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Jeff Kreisler $14.99 NOW $10.19
By Julian Fellowes $16.49
$35
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 Flickr / Lee Carson
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The Spanish government is cracking down on television advertising that promotes weight-loss products and other related goods and services, including plastic surgery, by creating legislation that would bar the ads from being shown until after 10 p.m.
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The vice president’s “suave original personality” and “sly trademark grin” might make him an excellent pitchman. The Onion mocked up this joke ad campaign for Hennessy and it kind of works—almost too well to be funny.
Posted on Jan 12, 2010
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 flickr / deneyterrio
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Facebook has come under fire more than once for its execs’ creative interpretations of the term privacy, and now the megasite’s fresh-faced CEO Mark Zuckerberg has drummed up a very interesting line of argument to justify his stance on the issue. What you might see as violations of personal privacy, Zuckerberg and his team view as “reflect[ing] the current social norms.” Oh.
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 Flickr / Adam Pieniazek
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Thanks to the runaway success of the iPhone, AT&T has the largest wireless network in the country—and the lousiest. Fed-up subscribers, who pay the telco about $30 a month just for data (and another $40 or so for voice), are planning an assault this Friday called Operation Chokehold. (continued)
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The Associated Press reports on one of Congress’ urgent priorities: “Television viewers jarred by abrupt spikes in volume during commercial breaks may someday be able to give their mute buttons a rest.”
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 youtube
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What to do when your business and the medium it’s printed on are disintegrating into pulp? Form a consortium, of course. Condé Nast, Hearst, Time, News Corp. and something called Meredith have banded together to crack this nut with a common digital format, shared innovation and maybe even a new gadget or two. (continued)
Posted on Dec 8, 2009
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 Flickr/Gisela Giardino
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Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt has gazed into the future of the news business, and—surprise!—he sees Google playing a big, vital role. In his Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece, Schmidt heralds the advent, in the not-so-distant future, of an era in which the Internet “will foster a new, digital business model.” Hmmm!
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 White House / Pete Souza
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Why did voters in Maine reject a law that would have sanctioned same-sex marriage? Well, according to some marriage equality supporters, one big reason currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and another has to do with conservative scare tactics played out via television ad campaigns.
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 youtube.com
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He may be jacking up his ratings with all his, um, displays of distrust of the Obama administration and its policies, but it seems that Fox News pontificator Glenn Beck might well be feeling the burn in the advertising department for all his bloviating (not to mention his spelling issues).
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 adfreak.com
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It may always be too soon to bring Sept. 11 disaster imagery into certain forms of media, especially advertising, but two different ad firms and their clients just learned the hard way that now is most definitely not the time for that sort of thing.
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 Collage: Flickr / Qfamily and melloveschallah
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Just about every Web site you visit, including this one, keeps track of details such as who you are, where you come from, and what you look at on the site and for how long. But some go even further to please advertisers, who may know what kind of books you read, what you search for, whom your friends are and more. Enter the House of Representatives.
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 aids-is-a-mass-murderer.com
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Invoking the notorious images of dictators like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Saddam Hussein as part of an AIDS-awareness ad series constitutes a serious gamble at best—and a deeply misguided move at worst, according to critics of the new “AIDS Is a Mass-Murderer” European campaign conjured up by a Hamburg advertising firm.
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By David Sirota — The military’s fantastical advertisements promote a somewhat comforting, if disturbingly misleading, message—and it is aimed not just at potential soldiers, but also at the public at large.
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 femexvoleibol.com
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The American television industry is in crisis, according to Advertising Age critic Bob Garfield, who figures prominently in The Wrap’s two-part look into the future of the industry. In fact, says Garfield, we’re seeing early signs of “the total collapse of the network television model.”
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 ppcforhire.com
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A long-rumored partnership between software giant Microsoft and Internet giant Yahoo has come to pass. In an effort to tag-team Google, Microsoft will combine its new Bing search engine with Yahoo’s vast advertising empire.
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Chris Hedges — The Obama brand is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.
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 imageshack.us
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We’ve all been hearing this refrain for some time, but this is getting even more serious, people: According to Business Week, circulation numbers for 11 of the 25 biggest newspapers in America have taken a nosedive—the worst drop yet since the mediapocalypse in the print world commenced.
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 AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Chris Hedges — The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. Our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
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 Flickr / AtomicPope
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By Chris Hedges — I visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles a few days ago. It is advertised as “the final resting place to more of Hollywood’s founders and stars than anywhere else on Earth.” We all have gods, Martin Luther said, it is just a question of which ones. And in American society, our gods are often celebrities.
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 USAF / Tech. Sgt. Charlein Sheets
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The military’s spin budget—covering recruitment, advertising and public relations—has jumped 63 percent over the last five years, to $4.7 billion, according to a yearlong investigation by the Associated Press. The Pentagon pays nearly as many people to influence public opinion as the State Department has in its entire work force.
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 AP photo / Kevork Djansezian
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By Bill Boyarsky — I’m concerned about the uncertain future for journalists. Without them, who will “watchdog” politicians and bureaucrats, charity officials, cops, educators and the many others who help make our society run?
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By Ellen Goodman — Now, competitive consumption has been replaced by contagious anxiety. Buying hit the wall with the housing collapse, the stock market plunge, the credit card crunch and the surge in unemployment figures.
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It’s always a little spooky and a little funny to listen to a person from the past predict a future that may have already come to pass. In this clip from 50 years ago, Mike Wallace interviews “Brave New World” author Aldous Huxley, and while some of what Huxley says sounds goofy, some sounds uncomfortably familiar.
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 AP photo / Tina Fineberg
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By Chris Hedges — The change from a print-based to an image-based society has transformed our nation. All the traditional tools of democracies, including dispassionate scientific and historical truth, facts, news and rational debate, are useless instruments in a world that lacks the capacity to use them.
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 AP photo / LM Otero
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — A good politician triumphs by adapting to the times and taking advantage of opportunities as they come. A great politician anticipates openings others don’t see and creates possibilities that were not there before.
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Every election season, some independent groups sizzle with controversy and impact, and others fizzle. We couldn’t tell at first, but the National Republican Trust PAC appears to be of the sizzling variety.
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By Amy Goodman — The candidates’ coffers are swelling with larger and larger bundles of cash, but don’t hold your breath waiting for the extended television discussions of this, because it’s the broadcasters who profit the most.
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 AP photo / Madalyn Ruggiero
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Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has pulled significantly ahead of Republican rival John McCain, taking an 11-point lead after Tuesday night’s presidential debate, according to the latest Gallup Poll.
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 AP photo / Paul Sancya
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Well, there you are, Joe Biden! After what seemed like ages out of the spotlight, the Democratic vice presidential nominee came out swinging at a campaign stop Monday in Michigan, casting Republican presidential hopeful John McCain as a Bush wannabe and part of “a culture in Washington where the very few wealthy and powerful have a seat at the table and the rest of us are on the menu.”
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 Flickr / Mykl Roventine
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The Justice Department could be gearing up for an antitrust case against the world’s leading search and online advertising provider because of a deal with Yahoo that puts Google in control of the vast majority of online ads. Despite a pledge to not do evil, Google’s image has been tarnished in recent years, mainly over privacy concerns.
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Michael Phelps’ million-dollar bonus for making Olympic history is chump change compared with the hundreds of millions he is expected to rake in over the course of his career. What does swimming have to do with credit cards? Visa is prepared to spend millions to convince you the answer is “a lot.”
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 Flickr / specialklikethecereal
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Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller is best known for firing people. Now Hiller himself is out of a job. The ousting was announced as the Times braced for another devastating round of staff cuts. Meantime, the editor of another Sam Zell-owned newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, announced her resignation as that paper continues its own gutting.
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 businessweek.com
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A recent advertising partnership between search giant Google and competitor Yahoo has antitrust authorities worried. Not only does a Google-Yahoo deal look ridiculous in name, but critics (such as Microsoft) say the partnership would consolidate Google’s control of Internet search ad revenue to a whopping 90 percent of U.S. market share.
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 Flickr / Tracy O
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We’re barely into the general election campaign and already more than $1 billion has been raised by the various candidates. That tally includes now-defunct campaigns and personal loans. Still, that’s more money than has ever been raised for an election, and we’ve got about five months to go.
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 Flickr / jimw
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Sam Zell seems to get a kick out of antagonizing his critics, some of his own reporters among them, but this time the Tribune Co. boss has really outdone himself. Zell has announced a new model for his newspapers: 50 percent news and 50 percent ads. At the Los Angeles Times, that will mean 82 fewer pages of news every week.
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 vox.com
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Tyson Foods was ordered by a judge Thursday to cease a false multimillion-dollar ad campaign promoting its claim that its chickens are “raised without antibiotics.” The key question centers on the word raised and whether the egg stage can be considered to be outside the process of raising chickens.
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 Flickr / Steve Rhodes
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A new poll shows Hillary Clinton way out ahead in Pennsylvania, thanks in part to the 23 percent of respondents who said Barack Obama’s saturation advertising is turning them off. The Obama campaign is currently spending more per week on ads in Pennsylvania than any other candidate ever has spent.
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A few months ago columnist Amy Goodman argued that the principal beneficiaries of our current campaign finance system are the media conglomerates that rake in all those advertising dollars. That’s especially true this week as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama bombard Pennsylvania with commercials.
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 latimes.com
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The Swedish vodka company known for its memorable advertising has stirred a bit of controversy in the United States with an ad running in Mexico that shows what the two countries would look like “in an Absolut world.” Updated
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There’s a reason campaigns are more expensive than ever: commercials. Although they try, the candidates can’t be in every Super Tuesday state at the same time, and the most effective way of reaching millions of people in one state is the same for politicians as it is for Tylenol. Even Barack Obama, who has bet big on his grass-roots organization, spent around $4 million on ads in the last week of January.
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For years, we’ve been hearing about big companies increasingly taking over the American news business, as well as media execs jumping into bed with government higher-ups, but this report about the federal government and major corporations actually producing and planting prepackaged “news” stories in outlets around the country raises the Big Brother threat level to at least Orange.
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The Department of Health and Human Services’ latest abstinence ad commands the viewer to “tell your kids you want them to wait till they’re married to have sex.” That’s the Bush administration for you: Forget about the heaps of data that show a strategy doesn’t work and just keep throwing money at it.
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 informedvoters.wordpress.com
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Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani tried to diss The New York Times, Sen. Hillary Clinton and MoveOn.org all at once by placing his own advertisement in the paper to counter MoveOn.org’s critique of Gen. David Petraeus, claiming The Times had played favorites with their ad sales policy.
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 businessinnovationinsider.com
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Signaling a sea change in the advertising business, four top-tier ad agencies are lining up to pitch to former Vice President Al Gore in hopes of landing the account for his Alliance for Climate Protection and helping Gore design a multimedia global warming campaign with a whopping $100-million annual budget. The takeaway, according to AdAge: Global warming is hot on Madison Avenue.
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A group of progressive organizations and blogs is planning to hit Fox News where it hurts: the bank account. MoveOn.org, Brave New Films, DailyKos and others are working to compile a list of local advertisers as part of a larger pressure campaign. Fox News may have brought this on itself by successfully pressuring JetBlue to pull out as a major sponsor of the YearlyKos convention.
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By Marie Cocco — Food companies that market obesity-inducing products to young children are taking a lesson from big tobacco and getting ahead of the lawsuit curve.
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By Marie Cocco — We’ve come a long way from seeing ourselves as oh-so-sexy holding a slim cigarette—all the way to seeing red. Red, the color of angry outrage, could be just the thing to blot out Big Tobacco’s latest campaign to hook young women on cigarettes by dressing up death in fuchsia and teal.
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Barack Obama recently sat down with David Letterman and managed to hold his own with the humor. When asked why his campaign needed so much money, the candidate said evenly: “We’ve got to advertise on the Letterman show.” According to Amy Goodman, that’s no joke.
Posted on Apr 11, 2007
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By Marie Cocco — If we are what we eat and we eat what is advertised, then American children are facing death by junk food.
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