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By Blaine Harden
$10.20
$4.49
$22
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youtube.com
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An advertising boycott enacted in the wake of Rush Limbaugh’s controversial “slut” comment about Sandra Fluke last year appears to be working.
Posted on May 8, 2013
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Sony Pictures Classics
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By Sheerly Avni — How did Gael García Bernal, an outspoken leftist who has played Che Guevara not once, but twice, end up starring in a film that would appear, on the surface at least, to be a celebration of 20th century free-market economics?
Posted on Mar 23, 2013
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messycupcakes (CC-BY-ND)
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Bernard Meisler was surprised to find that his recently deceased friend, who “hated corporate bullshit,” had returned from the afterlife to express his fondness for the Discover card on Facebook.
Posted on Dec 11, 2012
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Photo by David Holt (CC-BY-SA)
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The Olympics generate a fortune from sponsorships and exclusive deals, and to make sure no one gets in on the action for free, a uniformed force of advert cops has been empowered to patrol the streets of London. Get this: At the London Games, it’s illegal to serve chips.
Posted on Jul 16, 2012
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To make inmates in Guantanamo Bay divulge information, guards play “Sesame Street” songs; studies are attempting to show that people can suffer from a clinical addiction to Facebook; meanwhile, the Catholic Church is looking into the Girl Scouts for their ties to organizations that promote safe sex. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Jun 4, 2012
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By Amy Goodman — May Day, Murdoch and the murder of Milly Dowler. What do they have to do with the 2012 U.S. general election?
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Pascal (CC-BY)
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Google seems to have grown tired of waiting for the future and is reportedly developing a set of glasses that acts like a smartphone for your eyes.
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AP / Paul Sancya
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By Juan Cole — Politics has become a game of the super rich, but the money they donate is significant only because of the way it is spent: on TV and radio advertising.
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On this week’s “Moyers & Company,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson of FactCheck.org and FlackCheck.org says “we’re at a very, very critical time right now” and must try to block “visceral” political advertising at the local level.
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AP / Paul Sancya
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By Peter Z. Scheer — Newt Gingrich has made it clear that if he can’t be president, he’s going to try to take Mitt Romney down with him. But the former House speaker’s endless stream of attack ads could, perversely, end up strengthening the “Massachusetts Moderate,” who seems likely to survive the onslaught.
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Wikimedia Commons / Brett Weinstein (CC-BY-SA)
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Hip-hop impresario and yogaphile Russell Simmons is publicly shaming Lowe’s with some help from his amassed fortune after the home-improvement megastore pulled its ads from the “All-American Muslim” reality show.
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Zimbabwe’s own Robert Mugabe is the unlikely star of this startlingly funny little number that its sponsoring chicken restaurant chain, Nando’s South Africa, calls “Last dictator standing.” This did not please the real-life version of the ad’s fun-loving dictator.
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Thomas Galvez (CC-BY)
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In the spirit of fostering a more “socialist culture,” the Chinese government is banning commercials that interrupt television dramas. Judging by this BBC report, China’s TV executives seem much more concerned with lost revenue than with government interference.
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YouTube
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For its first official foray into the Campaign 2012 TV ad space, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s publicity team decided to take a phrase Barack Obama once used as a quotation clearly sourced to someone else and attribute it to Obama himself. But relax everyone, it was on purpose!
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inkstainedwretch.com
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Italian clothing company Benetton’s latest foray into multiculturalism, this time with interfaith overtones, has landed the retailer in hot holy water with the Vatican. In a blatant bid to stay relevant while broadcasting a shock-inducing message of love in the time of globalization, Benetton launched an ad campaign ... (more)
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You know what liberals do? They hit below the belt. That’s the explanation given for the race-based treatment that the mainstream media are giving “beautiful man” Herman Cain, according to this exercise in crisis management produced by Cain’s camp. (more)
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Flickr/ believekevin (CC-BY)
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Social movements come with their own unique aesthetics, often drawing raw material from past protest traditions and performances, as well as from the font of plenty that is popular culture, and repurposing it in inventive new ways for the cause at hand. The movement that began with Occupy Wall Street has brought a bounty … (more)
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Is there anything worse than Republican attempts at ironic humor? Well, yes, but they’re still pretty bad. Take this Western-themed ad from Herman Cain’s overreaching campaign team, “He Carried Yellow Flowers,” featuring the Ironic Celebrity Endorsement of actor Nick Searcy, some card-carrying liberals and ... (more)
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Nytimes.com
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Some graphic designers have come up with various proposals, but one wonders whether the motley crew of anti-corporate urban campers would welcome such a commercial device.
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Flickr / kcolwell
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American corporations are pushing the use of peer pressure to sell products to a new level as they hire roughly 10,000 college students around the country to work as brand ambassadors to their friends and acquaintances this year. (more)
Posted on Sep 11, 2011
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The biggest threat to WikiLeaks isn’t the house arrest of Julian Assange or the militaries of frustrated world governments—it’s the financial blockade by PayPal, Bank of America, Visa and other institutions that has cut off $15 million in donations (by WikiLeaks’ estimate).
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By David Sirota — In a breathless story somehow presented as a groundbreaking revelation, The New York Times recently reported that the Pentagon is—shocker!—using all sorts of media channels to market itself to the nation’s children.
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Sean MacEntee (CC-BY)
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By David Sirota — Is Snoop Dogg the new Joe Camel? Is Ronald McDonald? What about Facebook—has that website become synonymous with an infamous tobacco industry cartoon that preyed on unsuspecting kids?
Posted on May 27, 2011
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Move to Amend
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A growing number of political campaign contributors are bypassing the Federal Election Commission entirely, secretly donating large sums of money right under the nose of the toothless organization. (more)
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Adzookie.com
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Here’s one solution to the foreclosure crisis, albeit an ugly one. In what Gizmodo points out could very well be a publicity stunt, mobile ad company Adzookie says it will pay your mortgage if you let it turn your house into a giant billboard. Take it away, Chris Hedges.
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Daniel Erwin (CC-BY)
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In the age of oversharing, we take it for granted that our every status is up to date and hanging out for all to see. Privacy, we are told, is dead. But over in Europe, they have crazy new laws that actually restrict how businesses stalk us online. Communists.
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YouTube
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By Aram Sinnreich — The Super Bowl commercial is a shell game. Detroit’s pain isn’t the result of some existential crisis of faith, but a direct consequence of the amoral, profit-seeking behaviors of Chrysler itself.
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gawker.com
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Well, this was just a colossally bad idea. Kenneth Cole, manufacturer of strangely expensive yet consistently mediocre shoes, decided to do a clever (read: not clever at all) ripped-from-the-headlines blend of promotion and news commentary via Twitter ...
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In this TED talk, Johanna Blakley of USC argues that “there is an upside to having your taste monitored” online. Rather than pigeonhole you in a demographic prison, the people who make entertainment are paying more attention to what you actually like—especially if you’re a woman.
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AP / Koji Sasahara
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In the world of advertising, celebrity always equals money, and anything that these luminaries—whether from entertainment, sports or even politics—touch (even by accident) is tantamount to tangible, profitable product placement, right?
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Flickr / Max Braun (CC-BY-SA)
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The people who keep track of these things report that global spam traffic dropped from 200 billion messages in August to just 50 billion in December. Unfortunately it appears that the spammers may have decided to pause their activity before a relaunch. Which is just as well because we’re running low on Canadian Viagra.
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AP / Jae C. Hong
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It seems Google has weathered the recession quite well, thank you. The search superpower reported a better-than-expected third-quarter increase in net income of 32 percent, signaling growing confidence in the profitability of online and mobile device advertising.
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One would think that advertisers would be done remixing American aristocrat Wallis Simpson’s highly problematic old saw, “You can never be too rich or too thin,” but then one would be mistaken. Updated
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OK, so there’s clearly more important news out there, but when BBC News ran the headline “Parasailing donkey stunt sparks police inquiry,” we wondered what mischief might be afoot. Turns out it concerned yet another genius advertising idea gone horribly awry.
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AP / Reed Saxon
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By T.L. Caswell — The L.A. Times executive suite, desperate for company income, shows an ethics-be-damned attitude in breaching the line between ads and news.
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americanapparel.net
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We’ve always been a little skeeved out by the American Apparel phenomenon, what with the eco-conscious, “sweatshop free,” hipster-friendly company’s glaring omission of any sense of enlightened politics when it comes to ... (continued)
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Al-Qaida is to Bill O’Reilly what Nazis are to Glenn Beck. That is to say it’s his favorite smear for things he doesn’t like. In this instance, a heartwarming (warning) commercial for McDonald’s in France (danger) aimed at gays (RED ALERT!).
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By David Sirota — “I Want My Country Back”—this ubiquitous tea party mantra belongs next to Nike’s “Just Do It” on Ad Age’s list of the most transcendent idioms.
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Flickr / stringberd
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European retailer Primark has gotten itself into some hot water. The clothing chain halted the sale of padded bikini tops for girls as young as 7 years old after advocacy groups and politicians criticized the store for “premature sexualization and unprincipled advertising.”
Posted on Apr 14, 2010
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glennbeck.com
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What are we to make of the Obamalyptic images and messages sounding the alarm, in the form of click-through advertisements, on Glenn Beck’s website? And exactly what, pray tell, is “food insurance”?
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Google
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Unsatisfied with running just your searches, browser, e-mail, calendar, documents, videos, cell phone, turn-by-turn navigation, operating system, electricity monitoring, much of the advertising on the Internet and more, Google has announced that it plans to experiment with providing Internet service that is about 100 times faster than what most Americans are used to.
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Sadly, this ad probably wasn’t banned because it’s lame and not funny, but CBS did Go Daddy a favor keeping this humor fail off the air.
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newsday.com
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In the future, news junkies may be willing to pay a subscription fee to get their fix, but judging by what’s happening over at Long Island’s Newsday newspaper, that time has not come. According to The New York Observer, after three months, only 35 people had signed up to have full access to newsday.com for $260 a year.
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Truthdigger of the Week: Medea Benjamin
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