Dear Pizza Hut,
“Viral Marketing” is the wrong kind of virus when you insult small business owners and act smug, condescending, and bullying. When the biggest pizza chain in the world makes fun of local pizza shops, the little guy isn’t the one who looks bad.
Not that I would eat at Pizza Hut anyway,
Joshua
Fusion Ad Network
Daring Fireball mentioned this recently:
“Given how successful The Deck has been, and how much better I believe The Deck’s basic model to be versus “regular” web advertising, I’ve long wondered why there weren’t any other Deck-like ad networks. Now there is one: Fusion Ads. Good ideas deserve to spread; I hope this blossoms.”
As I hinted at a few days ago (thanks everyone for the feedback), I’ve been contemplating blog advertising. Obviously, I made a decision.
I’m happy to join up with Fusion Ads. I’m happy that the network includes sites I was already reading. I’m happy it only displays a single, tasteful ad per page with minimal text (which still took me quite awhile to decide how to incorporate into a blog layout that’s never had a sidebar). I’m happy the advertisers are products I’d probably use anyway. In general, I’m happy.
I’ve never really had much of a plan for blogging. It’s something I enjoy, and so I keep doing it. I’ve met some wonderful people through it. I’ve learned a bunch of stuff. I hope that partnering up with Fusion Ads will give me a little more time to devote to making the conversations here better. And I hope some of my happy keeps making it through the internet to you. Thanks for reading/visiting and just generally loving the internet with me. Onward and upward.
The Atheist Bus Campaign
The donation-funded Atheist Bus Campaign launched today in the UK with the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
They want to use the advertising to “brighten people’s days on the way to work, help raise awareness of atheism…encourage more people to come out as atheists…and help people think for themselves.” and as a direct counter to recent overtly Christian adverts on buses in the UK. The back-and-forth public dialogue is interesting and welcomed. The assertion that I can’t think for myself and be a person of faith is tired and trite.
I’d embed the video, but I won’t subject you to auto-playing anything. Dancer David Elsewhere doing his thing for a Motorola campaign. Highly enjoyable.
The thing I hate most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative, ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little. — Banksy
YoutTube is trying out full-length videos here and there in an effort to see if they’ll be more marketable for advertisers. If the content is compelling, sure, I might sit in front of my computer for long stretches of time (Hulu proves this consistently). But I certainly won’t watch a horribly compressed YouTube video for that long. Maybe I’m in the minority?
Paula Scher/Pentagram’s updated identity for The Public Theater is, as always, typographically delicious. Redrawn in HF&J’s KnockOut typeface (bye, Akzidenz Grotesk) and set in 90° angles, the (now classic identity) is so very New York and inspiring and this year’s advertising is stellar (which makes up for ‘04-07, which were less than stellar in light of previous years.)
Advertising icon and author Paul Arden died yesterday. His book It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be: The World’s Best Selling Book is one of my favorites, and was extremely formative for me and my understanding of creating great work for clients.
Microsoft, CP+B, Advertising, and Why It’s All Noise
Apple is having a good time at the expense of Microsoft in almost every commercial they make. So Microsoft’s response is to hire Crispin Porter + Bogusky and give them a $300mil blank check (kidding… mostly) to woo the younger set, ostensibly convincing everyone from 18-35 that Microsoft and their products are cool and hip.
Ignoring the fact that Microsoft and their products aren’t cool or hip, and ignoring the fact that CP+B only knows how to market to one target audience (honestly, how hard is it to write ads specifically targeted at college guys?), how is this going to work? How is this going to directly effect the bottom line of selling more Microsoft products?
Because if it does anything other than bringing in more dollars than it spends, it’s a complete waste of time and money for everyone except CP+B, who get to have fun w/ a budget and win awards (and get new business to replace the old business they lost because most advertising doesn’t actually work, it just gets talked about and looks pretty, which is very different than selling more products.)
The graphic design community doesn’t like advertising; it thinks advertising’s immoral. (It doesn’t count book covers, CD covers, annual reports, magazine covers, corporate brochures, real estate brochures and promotions for cultural institutions as advertising). — Paula Scher, excerpted from Advertising Got Better
Quote, “…Improve your brand in the eyes of the Lord. If God loves your brand, it will become stronger and more successful.” Thanks, Christvertising!
The Doritos Mousetrap was the only SuperBowl commercial that truly delighted me. (Although the Pepsi Justin Timberlake ad did elicit a few chuckles over guacamole.)
Spam En Español and Targeted Marketing
Enterprise Rent-A-Car just sent me an unsolicited email. En Español. If you’re going to interrupt me with advertising, at least make sure it’s correctly targeted.
Thanks to Amazon.com and their Affiliate tools, I now have a .com/booklist page full of recommended reading. There’s more to be added in time, but it’s a good start for now.
Illustrator Siggi Eggertsson
Icelandic illustrator Siggi Eggertsson updates his portfolio with all kinds of goodness, like this Polar Bear here.
His work is energetic, fresh, angular, uniquely colorful, typographically delectable, and highly creative. Check out the style on this illustration of British band Zoot Woman and the variety of styles in these posters for the Coke Side of Life campaign.
Study up!
Sales is rooted in what’s good for me. Evangelism is rooted in what’s good for you. — Guy Kawasaki, author of Selling the Dream and Rules for Revolutionaries
For a limited time only, Paste Magazine wants you to name your own price for a one year subscription. That’s 11 issues and 11 CDs (with roughly 220 songs) for a minimum fee of $1.
I wish more money and time was spent on designing an exceptional product, instead of trying to psychologically manipulate perceptions through expensive advertising. — Phil Kotler, marketing guru
More Trigon BlueCross/BlueShield Commercials
When I rolled across the first commercial with this young Bill Cosby-ish kid talking about being injured…injured bad, I was basically overwhelmed with radness. I wasn’t aware that there were other commercials in this campaign.
Our little man also does Karate (shown on the left), his compatriot discusses snotty doctors, and two kids ponder the finer point of differentiating spinach from Spanish. It doesn’t hurt that the background music is Apple-esque in its bouncy, friendly simplicity.
What I really wanted [AMC TV series Mad Men] to be more like was Mad Max. I wanted the hero to be a little off his rocker about doing great work. I wanted to see him threaten to jump out a window to sell a bagel ad…Because advertising is something that deserves to be shown for what it is — an art form…Mad Men should have been about the real heroes in our industry: Those who didn’t just sell toilet paper and cake mix, but changed culture. Those who didn’t know they would be our heroes by simply doing their best. Those who believed in what they were doing without thinking too much of themselves. — Bart Cleveland, ‘Mad Men’ Could Use More Mad Max
I should just start a post category called More Proof That The Advertising Industry Is So Completely In Love With Itself That It Can’t Think Straight. Mad Max? Art form? Culture changing? Selfless devotion to craft? Freaking HEROES? Are you serious? Your job is to dress up things I don’t need in a package that makes me believe I have to have them. And then repeat. You sell things. You are a salesman. (And I am, too.) You sell toilet paper and cake mix. Get over it. Do it well. I’m a pretty positive guy, but the noble hero rhetoric is almost unbearable.