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Nintendo claims ownership over gamer fanvids on YouTube

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 19 May 2013 00:43:14 +0000

Alan Wexelblat comment on the news that Nintendo has claimed "monetization rights" to fan videos on YouTube that feature tips on playing its games. Some of these videos are incredibly popular, and while their use of Nintendo's creations are often fair use, Nintendo gets to use YouTube's monetization system to advertise on all the videos:

The basic idea is that if someone makes a video of themselves playing a Nintendo game and uploads it to YouTube any ads shown with that video will be of Nintendo's choosing and revenue from it will flow to Nintendo. Ads may appear beside the videos or actually be inserted before and after the video when people go to play it.
The problem here is that "Let's Play" style videos are a pervasive form of information and sharing throughout the industry. I did a quick YouTube search for "let's play" for this blog post and got back over 9.1 million hits. People create these videos to show off their skills, to highlight interesting things they've seen such as game "easter eggs", to provide guides or walk-throughs, or just to share a bit of fun with friends. There are a few professional or semi-professional games writers who use this style of video to promote themselves or their channels, but they are a tiny minority of that nine million.
Nintendo has positioned its action as a gentler approach; rather than trying to ban content related to Nintendo games, they just want to make money off it by changing the video that an individual uploaded. Yeah, um, guys that's not a whole lot better. It also comes across as cheap and lazy - rather than creating content for YouTube that fans and players would want to watch, Nintendo is just taking over other peoples' content.

Nintendo Decides It Can Own Fans' YouTube Content

Apple's man behind the camera

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:17:10 +0000

Peter Belanger reveals the technical complexity behind Cupertino's cooly minimalist advertising…. [Michael Shane at The Verge]

Allan Sherman's Mad-Man-style comedy song: "When I Was a Lad"

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 17:49:04 +0000

This shuffled into my music player this morning, and delighted me as it ever does: Allan Sherman's When I was a Lad, a lovely bit of Mad Man-style period parody from the album My Son, the Celebrity. You probably know Sherman's work from "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah," but it's well worth exploring his whole catalog -- especially since there's a fabulous box set.

When I Was A Lad - Allan Sherman

Memorex, a 50-minute odyssey through the VHS generation

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:55:13 +0000

"The sequel to Smash TV's critically acclaimed "Skinemax", Memorex is a 50 minute VJ odyssey, a tribute to an entire generation who grew up with only a TV and a VCR for a babysitter. Sourced from over forty hours of 80s commercials pulled from warped VHS tapes, Memorex is a deep exploration of nostalgia and the fading cultural values of an era of excess. It's a re-contextualization of ads - cultural detritus, the lowest of the low - into something altogether more profound, humorous, and at times, even beautiful." [Vimeo]

The champagne of national unity

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:47:01 +0000

According to a survey of 200,000 Americans, Miller High Life is the most bi-partisan of beers. Republicans favor Samuel Adams and, apparently, there are a lot of Democrats drinking Heineken. (Although one might argue that these results are heavily skewed, as the survey did not include either microbrews or microparties. God only knows what the Libertarians are drinking.) There's a chart. Yay, charts! (Via Kevin Zelnio)

New Nike ad features overweight 12-year-old boy

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 16:22:18 +0000

[Video Link]. Wieden+Kennedy's new ad for Nike is provocative stuff. Nike isn't sponsoring the Olympics this year, but the ad is timed accordingly. The star of this spot, Nathan, is 12 years old and lives in London, Ohio. He tells Business Insider he puked in a ditch while filming takes. I like this kid.

What do you think of the new Apple "genius" ads running during Olympics 2012 TV coverage?

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 16:37:09 +0000

The internets are a-flutter with critics of these new Apple ads. I'm not crazy about them. They feel like they're for Best Buy or something, not Apple. I do wish they'd just bring back John Hodgman. (via @nytjim…

Top 10 corporate theme songs

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 16:32:00 +0000

The first offering has lyrics by famous advertising copywriter Salman Rushdie. The second is a version of U2's One created for Bank of America, titled One Bank. By the time you get to The Gazprom Song, you will have already gone quite mad. [popbitch]

Plumber's butt, transcended

Amy Seidenwurm — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 00:47:40 +0000

I challenge you to un-see this.

I asked photographer Markus Mueller about these hilarious and semi-disturbing shots on his website:

We shot these in different locations in berlin. one day three motives, three locations, a nice and very funny crew and work. we took the portrait pictures from the girls separately some days before. that are original prints on the t-shirts .....nothing with photoshop!

It was a ad campaign for the german client "Das Handwerk" (it is a German union for handcraft companies)
Agency: scholz&friends Berlin
Art Direction: Michael Johne

Gut gemacht gentlemen!

Women beat 18-34 men for tech adoption and purchasing power

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:56:59 +0000

An interesting piece from The Atlantic's Alex Madrigal points out that the coveted 18-34 male demographic is no longer the most important force in technology consumption and purchasing. He quotes Intel anthropologist and all-round awesomesauce dispenser Genevieve Bell's research, which shows that women lead tech adoption in "internet usage, mobile phone voice usage, mobile phone location-based services, text messaging, Skype, every social networking site aside from LinkedIn, all Internet-enabled devices, e-readers, health-care devices, and GPS. Also, because women still are the primary caretakers of children in many places, guess who controls which gadgets the young male and female members of the family get to purchase or even use?"

Of course, the neglect of women -- and other groups of systematically disenfranchised people, like gblt people and people of color -- is a recurring theme in the history of business. And periodically (generally in the midst of a recession that makes the previously unthinkable into the inevitable), some industry will figure out that there's a group of people whom they've ignored or held in contempt with a lot of money on their hands, and you get a new boom of targeted products, media and advertising. And exploitation, of course. Lots of exploitation.

Terry O'Reilly's "Age of Persuasion" podcast has done some good episodes on these turns in advertising history -- here's one on women, one on people of color, and one on gblt-targeted ads.

How can an industry get its market so wrong?
One huge reason is the relative lack of women at major venture capital firms, startups, electronics makers, and Internet companies. The other huge reason is the historical erasure of women's roles in the history of technology, as Xeni Jardin pointed out in response to a New York Times article that overemphasized the role men have played in the creation of the Internet. When you look around, it *seems* as if technology is by and for dudes, but the reality is much more complicated than that.
But even if you are the biggest sexist in Menlo Park, even if you believe that only men create technology, even if you are real-life Jack Donaghy hell bent on profits alone, you'd still want to change your approach to women as technology consumers. Follow the money and follow the users: you'll find yourself in a female-dominated landscape.
Bell concludes: "So it turns out if you want to find out what the future looks like, you should be asking women. And just before you think that means you should be asking 18-year-old women, it actually turns out the majority of technology users are women in their 40s, 50s and 60s. So if you wanted to know what the future looks like, those turn out to be the heaviest users of the most successful and most popular technologies on the planet as we speak."

Sorry, Young Man, You're Not the Most Important Demographic in Tech (via /.)

GM to end display ads on Facebook

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 15 May 2012 23:07:37 +0000

The Wall Street Journal reports that General Motors will soon stop advertising on Facebook "after the auto maker's executives determined their paid ads had little impact on consumers' car purchases." GM will, however, engage in Facebook's "pages" that allow marketers to display promotional content at no cost. The news comes just days before Facebook's planned IPO.

Psychedelic ad for Peace Corps, 1968 (video)

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 04 May 2012 23:43:48 +0000

Image Link. Boing Boing reader MewDeep, who has an awesome Flickr stream of '60s-'70s ad scans, points to this YouTube clip of a notable television commercial from 1968: it's a promo for the Peace Corps, set to "Age of Aquarius." As MewDeep excerpts here, the ad is mentioned in The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, by Thomas Frank.

Sad Schlitz Beer Clown is Sad (vintage ad)

Xeni Jardin — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:50:38 +0000

Image Link. From the excellent Flickr collection of MewDeep (lots of '60s-'70s ad scans), via BB Flickr Pool.…

Unraveling a baroque, snarled, multimillion-dollar porn-ad clickfraud scam

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:04:05 +0000

Panos Ipeirotis, who writes the aptly named "A Computer Scientist in a Business School" blog, describes how he made national news by unraveling a multimillion-dollar "clickfraud" enterprise that used hidden frames, pornographic traffic brokerages, clever misdirection and obfuscation techniques, traffic laundering, skimmed traffic, and other techniques from the shadier side of the Internet's ad-supported ecosystem to extract anywhere from $400K to $5M to date. The monetary losers were pornographic sites, but a number of high-profile "legit" sites were implicated, unwittingly used as "laundries" for the traffic. The scheme itself is awfully baroque, and Ipeirotis does an admirable job of laying it out, while introducing all these marvelously weird terms describing the modern practices of Internet grifters.

At this point, we now know how this person makes money. Clearly, there is click-fraud: the scammer is employing click-fraud services to click on the pay-per-click ads "displayed" in his parked domains. If some of the ads are also pay-per-impression, he may also get paid for these invisible impressions that happen within the 0x0 iframe.
Why the parked domains though? Why not doing the same directly within the porn site? The answer is simple: Traffic laundering.
What do I mean by "traffic laundering"? First, the ad networks are unlikely to place many ads within a porn site. On the other hand, they have ad-placement services for parked domains. Second, the publishers that get the traffic from the parked domains see in the referral URLs some legitimately-sounding domain names, not a porn site. Even if they go and check the site, they will only see an empty site full of ads. Nothing too suspicious. Hats off to the scammer. Clever scheme.
You think we are done? No. There is one more piece in the puzzle. How does the scammer attract visitors to the porn site?
The other interesting part: The porn website does not really contain porn! There are a few images but most of the links are to other porn website that actually host the video. In other words, the scammer does not even pay the cost of hosting porn!

Uncovering an advertising fraud scheme. Or "the Internet is for porn" (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

North Dakota tries to be cool, fails

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:04:45 +0000

We all probably had at least one friend who attempted to reinvent themselves after high-school in a way that was so not them that it just made you feel pity. You know what I'm talking about. Like the goody-goody who tried so hard to change their squeaky clean reputation, but would clearly never be a badass cool kid, no matter how many times they told you that they got "sooooo drunk" last weekend.

That's what this ad reminds me of.

Somehow, North Dakota has managed to create a tourism ad that is simultaneously offensively sleazy and desperately uncool. It's trying to make a wink-wink, "women are objects" lad mag joke. But it looks like your really dorky, incredibly square uncle's idea of a wink-wink, "women are objects" lad mag joke.

It's sleaze as designed by people who have no idea what sleaze is supposed to look like. They've just heard about it third-hand from someone who went to Vegas once.

Lego's old line of toys for girls

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:34:04 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, Mark told you about Lego's new line of products aimed at girls. It includes new minifigs that look more like dolls and cutesy playsets with names like Heartlake City. This week, Cory introduced you a little girl who is very frustrated with excessively gendered toys.

I played with a lot of Legos when I was a little girl. And, while I certainly liked dolls, that wasn't really what I used Legos for. (And, frankly, going shopping, playing house, and being "just like me" wasn't what I used dolls for. In my experience, games of playing house tend to involve a lot more violent interaction with pirates, Darth Vader, and Nazis than advertising to girls would lead you to suspect. First you put the baby to bed, then you defend her with your mad karate skills, right?) Ads like this old one from 1981 appeal to me a whole lot more than modern girlvertising. I've seen this ad passed around the Internet before. But the contrast with those recent reminders of who advertisers and toymakers think girls are strikes me as particularly timely.

Thanks, L0!

TOM THE DANCING BUG: What Message Did We Receive From Outer Space??

Ruben Bolling — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:10:46 +0000

Attention Earthlings: Visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER. End transmission.…

EXCLUSIVE: photos of BofA's new #OWS-themed ad campaign

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 00:09:05 +0000

I have no idea who shot these, or who is responsible. Update: here are some daytime shots, from the San Francisco Mission district.

…

Patriotic advertising: selling with war

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:02:53 +0000

Sociological Images has a nice gallery up called "United We Buy," showcasing the use of war and patriotism in advertising from WWII up to the present day. That's some weird-ass WD-40.

United We Buy: Using Patriotism and War to Sell Products

Public papercraft ponies

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:20:49 +0000

A U.K. ad agency created these 3D papercraft ponies… to stand out from the usual flyposted fare. [Ads of the World]

God Watches Mad Men

Glenn Fleishman — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:29:20 +0000

One might be tempted to ask: Can God make a signboard so big that even He can't illuminate it? Spotted in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, otherwise known as the Center of the Universe.

I am the photographer, and I approve this use of my image.

Soviet brochure from Expo '58: "Come Visit the USSR! Soviet Women! Sputniks and Rockets!"

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 04:59:20 +0000

Here's a neat bit of paper ephemera: A brochure of the Soviet pavilion at Expo 58, also known as the Brussels World Fair—which was the first World Fair after World War II. The Soviet pavillion brochure includes period-perfect illustrations, a neat map, and promises of love 'n' leisure in the land of the Reds: "Sputniks and Rockets! Soviet Women!"

Scanned and published to Flickr by user Jericl Cat

(via BB Submitterator, via metkere.com)

Vintage-style ads for Facebook, Skype and YouTube

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:34:20 +0000

Brazil's Moma ad agency created a set of ads for newfangled tech companies in a mid-century style. [Ads of the World via Gawker…]

Jamiroquai: Where's he now? Pimpin' instant ramen in Japan

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 02:53:41 +0000

Well, I suppose we all have to pay the rent. In the Japanese television commercial embedded above, Jamiroquai's Jay Kay sings an alternate version of the band's '90s funkyraver smash hit "Virtual Insanity" in which the lyrics have been changed to praise the noodly goodness of Cup Noodle instant ramen (known in the USA as "Cup Noodles").

Virtual insanity, indeed! Here is the official Cup Noodle campaign site. (via watashi no tokyo, via Gavin Purcell)

1977 commercial for the IBM5100

Lisa Katayama — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 02:10:19 +0000

This 1970s commercial for the IBM5100 is really funny.

[via AllThingsD]…

Awkward Stock Photos

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:36:47 +0000

awkwardstockphotos.com (via William Gibson). …

If alien life exists, we have probably weirded it out by now

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:36:38 +0000

From Arecibo, to the sound of vaginal contractions, to an ad for Doritos—a short history of Earthlings' attempts to communicate with the cosmos. The vaginal sounds recording reached Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti in the late 1990s. New Scientist says, "It is unclear what sort of reply we should expect."

Pharmaceutical company funds documentary about over-eating

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:29:56 +0000

GlaxoSmithKline is financing a documentary about over-eating, in the hopes that it will boost sales of Alli—their over-the-counter drug that blocks your body from absorbing some of the fat you eat. (Fun game: Read the recent Science Question from a Toddler on poop and see if you can guess what the common side-effects are.)

Glaxo says they won't have control over the content of the film and won't even be pushing to make sure Alli gets mentioned. They simply want to educate Americans about the fact that they eat too much.

The partners say they hope to emulate "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's celebrated 2006 documentary on climate change. It cost an estimated $1.5 million to produce and sold $50 million in tickets worldwide. Ms. Ferdinando summarized the film as "the 'Inconvenient Truth' of mindless eating," with the story taking a "behind-closed-doors, fly-on-the-wall" approach that highlights unhealthy relationships people have with food.

Artistically, the problem I see here is that successful documentaries—and really documentaries in general—are usually about challenging popular perception and either making a case for a viewpoint that's counter to "common-sense" or informing people about a situation that's mostly being ignored. The thesis "Fat People Eat Too Much" does not exactly fit into that mold.

New York Times: Glaxo, diet drug maker, to pay for film on eating

Image courtesy Flickr user yukariryu, via CC

What "Kills 99.9% of germs" really means

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:56:53 +0000

Shocker: Advertising health claims are often misleading. In this case, it looks like most of the products that tout near-perfect germ-killing abilities are getting those results in trials that aren't exactly designed to mimic real-world conditions. When a University of Ottawa microbiologist ran a more realistic demonstration for Canadian schoolchildren, he turned up VERY different results.

Three popular sanitizers killed between 46% and 60% of microbes on the students' hands, far short of 99.99%. Bugs that aren't killed by sanitizers aren't necessarily more dangerous than those that are. But the more that remain, the greater the chance of infection, doctors say.

The ad writers also benefit from regulations that allow them to claim 99.9% effectiveness without actually killing 99.9% of all germs, all the time. Instead, representative samples can stand in, and there's room for do-overs in the lab, if the first test doesn't work.

Wall Street Journal: Kills 99.9% of Germs—Sometimes

Image courtesy Flickr user If you dream it..., via CC

Elevator mural casts you as Adam on the Sistine Chapel's ceiling

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:14:23 +0000

Scanned from an unknown source, a mural near the elevator in a plastic surgeon's office that casts the rider in the role of Adam on the Sistine Chapel.

Advertising / Be Born Again (via Geisha Asobi)

Previously: