Pepsi's plan to pay a Russian company called Startrocket to loft an artificial constellation of cubesats with mylar sails to advertise a "nonalcoholic energy beverage" has been cancelled for unspecified reasons (the company says its prototype launch using high-altitude balloons was a "one-time event"). Read the rest
Propublica is one of many organizations, mainly nonprofits, whose "ad transparency" tools scrape Facebook ads and catalog them, along with the targeting data that exposes who is paying for which messages to be shown to whom. Read the rest
Tommy Lee Jones does ads for Boss Coffee's Rainbow Mountain brand of iced coffee, most of which feature him as a fish-out-of-water immigrant observing and enjoying Japanese life, taking odd jobs (cab driver, train station guard, astronaut, etc) and occasionally using his magical powers. It's like a series of clips from an early-90s science fiction show set in a parralel universe. Which it is. Read the rest
This funny South African ad depicts an African explorer discovering Europe in the 1650s, a counterfactual to the 1652 arrival in South Africa of the Dutch. But it's upsetting people there and fast food chain Chicken Licken has withdrawn it due to the complaints.
South African Sandile Cele lodged a complaint with the Advertising Regulatory Board, arguing that the commercial made a "mockery of the struggles of the African people against the colonisation by the Europeans in general, and the persecutions suffered at the hands of the Dutch in particular".
Upholding the complaint, the board said: "While the commercial seeks to turn the colonisation story on its head with Big John travelling to Europe, it is well-known that many Africans were in fact forced to travel to Europe in the course of the colonisation of Africa.
"They did not leave their countries and villages wilfully. They starved to death during those trips to Europe and arrived there under harsh and inhumane conditions."
Chicken Licken said it wanted to show that South Africa had "all the potential to conquer the world and rewrite history from an African perspective". Read the rest
Australia's Paleotronic is celebrating Christmas with twelve posts celebrating the best seasonal computer ads of the years between 1980 and 1992; today is day 1: 1980, in all its Coleco gloriousness. (Thanks, Gnat!) Read the rest
Thanks to the members of a street art project, some bus shelter adverts for Facebook in London were improved by a good ol' fashioned culture jam.
The Protest Stencil is taking credit for these subvertising efforts which altered Facebook's messaging to say, "Fake news is not our friend, it’s a great revenue source," and "Data misuse is not our friend, it’s our business model."
They refer to their work as "honest Facebook ads," writing, "To facebook, you’re not a ‘friend’, you’re the product on sale." Preach it!
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image via Protest Stencil Read the rest
Eight American kids are killed or injured daily by unsecured guns in their homes. The Ad Council, creators of Smokey Bear and other iconic PSAs, launched the End Family Fire campaign to raise awareness. Read the rest
Apparently Facebook is running TV ads apologizing for being a creepy stalker optimized for organizing Nazi hate-mobs and genocidal pogroms (also apparently: now that all the young people are leaving Facebook, TV is how you reach the company's core user-base). Read the rest
"101 degrees in the shade..."
It's been hot in the Bay Area and I was joking with a friend that we should take the "Nestea Plunge." They had no idea what I was talking about which surprised me, given the iconic ad campaign ran from the 1970s through the 1990s (and came back in 2014).
I grew up on Cape Cod, so we didn't have a pool, we just went to the beach when it was hot. For hours, my friends and I would put our arms out and fall backwards into the Atlantic, trying to reenact the Plunge we saw on TV. It was like an in-water trust fall with only the waves to catch you.
Cripes, you all remember it, don't you? Surely it's just an anomaly that my friend didn't know about it.
"Temperature was up around 103..."
"The temperature was up around 111..."
"Come on, taste the taste of wetness..."
Even legendary groupie Pamela Des Barres took the Nestea Plunge
They're *still* taking the Plunge in the Philippines Read the rest
"Red Coke," aka Riunite on Ice, was largely inspired by the 1940s "Man, Oh Manischewitz" ads. Here, voiceover genius Bob Crane does several impressions for that Robitussin-adjacent wine beloved by middle-class boomers both Jewish and gentile. Read the rest
In 2016, Google banned ads for payday lenders; now it has followed up with a ban on another predatory industry: for-profit bail bondsmen, who rip off black people and poor people with deceptive financing terms that are designed to create a usurious cycle of permanent debt. (Image: Sarah Nichols/CC-BY-SA) Read the rest
I always loved Ferrero Rocher because of its wonderful television ads in Britain. To immigrants in America, writes Liana Aghajanian, the foil-wrapped chocolates are a status symbol.
Growing up in Culver City, California, in an apartment complex entirely occupied by Libyan-American families -- each of whom had their very own stash of Ferrero Rocher in serving bowls -- the chocolate was something Herwees says she associated with Libyan culture, because the only places she encountered it were her house, at Libyan-American weddings, or in Libya itself.
“I had this one auntie who always pulled out a Ferrero Rocher when I was there; I always knew she had Ferrero Rocher on hand,” she says. “She became one of my favorite aunties for this. I think I associated it with decadence -- even now when I have it, it feels like a really special thing.” The strong emotional response this particular chocolate induced in immigrant families was common. Their lives were caught up in war, violence, political turbulence, and socioeconomic inequality. As their worlds changed around them, Ferrero Rocher remained a constant, an accessible bridge to the past and present that has now become a nostalgic reminder of what life growing up in America was about for children of immigrants like me.
On the infamous UK ad (embedded above):
Read the restIts appeal, however, wasn’t as universal as it seemed, and perhaps nothing encapsulated the disdain for Ferrero Rocher better than the roaring reaction to the infamous commercial known as the “Ambassador’s Party,” which aired in the UK in 1993.
Unilever founder John Wanamaker famously said, "I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. My only problem is that I don’t know which half." It's an odd testament to the power of advertising, an industry whose executives are incredibly effective at selling their services to other executives, even if they can't prove they're any good at selling their customers' products to the public. Read the rest
Facebook maintains a repository of success stories trumpeting the advertisers who have attained greatness by buying Facebook ads; most of these are businesses, but until recently, Facebook also trumpeted Florida Governor Rick Scott's use of Facebook ads to "boost Hispanic voter turnout in their candidate’s successful bid for a second term, resulting in a 22% increase in Hispanic support and the majority of the Cuban vote." Read the rest
The ROICHEN EASY TRAY "helps you to stock and pull out your clothes without making a mess" and is an instant classic in the annals of weird advertising. Read the rest
In 1993, AT&T ran a series of ads trumpeting the future of the internet, called "You Will." Read the rest
Artist Jenny Odell created the Bureau of Suspended Objects to photographically archive and researched the manufacturing origins of 200 objects found at a San Francisco city dump; last August, she prepared a special report for Oakland's Museum of Capitalism about the bizarre world of shitty "free" watches sold through Instagram influences and heavily promoted through bottom-feeding remnant ad-buys, uncovering a twilight zone of copypasted imagery and promotional materials livened with fake stories about mysterious founders and branded tales. Read the rest
