The caramel coloured chateau casino on the web so good at getting press for nothing has apparently run out of morons.... Sorry foreheads, boobs and other limbs, as they are now painting their domain name on cows in Florida.
As usual the mainstream press that can't bother researching anything these days are hailing their old shit as something groundbreaking and new regurgitating everything straight from the palaces press release.
Just to give you an idea of how old exactly this painting on cows thing is, lets take a trip down moo-memory lane shall we? (read more pals, all the fun begins after the jump)
Back to 1996 and we're at Hockley Heath, in West Midlands, England. This is where farmer Harry Goode had the bright idea of selling advertising space on his cows, for 300 £ a week the cows wore a vest printed with an advertisers logo on it all day. (internet source). The advertising (paper) tradepress had so much pun-fun with this story back then anyone in the business couldn't miss it.
More recently, seems the original dot.com'ers were already tagging cows with their domain names back in 2000 (source)
Still, while Milka swiss chocolate have always painted purple cows in their ads and become so known for that it can be spoofed with all sorts of animals, they weren't the only swiss painted cows. Back in 2002 Frank Baumann started something called the Cow Placard Company ( google cluster), where he'd rent out the space of swiss cows for around $250. Back then animal rights groups got peeved with him for using toxic paint and said he was simply looking for the publicity and not being a do-gooder that wanted to help boost rural economy and support agriculture as he claimed. The sharp advertising commenting pen of Kate Kaye had a blast making fun of him and and the russian stray dog-billboards in Cow gypping. Who knows if his company still exists.Drive through the countryside of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois,
Nebraska, and elsewhere and you'll find cows with names like eatme.com,
steermyway.com, butcherblock.com and many others.
More recently the BULA clothing company painted a herd of norweigan cow-ads in June 2004. You can probably still catch a real audio video of that report on Local6.
In march 2004, BBC reported on some enterprising schoolkids idea that cows can provide moo-ving billboards, where they only charged £35 a time for your logo on the cow. A+ for the idea kids, lesser grade for the business math.Wonder if they made a profit on that? ;)
Well, the press release from Goldenpalace.com says stuff like this:
The casino went above and beyond the call of duty when they painted several of the cows purple, as a literal interpretation of author Seth Godin's "purple cow" marketing analogy. Godin equates the advertising world to a sea of grazing cows, and that it takes a purple cow to see your brand amid today's marketing clutter.
*yawn*. .... Mmm, that's odd, I have a really bad craving for Milka now. Yummy Yummy Milka......
For more on the Casinos cows check this google news cluster. Hat tip to caff for lending her google-fu.
Ah, I forgot - related to these skin-ads in the artworld are the tattooed pigs by Wim Delvoye, and Banksy's brandalism on cows, sheep and pigs. See animals are hip just like us and even goldfish have lip piercings these days. ;)
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PermalinkBovine Billboards (or bullboards) go back to 1984 when Puck's Farm-It's Fun north of Toronto Canada offered advertising space on the sides of their Jersey Cows. The canvas banners were $500 a side, and named "Mediacows" after the local outdoor advertising company "Mediacom" who didn't want anything to do with it. Too bad. ABC, CBS and NBC sent crews to Canada to cover the story and photos and story made the wire services across North America. Truly outstanding in their field.
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PermalinkNice trivia addition.
So painting cows is older than one thinks. I bet it dates back to Burma shave times.
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PermalinkYes brilliant! Thanks! "Mediacows" huh?
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PermalinkThanks for the extra trivia. I love Adland for this.
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PermalinkThis is great, I just had someone suggest a cow-paint idea here in the office when someone retorted that it would be copying Banksy, but this guys insisted that it had never been done in advertising before. I knew in my gut that he couldn't have been the first guy to tag farm animals, and here you are with a nice piece backing me up. I'll be printing this and putting it on that guys desk, if your ears are red in the morning it'll be him cussing you out for sinking his terrible idea.
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