A rant about digital and the future and that kind of stuff.
Or why your digital ad is a ‘fart button’.

Lately I’m meeting more and more people who ‘know about digital’ and to be honest I think I’ve uncovered a latent tendency to self-harm. Or Tourette’s.

Time was when we (that’s not the royal we btw) could impress people with our digital magic. “And when you click this here, tadaaaaa that thing happens…” Sigh.

Not now.

Advertising has caught up. Clients have caught up. And now they know that if you click ‘this’ then ‘that’ happens. Because any tool can do that. And when I say tool I mean dick. Or Tom or Harry.

Digital is now a staple on the media plans. It’s a channel. And for a lot of agencies that’s it.

There’s a formula now. They do a TV ad. They pull some stills. That’s the Digital Display ads done. Yay! And now we’ll put the ad on You Tube.

Stabs leg. FUCK!

Here is an infomercial starring the former Sham Wow/Slap Chop spokesman who was last seen "getting the crap kicked out of him" by a prostitute.

The Guardian spells out doom. Zuckerberg is King, even if I didn't vote for him. In "Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass" Adrian Short even pulls out the old 'if you're not paying for it, you are the product', a cliché I am also guilty of using when hating on Facebook. He dubs the phenomena of 'if you're not on Facebook you're not on the web' to antisocial networking.

Left to right: Vince Cullers Advertising self-promo ad, the Afro Sheen 'Wantu Wazuri' campaign and a promo-poster for Putney Swope

Season five of AMC's Mad Men is soon here and fans are eagerly awaiting it, while others are still asking the question: Where are all the black mad men? The Root shines a spotlight on a few of the African American pioneers in advertising, pointing out Vincent Cullers, Georg Olden and Tom Burrell, and say:

The oldest advertising trick in the book to attract the straight male buyer is to drape a half-naked lady across the product. The second oldest is to color something pink, when your advertising target is a woman. Bonus points if you manage both to pink-ify a traditionally 'male' item, such as a toolkit, and have a nude woman drape it across her. Win-win, both targets love it, right?

Wrong.

The sharp tack Lucia Elliott, whom I had the pleasure of chatting with at the CampaignBrief party, shares a few thoughts on the third days session in Cannes, called "Beyond Mad Men; Gender Balance in Creative Roles". She writes The end of the boys club?.

In fact I suspect that the same topic at Cannes a decade ago would have uncovered identical themes and language: life balance, gender hard-wiring, male ego/female self-doubt, ‘having it all’ and the glass ceiling. The tempo may be a little jauntier these days, but the song remains the same.

One of our favorite hobbies in the ad-business is the rename old phenomena with new buzzworthy lingo, then hold seminars write books and sing ka-ching all the way to the bank with it. I always felt that WOM was a bit like tupperware parties 2.0, and The Denver Egotist found this example of old school ambient from 1955. We may think we're breaking new grounds, but what we're actually doing is using the same tried and true working methods in new grounds.

First, let’s define a ‘Scam’ ad.

A scam ad is the industry term for an ad made simply for the purpose of entering it into advertising award shows. It’s made for a client without the client’s consent, and sometimes, the agency or creatives don’t even have that client on their roster.

It may run once, paid for by the agency. Many times, it never runs at all.

Crispin's Tiffany Rolfe ponders this and offers as solution at Creativity.

Women are hardwired to kick ass and nurture at the same time. But unfortunately the advertising business isn't known for nurturing. It's competitive, it's fast and it's filled with insecurities. We don't want to be replaced by the newer, younger, better model.

Hello I'm David has posted "Crowdsourcing fucks us all in the ass, and here’s how" which is a good read. He deduces those who do participate in crowdsourcing competitions are either insane, don't care about being professional, or live in India, and none of them have cotton socks!

Today it's nationaldagen in Sweden, and as Wikipedia will tell you, it's sort of a recent holiday: "National Day of Sweden (Sveriges nationaldag) is a national holiday observed in Sweden on June 6 every year. The day was renamed and finally justified as national day by Riksdagen, the Swedish parliament, in 1983. Previously it was commemorated as svenska flaggans dag, Swedish flag day." We're confused about this as we don't have the 4th of July bombastic fireworks tradition, or the 17th of May all-day family friendly Norwegian happy party. Nor do we have a national day of massive parades, wine and cheer like the French Bastille Day which is so contagious even other countries celebrate it.

The most recent example of a shared photo that made its way around the web and into the paid news is Stefanie Gordon's shuttle launch photo. MSNBC tells the full story in : That famous space shuttle photo: When is sharing stealing?

Gordon's photo has been viewed nearly 1 million times, and shown by media TV, Web and print news outlets around the world. She was paid by precisely five news organizations.

I started my goofing off day with a college basketball game. Yea, total couch potato bliss until the first popup covered the score. Not all my anger was directed at the mere presence of the popup, some was saved for the content of the ad. A Ford F-150 pickup image plus some blah blah message. My first thought was Ford sued Ferrari. Not a thought about the truck.Of course I tweeted my thoughts.

Naturally Official Formula One had nothing to say but the news media had a field day. From the BBC News

I saw a press release from Sears that they launched an online platform for local Chicago-area merchants to sell their products and merchandise. Supposedly, local “mom and pop” shops can sell their products on Sears.com to help increase business for them and help the local economy stay competitive.

It sounds all good and all, but doesn’t this platform sound familiar ala Amazon.com and eBay.com? Both Amazon and eBay allow local merchants and even individual people sell used and “new” products online all the time. This has been happening for about a decade now.

When I told my fellow bloggers about this, they all agreed. This platform has been done to death and nothing is new about a third party store (or individual) selling products on a large retail website.

He's been mocked by Russell Howard, he's been at the school protest, he's been spotted at the news report of a building fire in Peckham, he's been seen laying down flowers at the memorial of victims of the 7/7 attack. People thought he might be viral marketing for something - after all, we're used to it now with faceless people and such. Maybe he was like the Observer pointing to the pattern in Fringe - this might even explain why the man only owns one pale skin-colored shirt. Blogs like Fidgetwith collected screenshots of his appearances.

Well, his name is Paul Yarrow and he's now been interviewed in London Evening Standard, by the BBC and even become the star of the flash game "Kick the news stalker".

You know, a good friend of mine actually told me about the Jen Cassetty fitness app that's free for download on the iPhone.

At first, thought it was a marketing ploy (he's a publicist) since the app is still in its early stages. The app, created by a NYC Fitness trainer at Crunch Gym, was designed to offer clients 24/7 access to her. Whether her clients were in Tokyo, LA, Miami or Japan, the app allowed them to see her fitness tweets, videos on Facebook and nutrition advice.

Again -- I'm thinking it's nothing but a marketing tool to promote this trainer. How can tweets and Facebook videos motivate clients without having a physical trainer present?

It's been clear for quite some time that we don't fancy PETA ads around here. Nudity for attentions sake is nothing but a cheap trick that PETA loves to employ. What's more, PETA are deceptive in both their advertising and the origins of the creative ads, for example that "hot dinner" vegetarian ad with the sexy food isn't an original PETA rejected from the 2002 superbowl, but an ad created by the Vegetarian Society UK in 1998 - caffeinegoddess busted that fib wide open years ago.

We can argue wether using sexy and misogynist images to get attention is justifiable in the comments, that's half the fun. You'd think that when PETA are acutely aware of the link between animal cruelty and domestic abuse, they might consider what their own images of women are doing in the big picture. We do know that their tactics seem successful, with PETA being one of the world largest animal rights organisation with 2,000,000 members (according to the wikipedia), and that when they push the right "offend" button their press coverage is all over the place like radiation. Once can argue that I am contributing to the success of this strategy right now by posting this list. Sue me.

I'm curious though, when the tactic isn't "offend everybody on the planet", as was done when they compared the decapitation on a Manitoba Greyhound bus to slaughtering chickens, and when they likened the meat industry to the holocaust, PETA seems to concentrate on "offend women". PETA doesn't even seem to like transgendered women, nor fat women. What's with the hate for human females, PETA?

While PETA claim they never threw red paint on fur clad women, anti-fur people did. Yet nobody entered a biker bar to complain abut their use of leather in clothing. That joke writes itself.

Scam ads have been popping up everywhere like mushrooms lately, the award shows One Show and the D&AD have laid down new playing rules and then, Niel French is defending them at the Spikes Asia Festival, of course he does. He is the king of controversy after all, and some say the King of Scam ads (please know that the Dark Beer campaign is not a scam campaign).

He also defended scam ads ("I don't mind kids trying hard and cheating and lying to get to the top") and lamented that the quality of ad creative this year leaves much to be desired. "It's gone down everywhere, not just here," Mr. French said, a sentiment echoed by many delegates, including John Merrifield, TBWA's Singapore-based creative at large.

You can say a lot about French, but you can't say that he wavers, he had these very same opinions eight years ago when he spoke to HK magazine. *

Mr French upped the ante when he said “Who cares if a few scam ads win awards? It’s not the Olympics. It’s just a game a side-show”

You'd think the posse at Grey and the startup rocket GoViral would have a bigger clue when it came to virals, but alas the Karen26 hoopla has shown that they forgot the basics.

My previous posts on Karen: Karen26 the Danish mother seeking is actually Ditte Arnth which has been retweeted like mad under the tag #Karen26.

More quotes and the video is here in a later update when VisitDenmark decided to remove the video from youtube: Karen26 - Karen in Denmark seeking August's father - (2009) (Denmark)

In the interest of full disclosure, I've judged the Guldkorn 2006 award with Balder Olrik from goviral as jury foreman - but that was not the first time we met. We met when I asked for work at GoViral, thinking that the skills of a 'traditonal' BDA art director who runs her own internationally known advertising blog and has been a nethead since the dawn of dot com might be useful to a new agency that intended to specialize in viral advertisments. The conversation went something like this: Did you code the site? No, I hacked a suitable CMS. Did you make the little icons? Some of them, but not all 670 of them. Uh, we're not sure how to use you here... so showing my portfolio with strategically sound campaign ideas to them was a waste of time.

What is strategically sound? There are a few rules in advertising that are really quite simple to apply whenever you get a brief. Ask are we expanding market - or expanding market (brand) share? Do we want a trial or increased consumption? Do we have a USP or are we branding? before you even begin to think. In this case all the aftermath talk from Ms Kiilerich, the CEO of VisitDenmark seem to indicate that they wanted to raise awareness of Denmark as a travel destination. Since we're talking a limited group of tourists who spend money & time on trips, it's likely expanding brand share, trial consumption and there are USP's that Denmark have that other countries do not if you think about it. Sweden has the midnight sun, you have Legoland, legalised prostitution (hey you were playing on the sex angle) and beautiful white sandy beaches with a special light that inspired an art movement. There are plenty of other countries with legalized prostitution, and Thailand pretty much owns that selling point so we're now stuck to the laid back euro-traveller who fancies a bit of old style romantic like H.C. Andersen quaint city-life and a good beer. That's "hygge".

The rules for virals are not set in stone, since the phenomenon has been treated as brand new by people who haven't worked in advertising very long and the internet seems to change like quicksand - but there are rules, since it is still advertising and advertising has been doing virals since advertising began. (insert jokes about STD's here since advertising is the second oldest profession.) rules after the jump folks

Bah, I knew it, I forgot to add this fine collection of Evony ads to my sexist ads rant. Coding horror has archived the campaign as it evolved or rather devolved, from showing some knight and asking you to play to showing plain old boobage and asking you to play.

Not only do Evony ads use the shotgun approach to targeting, this campaign has been hard to avoid as it pops up on anything from news sites to knitting sites, and it's impossible to remove from ones adsense. I've tried blocking them from appearing here on the grounds of good taste, but their landing URL changes more often than I get a cup of coffee. So the campaign was already annoying me when it only had a knight in it, then the princesses were trotted out, one with deeper cleavage than the other, then finally they cut out the whole illustration theme all together and went close-cropped on a set of lace clad boobies. It's almost as if the marketing department got sarcastic. Click you guys! C'mon! I'm not sure what annoys me the most about this campaign, the ugly, the boobs, or the fact that google adsense makes it nearly impossible to control what ads your sites serves despite their insistence of the opposite.

Someone in the Metafilter thread "Halp your queens boobs mylord" had to pull out the "it's working because we're talking about it" card. Talking about Evony is not the objective, the objective is to get signups and people who play the game.