During recent days, there's been a lot of hub-bub regarding Dove's latest "Campaign for Real Beauty" ads for their firming lotion. One of the most interesting happened in Chicago.

The Sun Times did a feature on the ads, and supposedly a "he said/ she said" piece as well. I say supposedly because there was only one journo credit on the piece. And apparently she only wrote the introduction, which is a background on the campaign and the new massive media buys.

That "he said" portion was writen by Lucio Guerrero:

This post Making sense of mens fragrance ads posed a severe threat to my keybord as I was slurping coffee. Example:

Davidoff
Clearly the good life consists of being able to spend lazy afternoons on a gigantic tree branch admiring the results of consuming web-purchased enlargement pills over a sustained period of time.

And it struck me that we could be doing this for hours - trying to make sense of fragrance ads like the full frontal nude YSL ad for smegma7, sorry that's "M7". Shall we? (Remember you can post images in comments folks!)

The Media Guardian reports today that Saatchi & Saatchi London has been fired by Dr Martens for running an advertising campaign featuring dead rock stars Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious, Joey Ramone, and Joe Strummer wearing the their Doc Martens boots in heaven. The ads have been flying around the net recently, mostly posted on blogs. Quite a few have commented on the ads being in poor taste.

Bjoern at Site-9 Weblog spotted something iffy with the polite email from a marketing student. The email starts off with : "First of all, let me tell you how much I like your blog. I am a last year student at university and I hope to start working in advertising next year. Your blog is a real source of inspiration." and goes on to tell about the American Express interactive Billboard we posted about on Thursday.
Bjoern did a little header-reading on the emails to see where it came from, and when he compared to his site-stats, he saw that the same IP showed up in his server logs as tmp.ogilvy.com.
Do a

dig -x 199.229.159.2

and the answer is

2.159.229.199.in-addr.arpa. 
86318 IN    PTR     tmp.ogilvy.com.

In short, they suckered us! Ogilvy happens to be American Express' ad agency. I'll blame my lack of cynicism that day on the yearly deadline stress before the superbowl, I read the mail and took it at face value.

Well not really, I couldn't care less if they were a student, if they really did think this site was a source of inspiration or not - all I care about is the tip, and is it "report-worthy"? After sending a few images to the Amex billboard, including goatse as I mentioned in the comments I thought it was a fun little poster and posted about it. Someone at Amex server actually sifts through those images and makes sure goatse doesn't end up on the street after all, and that's pretty clever (though it might have been even more fun had the Goatse image-send worked - god knows it would have gone viral immediately then)

Fans of Badland know that sometimes, twin ideas just happen. Blame it on syncronicity, similar thought patterns, the idea Gods or aliens, or just a bad-idea-day, no one knows exactly why it happens... But we do know that it does. Read more to see three very original stolen jeans ideas from three different countries all appearing independent of each other.

photo thanks to Mårten at Bold.se, via this thread (in Swedish).

This is the advertising quote collection that used to be on the front page and change to another random quote every time you revisited. I got bored with that setup. Besides, everybody is doing that these days. ;)

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"I will have clients rather than people who just give me orders"
Francis Wayland Ayer-1848 1923

"How many times do I have to tell you guys? Media does not enter before strategy and idea!"
Åsk Wäppling

"The same amount of space that exists over your head exists under your feet"
Tia Wolfe

"To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research."
unknown

"Thou shalt speak softly and carry no stick, except lipstick"

GoGORILLA Media Launches New Ad Concept: Advertising on Money! the press release reads.
Never mind that defacing a dollar bill is actually a federal offense - maybe they got permission? Nevermind that a pro-bono anti STD ad already won a D&AD award advertising on coins 1999, so it's not that new... And nevermind that marking dollars bills and putting stickers on coins have been a favored way of getting the word out by students, pro-bono organisations, Adbusters and small guys like Joe's truck rental since.. well, since forever. ;)

Starting today, GoGORILLA Media will begin distribution of $1 bills bearing sticker ads for "Traffic: The Miniseries" in hip bars and nightclubs throughout Los Angeles and New York.

Well, the "I've seen that before"-bell has rung loud and clear,there's another recent poster series for a copy-shop that sold it's service by simply copying stuff that happened to be in the vicinity of the poster. Like park benches. The guy&gal behind the Arkitektkopia campaign we showed you yesterday is not the only creative team to think of this idea.

This ad was made in Denmark, back in 2001 and grabbed home awards-a-plenty, it started with wining a bronze at Danish award Guldkorn, then got shortlisted at London International and then nabbing a Gold in Montreux.

Sometimes I wonder, how do some PR agencies get paid for being so... Well, lets face it, bad. No no, I'm not saying that all of you PRgrunts are terrible, we have some good connections with some of you and look forward to your mails. But some others are really lost. Here's a list of the most common mistakes - perhaps some PR newbies might learn from this. If you wish to send things to us, don't make these mistakes.

Dove is at it again with their campaign for real beauty, currently airing several different parts of the campaign. Or not airing, as the case is with their Pro Age ad. Six over-50 gorgeous women do their best 'calender girl' homage in the latest ad posing buck naked in the ad, which is banned from airing because - get this - it "shows too much skin". Seems the TV ads don't adhere to FCC regulations.
GettyImages blog says:

This whole debacle is fascinating to me on two fronts. 1) How can it be that Ms. Spears is allowed to gyrate in a bikini top on MTV with a snake whilst singing "I'm a slave for you" to 12 year olds, but 50-something women are not allowed to be shown sans clothes in what I would argue is a completely tasteful, if not downright elegant manner? And 2) why is said "debacle" not more of a…well…debacle? The only mainstream coverage I was able to find on this was here, and that's on a Canadian news site.

It gets better - or worse - pro-family and women's groups are urging a boycott of Dove products for "contributing to the sexualization of women as a commercial tool, as well as exposing children to adult nudity."