae
Via bezembinder’s illustrated links and Ileana Tounta art centre.
Watch out for the game Polar Peril which has sucked the life out of the teeny amount of billable hours we have this week anyway, all the adlisters are currently wagering who might get the highest score. I think the top player in our posse right now is Marcus Engstrand with 441.
Then we got this steaming warm greeting dropped off by RobHo. Gee, thanks.
Decorate a stranger this on the other hand is something I can get – uh – behind. Sneak up on a stranger and decorate then while friend documents the whole thing & post to site! It’s like attack of the killer tinsel when done right!
Anyone on the hiring end knows that digital agencies are suffering from a worsening talent drought. You can probably bank on the fact that some of your sharpest talent has one foot out the door. For that reason, you've got to be sure you're tuned in to what your employees are thinking, what they want and what might be driving their dissatisfaction.
Yes, Etech, that O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Earlier this year i met Brady Forrest in Berlin and when he asked to be part of the jury selecting the projects i was everything but enthusiastic, even if he promised that the 2008 edition would be different. Then i saw that i’d be in good company: Alex Steffen from World Changing, Cory Doctorow and David Pescovitz from Boingboing, artist and curator Kati London, etc. We received some really good papers and i’m the first one to admit that i’d never hoped that the programme could be so stimulating. Anyway, now that the papers have all been selected, Brady, Kati London and i are looking for art projects. They will be part of an Etech art fair which will take place during the conference in San Diego on March 3-6, 2008.
The theme of the art exhibition is AWARENESS. Please drop me a line at reg at wmmna dot com if any of you or any of your friends has a project that addresses the way we can unveil what surrounds us and is not immediately visible, from electromagnetic waves to carbon footprint, from corporate activities to genetic information, from social network discrepancies to pollution.
When it comes to being naughty or nice during the office holiday-party season, Havas’s Arnold for the second straight year goes for nasty. In 2006, staffers stripped in creative director Pete Favat’s Boston office. This year, Arnold’s New York outpost greased the poll, with Agency Spy reporting on burlesque antics involving thongs and pasties and speculating about female employees feeling “alienated†(no doubt) and their male counterparts feeling “guilty†(yeah, save that story for your wives). If Arnold’s advertising campaigns were as hot as its parties, it’d be smelting gold at Cannes, to use a really ridiculous metaphor. You know what AdFreak’s holiday party was like? Stale Doritos in the editor’s “ski chalet†(it’s really just his garage) with last year’s withered decorations hanging like so many stockings filled with coal. And the guests! That super-skinny model and the dude with half a jaw barely touched the jalapeño dip, and when the Little Lad dropped his pantaloons to show us his “berries and cream,†I knew it was time to go home.
—Posted by David Gianatasio
Merry Christmas from AKQA, whose gerbil-powered lights might as well spell out “Suck it, PETA†for all the complaints they may get. (OK, so it’s not excessive abuse.) The gerbils run in their little wheel intermittently (sometimes extremely so) from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and by all accounts they enjoy toiling for the amusement of their humanoid oppressors. If AKQA really wants to impress, though, the rodents better make a good showing on Christmas Eve. Christmas music could invigorate them, though might AdFreak suggest the most inspiring song ever written would bring better results?
—Posted by David Kiefaber
Time magazine lists the top ten ads of the year, in youtube-vision.
New York Times: A Year for Quick Hits and Fast Flops as Campaigns Broke New Ground
Adweek: Top ten adtrends 2007
Digital media wire: Analysis: The Top 10 Most Overused Metrics of 2007
And of course Campaign has a list of the top ten ad turkeys of 2007 – but if you’re not a subscriber Swedish tradepress Resumé has gone and made a youtubefied version of that list.
Adfreak needs your vote to figure out which was the freakiest ad moment of 2007. Go there and cast votes, adgrunts!
Oddest form of flattery (?) this year: Someone has started a site called the Ad Rag where “bad advertising comes to die”. That feels oddly familiar but I can’t put my finger on it. I guess they couldn’t take adrag.com or even ad-rag.com because yaknow, I own those. (Sadly, we had to switch to the commercial-archive.com domain back in April 2006 because Norton Internet and other adblocking software were blocking our ad-rag domain errounously.)
The stakes are getting high in our Freakiest Advertising Moment of 2007 contest, which continues today with the Elite Eight. (See the full bracket here.) Four freaky matchups are featured below. Vote for a winner in each one. Voting in this round continues through midnight on Tuesday night.
—Posted by Tim Nudd
Matchup #1:
Italy’s anti-anorexia ads vs. Canada’s anti-dip ads.
Isabelle Caro became the extremely skinny Cinderella story of the tourney when she took down the great undead Orville in the Sweet Sixteen. Now she goes up against Mr. Bloody Face, with a spot in the Final Four at stake.
UPDATE: Lost Jaw backs up his trash talking with a solid win. See the vote totals here.
Matchup #2:
The Back-Up bedside gun rack vs. Dexter’s viral campaign.
The ultraviolent matchup of the tournament so far. Is the Back-Up quick enough on the draw to take down the serial killer and his creepy viral marketing? Only one contestant will advance; the other’s lifeless corpse will be dragged off.
UPDATE: Dexter saws off the shotgun and advances. See the vote totals here.
Matchup #3:
Starburst’s little lad vs. Pioneer’s laughing-eye ads.
The little lad continues his grating, dandyish progression through the tournament, but here he faces biological experiments gone wrong in Pioneer’s Kuro campaign. Expect the lad to sing a particularly shrill berries-and-cream song if he advances.
UPDATE: Pioneer’s mouthy eyes send the little lad home early. See the vote totals here.
Matchup #4:
VW’s bird-poop-eating ad vs. Skittles’ milked man.
Volkswagen’s poop-ingesting driver cleaned up in the early rounds, but now he faces some daunting opposition in Skittles Sours’ laconic man-cow. Neither spot tasted great going down, but only one will advance.
UPDATE: The milked man surges into the Final Four. See the vote totals here.
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.
