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A bizarre Christmas commercial from Russia is under fire for showing Santa Claus trying to teach a single mother a lesson in being a better parent—by abducting her and dragging her through the wilderness by a rope and eventually pulling a knife on her. And the ad's creators seem baffled that anyone could have a problem with it. The spot, for Credit Bank of Moscow, was created by ad agency 3Sba. It is beautifully shot, which makes it even weirder—clearly no expense was spared in producing the film, yet how no one raised a red flag during its creation is baffling. Check out the ad here...
As Text: "Fortunately, the Air Dri-Goat features a patented, goat-like out sole for increased traction, so you can taunt mortal injury without actually experiencing it. Right about now you're probably asking yourself, "How can a trail running shoe with an outer sole designed like a goat's hoof help me avoid compressing my spinal cord into a Slinky on the side of some unsuspecting conifer, thereby rendering me a drooling, misshapen, non-extreme-trail-running husk of my former self, forced to roam the Earth in a motorized wheelchair with my name, embossed on one of those cute little license plates you get at carnivals or state fairs, fastened to the back?" To that we answer, hey, have you ever seen a mountain goat (even an extreme mountain goat) careen out of control into the side of a tree? Didn't think so." Nike pulled the ad after receiving a slew of complaints....
Comic short films about the absurdity of the ad business have a proud history going back to Tim Hamilton's brilliant Truth in Advertising. Here's the latest one—director Tim Mason's No Other Way to Say It, about an amusingly bleak voiceover recording session for an ice-cream commercial. As the creative team tries to get the voiceover artist to nail the right tone for a single line, over and over—and the latter gets more and more distracted—the truth in advertising here becomes painfully clear: The project is mired in idiocy and inertia...
The nonprofit Online Trust Alliance (OTA) on Wednesday conducted a study that found 71% of native ads on top media sites fail to offer adequate labeling, transparency, and complete consumer disclosure.
This is a blow to the native ad/branded content business and should be a wake-up call for publishers and content studios.
The study, an analysis of native ads on the top 100 news websites, found that 71% earned failing scores for disclosures, delineation, and discoverability. The bottom line: The sites didn’t offer consumers the ability to easily discern pure editorial from ads.
As most readers of this column know, native advertising refers to Web site content that’s funded and produced outside the publisher’s editorial review or influence, yet is designed to appear similar to editorial on that site. As the OTA mentions, “this illustrates the tension -- paid for and controlled separately, but presented in a way to appear as editorial. The potential for audience confusion or misinterpretation is obvious, and the rapid rise in the deployment of native has already prompted concerns from advocates, media and regulators.”...
“While the industry looks at native advertising as the holy grail to drive new revenues, they are failing to address the long-term issue. With 71% of native ads failing to pass the consumer transparency acid test, this report should be a wake-up call to the industry. Inaction is not an option. Conversely, providing these concrete examples and recommendations helps advertisers, networks and publishers in moving forward,” Craig Spiezle, executive director at the Online Trust Alliance, told Native Insider via email.
Ryanair, the Irish low-cost airline, is 24-hour £9.99 flash sale for people who "need a getaway" after the UK voted to leave the European Union. An ad for the promotion on Twitter takes on the famous "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys and replaces them with UKIP leader Nigel Farage, former London Mayor Boris Johnson, and justice secretary Michael Gove - the leading three figures of the Leave campaign. Ryanair, was firmly in the Remain camp - so much so that it had sent out a marketing email earlier on Friday morning - hours ahead of the official referendum results - to promote the sale, reading: "Celebrate remaining in Europe with 1 million seats from £9.99."...
Cannes Lions has its second cringeworthy moment, this time from a Bronze Lion winner. The outdoor ad, for Bayer from AlmapBBDO in Sao Paulo, reads "Don't worry babe, I'm not filming this.mov" and features aspirin boxes. Cindy Gallop, the former agency exec and vocal women's advocate, has again brought attention to Cannes Lions ceremony tweeting a photo of the ad and commenting, "Don't use this to sell aspirin, male-dominated ad industry [and] don't award it, male dominated juries." UPDATE: Bayer has asked the agency to discontinue the campaign....
I was struck by the recent research that 60% of clicks on mobile banner ads are accidental. The main contributing factor was identified as fat finger syndrome. With mobile on track to become the third largest advertising medium, accounting for 12% of all ad spend, that’s an enormous disconnect. Of course it’s not fat fingers that are to blame. It’s the state of mobile design....
Burger King took out a full-page, open-letter-style ad in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune this morning, calling for a truce with McDonald's and suggesting they join forces to create a "McWhopper" burger.
But McDonald's is having none of it.Burger King's idea was to "get the world talking" about the Peace One Day charity, which is lobbying for September 21 to become an official Peace Day. Fernando Machado, the fast-food chain's senior vice president for global brand management, said it wasn't just a PR stunt and that BK was hoping McDonald's would agree to sell the hybrid burger September 21....
The great thing about social media is that it allows whatever stupid thing you want to say to reach your audience instantly. The terrible thing about social media is that it allows whatever stupid thing you want to say to reach your audience instantly. It takes about 30 seconds of thought to accurately gauge whether your brilliant marketing gimmick will build brand engagement or be prosecuted as some kind of hate crime in certain countries in Europe.
The folks on this list did not take those 30 seconds......
A global ad agency has sparked outrage with its mattress firm cartoon promo showing Pakistani teen Malala Yousafzai being shot in the head.
Ogilvy & Mather is catching serious heat for the sick illustration for Indian bedding firm Kurl-On that sees the young schoolgirl "bouncing back" from being hit by a Taliban gunman.
In the advert Malala is shot in the face, falls backwards covered in blood and is treated in hospital.
But then, after bouncing off the mattress, she receives an award wearing her trademark pink and gold hijab....
By now, you’ve probably read the New York Times piece that’s been making the rounds lately. If not, here’s the upshot: it concludes that Google AdWords isn’t practical for small businesses.
Unfortunately, it’s not the first time the Gray Lady has gone after AdWords, nor is it the first time that the paid search community has responded so vigorously in its defense. The real tragedy of the latest piece isn’t that AdWords has been singled out – it’s that the Times (and the business owners it interviewed) have once again missed the point....
While our society hasn't quite managed holograms that accost you, I can only assume the blueprints are sitting on a workbench somewhere as we speak. Because every week or two, advertisers figure out some new way to colonise some hitherto peaceful space within our society with their incessant yammering.
And the somewhat stalky behaviour exhibited in Minority Report has a parallel in the recent behaviour of the US department store Nordstrom, which admitted to monitoring its customers' location within their stores by monitoring their Wifi connections.
The other day I was at a petrol station filling up my car. No sooner had I detached the pump from the bowser than a screen sprang to life above it, forcing me to endure non-stop jingles as I stood there resentfully. Apparently it wasn't enough for the petrol station to be slugging me the exorbitant price that petrol goes for nowadays....
The customer is always right, as these 11 companies learned the hard way.... Exceptional bad PR lessons...
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I've lived and breathed and thought about this space every single day, and here's the sad conclusion I've arrived at: digital display advertising doesn't work.
I think it's safe to say that digital display advertising has never lived up to the promise and the hype. Since the very beginning, advertisers have been obsessed with finding ways to get people to click on their ads. They've worked with an array of ad creation platforms and embraced programmatic methods so that the right ads get in front of the right people, and yet the click-through average across all platforms and methodologies is .06 percent.
This means that for every 1,000 times an ad is shown, it is clicked on only .6 times. This means that for the average digital display campaign to get a single click, it needs to be served 1,800 times....
The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates malicious advertising ”malvertising” costs the U.S. digital marketing, advertising, and media industry $8.2 billion annually. A few years ago malvertising was merely scamming the system: fake ads, fake traffic, fake analytics. Ad tech is a hacker's heaven, an unregulated labyrinth of circumlocution systems for bidding, placing and tracking ads. "All the code is awful and you aren't allowed to change it anyway," says Salon developer Aram Zucker-Scharff. "Usually ad servers claim they run some sort of checks, but considering just how many malicious or badly formed ads get through, it is pretty apparent they don't do much." The hacker's goal is to bill, aka bilk, advertisers for ads no human ever saw. Their fraud takes several forms: Ad stacking piles multiple ads on top of each other. Ad stuffing shrinks ads to invisible 1-pixel squares. Click farms send fraud users to real sites. Clickjacking sends real users to fraud sites....
Gold's Gym is acting quickly today to defuse a PR crisis sparked by an Egyptian franchisee who created a social media post that showed a pear and said "This Is No Shape for a Girl." (UPDATE: The gym chain has posted a lengthy explanation and apology on Facebook, where the company says it has terminated its franchisee agreement with the location behind the ad. See below for the company's full statement.) While the Egyptian location has apologized for the image, it remains in circulation on social media, with many thinking it's an official marketing image for the gym chain. This morning, Gold's Gym's official Twitter account has been responding to many of the ad's critics....
The advertising model was broken, and Bill Grizack knew how to fix it." At The Variable, it was my job to invent the future of creative advertising strategy," his LinkedIn profile boasted. "I developed the staff and the technology that leveraged big data into meaningful creative insights, and built a creative team that new [sic] how to use those insights to create brilliant work." Switching to the third person, he wrote: "One of the luckiest periods in his life was working on both Coca-Cola and Jack Daniel's at the same time. For a man that went to college in the Southeast, there isn't much better than that." Those statements, like so many others made by Bill Grizack, were lies....
Cannes Lions 2016 has its first truly cringeworthy moment, in the form of a party invitation seeking "attractive females and models only." The email went out to a number of festival participants who planned to attend The Wednesday Party, an event sponsored by digital agency VaynerMedia and media company Thrillist Media Group with a musical performance by Wyclef Jean. UPDATE: Thrillist founder and CEO Ben Lerer responded to the controversy via an internal staff email that appears in part at the bottom of this story. A female agency executive tells Adweek that she and two female colleagues received the email while having lunch in Cannes on Tuesday. One of them forwarded it to women's advocate and agency veteran Cindy Gallop, who subsequently shared it on Twitter and wrote, "It's 2016, @vaynermedia @thrillist. This is not how you party at @cannes_lions." The email was sent by events company iGetIn. Its key section reads (emphasis via the sender of the message): "Thank you for your interest in attending!! Please be aware that this specific list is for attractive females and models only." The note, which was also shared by members of the public Facebook group Cannes for Cannesseurs, then instructs male attendees to "contact the PR departments of the respective sponsors" if they want to get into the party. It requests that women interested in attending send "recent untouched photos and/or your Instagram/Facebook links for you and each of your additional female guest [sic]," adding, "once we have reviewed we will send you specific entry details." ...
Is Todd Gurley actually vegetarian? You have to wonder after watching this Carl's Jr. commercial starring the Los Angeles Rams running back. The spot shows Gurley supposedly biting into the California Classic Double Cheeseburger, but it's blatantly obvious that the burger isn't real—it's a digitally inserted photo that isn't fooling anyone.
Check out the YouTube comments—almost every one is mocking. "That CGI burger is as inflated as your prices," says one. Says another: "Feel free to send me some burgers at my email. Thank you. Also save them in photoshop so I can eat them at a higher res! Thanks!"
The ad has 92 likes and 700 dislikes on YouTube, as of this writing....
Do you remember anything at all when you watch ads -- or is the experience a hazy blur? The fact is, consumers rarely remember a product -- they remember stories, which may inspire the use of the product. That element is what online advertising is lacking. Two weeks ago I talked about the value of complementary storytelling vs. disruption. For advertising to be as effective as it can be, ad stories need to align with the content so that it, along with targeting, ensures relevance of the message in a way that elicits a response.
I also want to remind advertisers to spend the extra time to tell a story that inspires consumers, rather than simply telling them about your product. I don’t mean that all ads have to move you to tears. I’m referring to inspiration in the manner of a quiet...
Your target audience is sick and tired of interruptive ads. They want something more valuable, rich and actionable. The content has to be digestible information, whether it’s presented in the form of an article, a blog post, an infographic, video, memes, podcasts, or short reports.
If you run a blog, your customers are most likely your readers. And if you’re an information marketer, your customer is someone who interacts with you in a certain way, in order to buy your product or service....
I can't believe this.Yes, advertisers lie. Or at least bend the truth a little. Everybody knows that, right?
WRONG. People expect to get what what they see on the billboard, but what they don’t know is that it’s impossible. I mean seriously, have you ever wondered why a Big Mac looks 1000% percent better on TV than what you get at the 2am drive thru?
A new infographic from Finances Online reveals just how far companies will go to make their products seem more appealing – from replacing actual ice cream with mashed potato for a more solid appearance to using motor oil for honey or syrup.
To show the disparity between common ads and actual products, Finances Daily compared popular food, hotel and fashion brands, revealing how different the ad images can look from actual items.....
Online video ads were supposed to be a marketer’s dream. Instead, many become lost in an unruly maze.
...According to the standard spiel, ads in this medium are alluring because they can be aimed at specific audiences. They can roll in front of content that people want to see. They exist in the digital space where coveted demographic groups are spending more time. It’s an enticing portrait, but one that glosses over an essential question: Is anybody watching? By many estimates, more than half of online video ads are not seen, either because they are buried low on web pages or run in tiny, easily ignored video players on those pages, or run simultaneously with other ads. Vindico, an ad management platform company, deemed 57 percent of two billion video ads surveyed over two months to be “unviewable.”...
Apple's new ads are failing.
Here are the 10 most effective ads of Q2 2013, according to Ace Metrix, a company that measures audience responses to commercials. The No.1 spot was by AT&T, advertising a Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, which can survive being dunked in a fishbowl. Samsung's own ad for the GS4 came in at No.8
Apple wasn't on the list...
Computer scientist and author Jaron Lanier has turned his back on the “information wants to free” meme to which he once subscribed, and he thinks advertising as a business model for media is doomed. It’s not just that Craigslist and other Internet businesses have snatched ads away from traditional media, he reckons; it’s that in this digital era, when Google and Facebook increasingly own most of the inventory, not to mention the ad servers and distribution channels, relying on advertising to prop up your media company just doesn’t make sense. youLanier, the guy credited with coming up with the term “virtual reality,” outlines this thesis in his new book “Who Owns the Future?” which examines the effects network technologies have had on our economy. In an interview with Nieman Journalism Lab, Lanier builds on that case, stating flatly that advertising isn’t a viable business plan for media businesses in the long term. He tells the publication...
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Yup this bizarre 5:07 min Russian spot is really great reputation management and destined to sell lots of loans, mortgages and banking services for Credit Bank of Moscow... NOT. Strategy missing in action although it's going viral...