The Muppets Rock Out on a Google+ Hangout

I’ve already famously predicted that 2012 will be the year that Google+ overtakes Facebook as the largest social network on the planet. That prediction isn’t looking so crazy now that Google has started releasing some pretty kick ass commercials showing off some of the cool features of Google+ that Facebook is noticeably lacking.

For years Google was known for not doing any sort of advertising whatsoever. In fact, their first network television commercial didn’t come along until 2009 and that wasn’t to advertise Google itself but to advertise it’s new browser, Chrome. All of Google’s early success as it grew into the world’s largest search engine was carried along by word of mouth. Wisely Google didn’t allow a stupid PR firm with its head up its ass to come in and mess things up while the company was still in its infancy.

Risqué French Condom Commercial

It’s no secret that when it comes to sex and sex education in the U.S. we tend to be fairly backwards and often refuse to even teach it to our children in a responsible manner. Obviously wearing a condom is one of the most important lessons you can drill into any sexually active person for about a thousand good reasons.

This French condom commercial tries to emphasize the importance of wearing a condom but…well just watch it and see. Have I become a prude or are there some much subtler ways to emphasize safe sex on TV?

Living Social Gets Great Deal by Promoting Academy Award Tweets Day After Academy Awards

I was online most of last night during the Academy Awards and I am pretty positive these Tweets weren’t live during the actual airing of the awards show.

I wonder if it’s like the day after Valentine’s Day when you can buy candy and flowers for half the price?

Microsoft is Using Promoted Tweets to Advertise a Government Only Telework Solution

Promoted or “sponsored” Tweets are a great way to get eyes on your product considering the click-through rate for promoted tweets is nearly 2,000% according to some statistics.

It’s still a little mind-boggling thought why Microsoft would choose this method to advertise a product that is for use strictly by government agencies. Certainly there are a plethora of politicians and government agencies using Twitter to communicate and stay in touch, but considering the cost of a promoted Tweet and the relatively low numbers of government agencies per capita on Twitter a promoted tweet for such a specific program seems a bit like overkill.

How many government office administrators could possibly be on Twitter looking for a solution to help create a telework situation for their office? Makes you wonder who pulled the trigger on this at Microsoft.

GroupOn and LivingSocial Duke it Out for Worst/Most Tasteless Super Bowl Commercials

Once GroupOn locked up a last-minute time slot for a Super Bowl commercial they sort of forced LivingSocial’s hand which responded by buying a pre-Super Bowl time slot. Then, they both united to confound people with truly terrible and tasteless commercials, each vying for Worst Ad of the Night.

Let’s just cut the chase and say GroupOn’s commercial was definitely the most tasteless. A lot of people were shocked when GroupOn said, “Thanks, but no thanks,” to Google’s $6 billion acquisition bid a couple of months ago. Now it just seems as if people are realizing that GroupOn may in fact be just run by a bunch of rich, “out-of-touch”, “insensitive dicks“.

And now, to the tape.

GroupOn Super Bowl Commercial

One of the world’s most revered cultures and religious histories has been threatened with death and extinction in Tibet for decades at the hands of the authoritarian Chinese government; Groupon’s Super Bowl advertisement about Tibet (below) was based on a joke drastically reducing the seriousness of that suffering. Not all hope is lost, the ad says, because at least there are still refugees that will cook discounted food for White people!

The joke was intended to be absurd, but the absurdity presumed a lack of seriousness in the whole matter. It was an attempt at post-serious humor – but most people with common sense agree that the struggles of Tibet still deserve respect and seriousness. The joke is on anyone who really cares. It came across as the kind of out-of-touch humor that overprivileged, spiritually mean, advertising industry creatives (specifically, the kind that kids refer to as “douchebags”) would come up with. via:rww

.

LivingSocial “pre” Super Bowl Commercial

As Ad Age reported last month, “Groupon has made a decisive shift in marketing strategy, now betting big on traditional advertising and hiring CP&B and Publicis Groupe’s Starcom as its new lead creative and media agencies.” How’s that working out?

The real winner (loser?) here is LivingSocial. While their ad did suck, it managed not to crap on an entire nation of people. Kudos LivingSocial!

Motorola Takes Off the Gloves and Shoves Apple’s Iconic ’1984′ Commercial Back in Its Face

Motorola uploaded a teaser to its Super Bowl commercial on YouTube today and it’s clear that they have one goal in mind, take a swing at Apple and portray it, legitimately or not, as selling out on what it’s commercial claimed it would do back in 1984.

Motorola’s Super Bowl Ad

Apple’s Original 1984 Ad

What do you think? Is Motorola’s ad effective? Does it hit its mark or is it just way off?

Verizon Launches its First iPad Commercial on YouTube

Thankfully I only have the WiFi enable iPad so I don’t have any envy about Verizon’s iPad being on a better network. They’re only selling WiFi enable versions as of now. Although the MiFi usage is pretty damn cool.

I’m like the César Chávez of Blogging

I rarely drink soda but when I do I expect to be compensated for it. I mean I’m sort of a big deal on the internet being a famous blogger and all. Can I seriously be expected to give out prime real-estate on my site with some crazy free product placement deal?

Not long ago, as my most recent soda shakes began to take hold, I decided to do what any right-minded capitalistic American would do. I called up my agent and told him to get me some sort of big time blogger/soda endorsement deal before I came down to his office and told him stories about the Ancient Aztecs used to rip off the heads of their fallen enemy and shit in their skull before using the head itself, now filled with poop, in some ancient form of basketball.

Since I live in NYC and I’m a Yankees fan it seemed natural that we set our sights on PepsiCo. Besides, their worldwide headquarters is just north of the city in White Plains which meant, travel-wise, I could literally do as little as possible to try and seal this deal.

Once my agent got us the meeting we hopped on the Metro North to White Plains and got ready to do battle with these guys. I have to admit that there were a few points during the negotiations that got pretty ugly. There was a lot of name-calling and a lot of, “are you fucking serious, do you really think there’s any goddamned chance in hell that we would even consider giving you money just for sitting around drinking a Pepsi while you blag or blark or whatever the fuck you call it then you’re out of your god damned mind,” or something to that effect.
[Read more...]

What AT&T’s ‘Rethink Possible’ Ad Should Say

Talk about truth in advertising.

AT&T Rethink Possible

Via robhue.

Evangeline Lilly Does Steamy Phone Sex Ads, Wants to Know What You’re Wearing Fatty

Yes, I know this isn’t the freshest news but lest we forget where Kate got her start let’s take a look at Evangeline Lilly’s acting experience before she was cast in Lost. The only thing that would possibly make this thing better would be to find out that Live Links was a subsidiary of the DHARMA Initiative.

Video #2 | Video #3

Nothing classier than using suicide bomber on a subway image to sell disinfectant

This seems like a senselessly stupid choice for a marketing campaign.

Posted via web from James Poling

Google Reverses Course, Allows Trademarked Adwords to be Bought by (Most) Everyone

Google AdWords LogoGoogle has announced a change in its AdWords policy that is sure to do two things. It’s sure to make a lot of people a more money, and it’s sure to stir up a quite a bit of controversy. Last Thursday, Google announced on its AdWord blog that it was reversing its previous stance and would begin allowing certain companies to purchase AdWords containing trademarks that they did not own.

…in an effort to improve ad quality and user experience, we are adjusting our trademark policy in the U.S. to allow some ads to use trademarks in the ad text. This change will bring Google’s policy on trademark use in ad text more in line with the industry standard. Under certain criteria, you can use trademark terms in your ad text in the U.S. even if you don’t own that trademark or have explicit approval from the trademark owner to use it. This change will help you to create more narrowly targeted ad text that highlights your specific inventory.

For example, under our old policy, a site that sells several brands of athletic shoes may not have been able to highlight the actual brands that they sell in their ad text. However, under our new policy, that advertiser can create specific ads for each of the brands that they sell. We believe that this change will help both our users and advertisers by reducing the number of overly generic ads that appear across our networks in the U.S.

I’m not exactly sure what Google’s stance was before because it is already being sued for selling trademarked brands without permission, not to mention the suits they’ve settled out of court.

On Monday, FPX filed a class-action suit against Google in federal court in Texas, saying that Google had infringed on its trademark and challenging Google’s policies on behalf of all trademark owners in the state. Legal experts said it was the first class-action suit against Google over the issue.

But Google’s acceptance of such competitive uses of trademarks has irked many other companies, including the likes of American Airlines and Geico, which have filed suits against Google and settled them. Many brand owners say the practice abuses their brands, confuses customers and increases their cost of doing business.

Only time will tell whether or not this move by Google will make things better or worse.

AT&T teaching new gradu8s how 2 spell

One of my pet peeves are people who use numbers and letters among other things to compose text messages or, even worse, emails and facebook messages. Of course at&t isn’t worried about any of that. They just know it’s hip and edgy to be illiterate…especially if you just graduated from something or other.

gmail-exclusively-from-att-buy-one-lg-xenon-get-one-free-jamespolinggmailcom_1242400418982

TiVo Revs Up Spam on its Machines, Keeps Driving the Nails in Its Own Coffin

Just when you thought you couldn’t get any more annoyed by TiVo’s plastering of ads on virtually every part of your screen, just when you thought there was no more real estate left to bombard you with crappy spam the hammer drops.

Hope you don’t like to use the “pause” feature.

Using the TiVo Pause Menu, advertisers can, for the first time, reach audiences with targeted product messages displayed within the pause screen of a Live or Timeshifted program. The feature provides an original solution for advertisers seeking to capture the fast-forwarding viewer. It’s another example of how TiVo offers unique and different solutions for advertisers looking to get viewers to watch advertisements.

What with TiVo hemorrhaging subscribers like they had the plague, you’d think they would be a little more concerned with their customer’s user experience.  It’s hard to tell which came first though, the chicken or the egg.  Are the ads to replace lost subscribers or did subscribers leave because the ads were so fucking annoying.

TiVo released its third quarter results today, and while the company reported a profit (thank you, EchoStar for that $105 million patent violation payment) the DVR maker lost 163,000 subscribers, dragging its total number of subscribers down to 3.46 million — the lowest it’s been since the spring of 2005.

tivo_logo_manTiVo’s DVRs sell for $149.99 to $599.99  and after you buy a box you have to shell out $13 more every month just for the service, that’s all on top of whatever your normal cable bill is.

Imagine paying good money for a nice watch and then every time you checked to see what time it was the background of your watch was an ad for shaving cream or your local chiropractor.  It would feel pretty shitty wouldn’t it?

Cable company DVRs do exactly the same thing as a TiVo with low monthly costs for the box and a much lower monthly rate for the service, not to mention they don’t spam your screen real estate with ads everywhere.

I have for quite a while been contemplating getting a TiVo to replace my cable company’s DVR.  This information makes it much easier to stay with what I got.  Now instead of a TiVo my next investment will be a BluRay player.

MTA Testing New Geo-Targeted Video Ads

Tired of all the ads you see on nyc buses and trains that are about something 20 blocks away or not directly behind you?  You’re in luck.

New York’s transit agency is testing digital advertising screens on the sides of buses.

The screens can target ads for specific neighborhoods. The ads, which resemble TV commercials, could even advertise coffee in the morning, and beer after work.

Titan Worldwide has a 10-year, $800 million contract to sell ads throughout the city’s bus and commuter-train systems. The company says GPS technology allows it to change the ads based on the buses’ locations.

I can’t wait for the first, “Follow me to Whole Foods, it’s only 4…3…2…1 block(s) away.  You’re here!”  If there’s one thing more annoying than the ads on buses and trains it would have to be those same ads constantly changing enroute while be more like TV commercials at the same time.