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Fresh Cat Food
10.29.2012
02:11 pm
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This little bird was photographed by Nicola Giacomelli earlier this afternoon, apparently advertising cat food, at the local Co-operative store in Brodick.
 
Photo copyright Nicola Giacomelli, with thanks to Colin Gilbert.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.29.2012
02:11 pm
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Serious safe-sex advertising fail

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“Love sex. Hate condoms. Love SKYN.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Maybe there should have been a few question marks in that statement, but there aren’t. It’s an advert for (ironically enough) a new type of condom by the company SKYN, which appears to promote unsafe sex, and definitely promotes a distaste for condoms.

Way to go, guys!

This advert is currently to be seen on a forty foot-high billboard on Manchester’s Canal St, right in the heart of the city’s gay village. Grahame Robertson, the photo’s uploader says:

The ‘Love Sex Hate Condoms’ message - in 6 foot high letters - is irresponsible and disrespectful to a community that has been at the forefront of promoting condom use for over 25 years.

SKYN condoms, who are made by the Mates brand, need to seriously rethink their advertising strategy. This advert will be looming large (literally) over Manchester’s Gay Pride festival, which kicks off in less than two weeks, and it is simply insulting.

If you wish to complain, you can find SKYN on Facebook here.

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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08.14.2012
03:37 pm
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‘Escort Quality, Hooker Pricing’
02.23.2012
03:37 pm
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At first glance, I thought this was some sort of Ron English type of billboard hijacking détournement, but no, it’s a real advertisement!

The above billboard ad for Wódka vodka so offended residents of the Hunts Point neighborhood in the Bronx that it was removed just one day after community leaders complained about it to the advertising agency and in the media. The Wódka billboard, which hung over the Bruckner Expressway, an area known for its brazen streetwalkers, read “Escort Quality, Hooker Pricing.”

Brian Gordon, the managing partner for the marketing company behind the ad, MMG, told the New York Daily News that the same billboard would still be used along the West Side Highway, another area known for street prostitution.

This isn’t the first time that Wódka’s advertising has proven to be controversial. Previous billboards have implied that Jews are cheap and residents of the Hamptons are superior to residents of Newark, NJ.

Elitism, and Antisemitism, both great things to have your product associated with, eh?

There are plenty of other ways for Wódka to get across the notion that it’s marketing a low-budget tipple: Why not just feature an incontinent drunk who’s pissed all over himself as the spokesperson?

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.23.2012
03:37 pm
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New Condoms: Popular brands as condom wrappers
08.19.2011
05:21 pm
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Popular brand slogans as condoms, created by New Condoms. I wonder if this is what’s meant by an advertising package?
 
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More wrappers after the jump…
 
Via Buzzfeed
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.19.2011
05:21 pm
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Advertising industry only interested in reaching the wealthy


 
As if there even is a middle class to reach, anymore… The top 1% control nearly 40% of the wealth and according to the American Affluence Research Council, just 10% of U.S. households “account for almost half of the consumer spending”—an INCREDIBLE one-third of the total GDP!

Why would Madison Avenue want to bother with “the little people”? They haven’t got any money. If you can’t afford a solid gold Bugatti, you don’t exist to them. This is just another one of the almost imperceptible ways that the capitalist system skewers our reality tunnels, both collectively and individually and just fucks us up as a nation:

From Too Much.com:

The chain-smoking ad agency account execs of Mad Men, the hit cable TV series set in the early 1960s, all want to be rich some day. But these execs, professionally, couldn’t care less about the rich. They spend their nine-to-fives marketing to average Americans, not rich ones.

Mad Men’s real-life ad agency brethren, 50 years ago, behaved the exact same way — for an eminently common-sense reason: In mid-20th century America, the entire U.S. economy revolved around middle class households. The vast bulk of U.S. income sat in middle class pockets.

A small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsize purchasing influence. The rich back then, for ad execs, constituted an afterthought, a niche market.

Not anymore. Madison Avenue has now come full circle. The rich no longer rate as a niche. Marketing to the rich — and those about to gain that status — has become the only game that really counts.

“Mass affluence,” as a new white paper from Ad Age, the advertising industry’s top trade journal, has just declared, “is over.”

The Mad Men 1960s America — where average families dominated the consumer market — has totally disappeared, this Ad Age New Wave of Affluence study details. And Madison Avenue has moved on — to where the money sits.

And that money does not sit in average American pockets. The global economic recession, Ad Age relates, has thrown “a spotlight on the yawning divide between the richest Americans and everyone else.”

Taking inflation into account, Ad Age goes on to explain, the “incomes of most American workers have remained more or less static since the 1970s,” while “the income of the rich (and the very rich) has grown exponentially.”

The top 10 percent of American households, the trade journal adds, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a disproportionate share of that spending comes from the top 10’s upper reaches.

“Simply put,” sums up Ad Age’s David Hirschman, “a small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsize purchasing influence — particularly in categories such as technology, financial services, travel, automotive, apparel, and personal care.”

Ya got that? Here’s the part where you might vomit in your mouth a little bit:

America as a whole, the new Ad Age study pauses to note, hasn’t quite caught up with the reality of this steep inequality. Americans still “like to believe in an egalitarian ideal of affluence” where “everyone has an equal shot” at “amassing a great fortune through dint of hard work and ingenuity.”

In actual life, the new Ad Age study points out, “the odds of someone’s worth amounting to $1 million dollars” have shrunk to “1 in 22.”

That’s right, so make sure to vote a straight Republican ticket so when you be makin’ that Donald Trump, 50 Cent or Kim Kardashian-level money, the damned IRS don’t come and take it all…

Via Daily Kos

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.01.2011
06:52 pm
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Weird and wonderful sixties ad for Afri-Cola
04.10.2011
06:40 pm
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Now in its 80th year, Afri-Cola, Germany’s answer to those other well-known soft drinks, has used some wonderfully thirst-quenchin’ advertising to promote itself over the years. None more bizarre than this lip-smackin’ beauty from 1968, which says everything you need to know about the sixties and the “sexy-mini-super-flower-power-pop-op-cola”, Afri-Cola in sixty seconds.
 

 
With thanks to Steve Duffy
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.10.2011
06:40 pm
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Smart and Funny Ways to Get Your Message Across
11.28.2010
05:28 pm
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This is almost what it says on the tin - smart and funny ads, but, you know, I haven’t a scooby what they’re selling.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Awesome Towel


 
With thanks to Ken Cargill
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.28.2010
05:28 pm
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Billboard coupons: visual pollution that earns you beer money
08.15.2010
05:14 am
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James Ready Beer has created one very cool ad campaign. In an effort to save their customers money so they can afford to buy more James Ready Beer the brewery created billboard coupons.

By partnering with local retailers, we created a program that allowed people to take a picture of our billboard, show the picture to the corresponding retailer and receive savings on selected products and services. Saving money meant more beer money.

 
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Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.15.2010
05:14 am
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To Permit Mouth To Be Able To Rejoice
12.16.2009
02:10 pm
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What’s wrong with “bite the wax tadpole” as a slogan for Coca-Cola ?
 
via Coca-Cola Conversations :

When Coca-Cola was first sold in China in 1927, it was obvious to the Coke employees in China that the Coca-Cola trademark must be transliterated into Chinese characters. To find the nearest phonetic equivalent to ?

Posted by Brad Laner
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12.16.2009
02:10 pm
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Five Reasons You No Longer Need an Ad Agency
08.27.2009
08:01 pm
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Having done two tour of duties in the advertising trenches, it’s refreshing to finally see someone speak the truth:

The current agency model is broken. I know it, agencies know it, but luckily for all of us, clients haven’t realized it yet.

After more than a decade of working for an agency (six years on the client side), I have come to several conclusions, none of which are pretty pictures for agencies unless they change. You see, agencies need clients more than clients need agencies, and there has been a fundamental shift in how technology has both enabled and altered that dynamic. It has exacerbated the problem with the explosion of new media channels, and it has also provided the solutions.

We have built an interweaving production process that is designed to produce media the old way, not the new way, and agencies and clients seem to be stuck in this model.

Agencies over the last 20 years have morphed into advanced communication production shops. The offline agencies have desperately been pursuing online projects with their clients, and the online agencies have been trying to do more offline work. What they both have not done, however, is change the process of production. They have been too busy chasing the money.

But agencies used to be so much more than that. They were the creative powerhouses. The ideation shops. The meme creators for their brands across society. Some still are, but is meme creation needed anymore?

Five Reasons You No Longer Need an Ad Agency by Sean X Cummings

Thanks Jose Caballer!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.27.2009
08:01 pm
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