Archive for the ‘advertising’ Category

Walmart Misplaces its Asterisk

Thursday, August 7th, 2008


First off, I’d like to welcome WAL*MART—er, Walmart—to 2005! It seems the neighborhood-munching behemoth’s nearly two decade old logo wasn’t friendly enough to represent the company in this brave new world. Second, I wonder how long it took to develop this logo. Ten minutes? Fifteen? It probably took a year of focus groups consisting of old people who think lowercase proper nouns are cutting edge.

Business Week had the details on this change last month, and Brand New had a more snarky take—e.g. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

At least Walmart kept the capital; the same can’t be said for AT&T’s 2005 logo change. Hey, Walmart is working on being more environmentally friendly. All they have to do now is stop mistreating their employees, and destroying small-town America, and they just might back up their friendly new logo. In the same way that AT&T stopped being evil the moment they changed their logo. Oh, wait, never mind.

Blip: In Sync

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

While driving home one night, I encountered a lot of road construction, and noticed that the various flashing lights were vaguely in sync with the beat of the music. Music: “Beat Connection” by LCD Soundsystem.

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Category advertising, music, video | Tags: Tags: , , , , , ,

Florida Anti-Tobacco Campaigns, Now With More Twitter

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Qwitter What began more than a decade ago with Florida’s landmark $11.3 billion tobacco settlement and subsequent (and successful) TRUTH anti-smoking campaign has become the Tobacco-Free Florida initiative.

Like the nation-wide spin-off of Florida’s TRUTH campaign, TheTruth, this new initiative is all about targeting teens, and therefore all about keeping up to date with social networking. So, it’s no surprise when I happened across a sort-of Twitter app called Qwitter, which is kind of like the MyMileMarker app, but for smoking. The idea is that you send a tweet out to @iquit telling how many cigarettes you’ve smoked, and the app will compile your posts into a graph to track how much you’re smoking.

It’s simple, and I hope, effective, since it’s a lot easier and natural for today’s teens to txt a quick numeric message to Qwitter than to just write it down. It’s good to know that someone’s out there, and if anyone is saved by Qwitter, it certainly won’t be the first person Twitter has helped.

From the Department of Lazy Graphic Designers…

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

When designing a layout, one usually uses placeholder images to get a better idea of where every piece of content will go. The placeholder images are not a part of the final product, so the quality and content isn’t especially important. That is, unless one happens to forget to replace the placeholder image with the final artwork.

Artwork used in Okami box art, including IGN watermark

Such was the case with the box art for Nintendo Wii game Okami. Kotaku has a write-up on this embarrassing oversight. As someone working in the industry, and a sometimes scatter-brained person, I can understand how this would happen. I would even wager as to how this image ended up on the game’s box art: a looming deadline and a rushed graphic design department.

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Category advertising, humor | Tags: Tags: , , , , , ,

Using a Meme to Sell Life Insurance? WTF?

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

So, I’m minding my own business, reading Slate, and see one of those “family killed by ninjas, need money for karate lessons” pictures off to the right of the page. Then, I see it is an advertisement for life insurance. Oh, and the article in question was about John McCain visiting Mo Udall on his deathbed. Deathbed? Life insurance? Get it?

Here is the ad in question:

Accuquote ad brings the lulz

Swag Alert! Free Jimi Wallet for Facebook Members!

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

I don’t usually do link posts, but, this one’s special: it’s a freebie!

Maybe you’ve heard of the Jimi Wallet (think wallet2.0). Well, now’s your chance to grab one for free! Join the Chase+1 group on Facebook (account required to view page), add the Jimi Wallet, go to checkout, and you’ve got yourself some truly awesome free swag. Quick, before the Digg effect kills the offer!

read more | digg story

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Category advertising | Tags: Tags: , , , , , ,

Un-pimp my Ride (Volkswagen’s GTI Ads)

Friday, March 3rd, 2006

If you've spent any time around Volkswagen or auto forums (or even digg!), you might have noticed some buzz around the new ads for the MkV GTI. While the lion's share of talk has gone to the "Project Fast" ads and its creepy little rabbit mascot (including its propensity to fetch absurd bounties on eBay), Volkswagen has recently launched an arguably better branch of their GTI advertising with the "Un-pimp My Ride" series of television commercials. (more…)

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Category advertising, reviews | Tags:

Digital On-screen Graphics: Pop-ups for Television

Saturday, February 18th, 2006

Have you noticed your screen real-estate shrinking?

Years ago, networks began placing their network IDs as digital on-screen graphics, nicknamed "bugs", small watermark logos that often appear in the lower right-hand corner of the television broadcast. These began as innocuous, only mildly obtrusive logo watermarks which popped up infrequently during broadcasts to remind viewers which network they were viewing. In an era before time-shifted set-top boxes and on-demand digital cable broadcasts, these little logos did provide some measure of benefit to viewers, allowing channel-surfers to know precisely what network they were watching in an instant. This was how these "bugs" became a Trojan horse for advertising. (more…)

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Category advertising, rants | Tags: