I would like to have now whatever they served in McDonaldland in 1970, which clearly involved more than beef, bread and condiments.

Read the rest

Sam Elliott had the horses in the back with a wrangler on his booty before Lil Nas X was even in diapers.

(Adweek) Read the rest

EVERYONE SHUT UP AND LOOK AT THIS COFFEE ADVERTISEMENT pic.twitter.com/oqpNvBAcXa

— dante (@sapphicticated) January 17, 2020

How did Dad rescue those glasses? Read the rest

In San Diego, California, strip club chain Deja Vu Showgirls distributed 150 tents to homeless people. The tents are emblazoned with the Deja Vu logo, natch. From 10News:

A picture of one of the tents was posted onto the “Homeless News San Diego” Facebook page and it received both praise and criticism. Some believed it was a form of shameless advertising. Others applauded the company for stepping up to help.

In this brilliant billboard for the new Dracula TV series, the 3D stakes create an ominous shadow. (And yes, there's an electric light in case the sun doesn't cooperate.)

A fun find on the Dracula Art Department WhatsApp group. Bravo, marketing team..! 🦇 pic.twitter.com/sHUSJDodVI

— Richard🦇Wells (@Slippery_Jack) December 29, 2019

Driving near Pittsburgh, PA, my wife Heather noticed this excellent billboard featuring a woman saying "Scared of the dentist? No, I called and got SEDATED!". Read the rest

In 1988, I worked in a toy store and quickly became annoyed by all the requests for the Snuggle bear. But this I can tolerate. For a moment anyway. Read the rest

The Atari 800 was released in 1979. I wish I'd bought one at the time because apparently it will never become obsolete.

(via Weird Universe) Read the rest

The video ad for this smart mug, for sale on Amazon, is either brilliant or an SNL parody.

I can not embed the video, you have to click to the Amazon product page to load it.

(Thanks, Jolie!)

**UPDATE** A kind reader found an embeddable copy, and it has subtitles!

Read the rest

MrConsumer specializes in spotting packaging tricks such as mouse print: small, low-contrast or otherwise obscured text designed to fool the consumer into thinking a product is something it is not. He spotted this very bland, normal looking bottle of olive oil available at Target. It's just olive oil, right? It says right there that it's extra virgin olive oil. Look closer, with a child's perfect eyes.

So how does this company get away with a label so seemingly deceptive? No one had gone after them — until last month. A New York law firm just filed a class action lawsuit against the company alleging that its label is violating the deceptive practice consumer protection laws of all 50 states.

Here's the class-action lawsuit filed against Iberia Foods, the company behind Sunflower Oil & Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

The “Extra Virgin Olive Oil” is in conspicuous gold that is prominent to the eye. By contrast, the sunflower oil disclosure is in black typeset that b lends into the dark green background and will be readily missed once the more ostentatious olive oil disclosure catches the hurried shopper’s eye

In any case, much supermarket olive oil is reportedly fake even when it's "honestly" labeled.

I recommend Dehesa de la Sabina [Amazon], an award-winning olive oil sourced from a single-estate cooperative in Spain and not outrageously expensive. Read the rest

Kevin McCallister (played by Macaulay Culkin, of course) is no longer a boy but has been left home alone again in the same house he was back in the early 1990s. The difference? This time the house is controlled by voice-activated devices so he's able to get stuff done without lifting a finger by talking to Google Assistant.

It's a cute advertisement but remember, ya filthy animal, that EFF has put "creepy, surveillant" devices like the ones featured in the video on the don't-buy list.

Personal side note: My awesome cousin James was the art director on this!

Thanks, Andy! Read the rest

The film above documents "Treatment Box," a one-day installation in New York City's Greenwich Village over the summer where passers-by could watch 26-year-old Rebekkah suffer through the horrors of painkiller and heroin withdrawal. Anti-addiction organization The Truth orchestrated the recording and public showing of Rebekkah's five-day experience that was edited into a single long-form video. After the detox, Rebekkah entered a treatment facility for treatment at no cost to her. From Ad Age:

The scenes of her shaky limbs, nausea, vomiting and insomnia played out on a three-dimensional installation at Astor Place in New York City in June. Passersby stopped to watch a life-size Rebekkah in her room, often huddled in bed, wracked with pain. Interspersed are short interviews where she explains that she was prescribed opioids when she was 14, after injuring her ankle during cheerleading practice. Addiction quickly followed, and two months later, she tried heroin. “I feel like I’m coming back from the dead,” she says on Day 3 of detox...

Before beginning the campaign, the organizations met with a medical ethicist to determine whether the project should move forward, and the treatment protocols were reviewed by Phoenix House, a national addiction treatment program.

I can imagine the first brainstorm: "What if the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey was actually a massive pack of cigarettes? And they found it at the bottom of the ocean?" Here's the actual back story according to Big Dog Media Productions:

When health warnings first appeared on packets in 1971 and the rules for cigarette advertising rules were changed, tobacco companies were faced with the challenge of maintaining brand awareness and driving sales in a market made more aware of the risks than ever before.

The change in rules, coupled with a fresh approach to advertising in general, gave birth to a unique genre of advertising that neatly ticked the boxes of the rule book yet created an art form. As with Surrealist art, these ads aimed to surprise and intrigue the viewer by replacing the objects people expected to see in a particular scene with something incongruous – in this case, a packet of cigarettes.

Collett Dickenson Pearce was tasked with the advertising for Benson & Hedges in 1973....

The story goes that Frank Lowe, Managing Director at CDP in 1977, had two finished campaigns to present. After much debate, he took both campaigns to CDP’s Creative Director, Colin Millward, and asked him his view.

Colin said “…one will let you sleep at night, the other will make you famous.”

(via r/ObscureMedia, thanks UPSO!) Read the rest

Just when you thought that Facebook couldn't get any more greasy, they have outdone themselves in a manner that places them well beyond even the most succulent of French Chef finger-kisses: the phone numbers that many folks gave them in order to activate the service's two-factor authentication protection? Zuckerberg and his crew are using it to serve up advertisements to unsuspecting users.

From TechCrunch:

Facebook’s confession follows a story Gizmodo ran a story yesterday, related to research work carried out by academics at two U.S. universities who ran a study in which they say they were able to demonstrate the company uses pieces of personal information that individuals did not explicitly provide it to, nonetheless, target them with ads.

While it’s been — if not clear, then at least evident — for a number of years that Facebook uses contact details of individuals who never personally provided their information for ad targeting purposes (harvesting people’s personal data by other means, such as other users’ mobile phone contact books which the Facebook app uploads), the revelation that numbers provided to Facebook by users in good faith, for the purpose of 2FA, are also, in its view, fair game for ads has not been so explicitly ‘fessed up to before.

The best part of all of this is that, according to TechCrunch, Facebook had the chance to confess to their shitty behavior some time ago when it was revealed that users who submitted a phone number for 2FA purposes were being spammed with texts ads sent to their smartphones. Read the rest

In 1985, HR Giger created a Japanese ad campaign for Pioneer's Zone home audio system. Apparently the biomechanical masterpieces seen in these print and TV campaigns were originally created by Giger for Alejandro Jodorowsky's never-made adaptation of Dune.

Read the rest

Everything has a cost, especially in the realm of online services. It used to be a pretty common practice for providers of 'free' email services to scan their user's messages for data that'd be valuable to advertisers. The data got sold to keep the email provider's lights on, with in-browser advertising filling in the financial gaps. Most email providers abandoned the practice, years ago: they were amazed to find that it pissed off their users. Yahoo's parent company, Oath, however, is getting back on this particular brand of bullshit.

From The Verge:

Yahoo’s owner, Oath, is in talks with advertisers to provide a service that would analyze over 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes for consumer data, sources told WSJ. Oath did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Oath confirmed to the WSJ that it performs email scannings and said that it only scans promotional emails, usually from retailers. Users have the ability to opt out, it said. Oath’s argument is that email is an expensive system, and people can’t expect a free service without some value exchanged.

That's greasy.

Greasier still is the fact that even if you pony up the dough, on a monthly basis, for Yahoo's premium email services, your data will get scanned unless you opt to opt out. Finding the page that lets you do this, surprise, surprise is not easy to do. We've got your back, though. Follow this link to take control of your Oath-related privacy settings.

Oath swears that the data scraping method they use ignores personal information and personal identifiers. Read the rest

Japan's Wakino Ad Company is selling ad space on women's underarms for rates starting at 10,000 yen/hour. Their first paid campaign comes from Seishin Biyo Clinic for its armpit hair removal process. From Straits Times:

Meanwhile, Wakino is calling for aspiring models to raise their hands, as it has since embarked on a recruitment drive via its website.

The company, which said it is open to hiring male models as well, will also be organising an armpit beauty contest.