Are we one step close to a Blade Runner-style dystopian future in which giant blimps float over our city-scapes broadcasting advertising? Well, that might be a bit extreme, but we certainly are a at the point where modern science as seen fit to bestow on us the joys of the floating soap bubble advertisement. [...]
April 29, 2008 – 11:00 pm
Our pals at San Francisco’s Billboard Liberation Front, feeling the heat after their recent ATT/NSA campaign, “decided to temporarily relocate to safehouses on the European continent.” While hiding out they spoke at The Game is Up! in Ghent Belgium and distributed one of their many valuable texts.
The new PDF of their The Art & [...]
It’s my birthday today, so of course I’m off to the amazing Polish salt caves of northern Chicago with my friend Liz, and I’m therefore gonna forgo the whole critical engagement with the ad industry thing and just tell you a story.
So a couple days ago, I was riding the train, when a super cute [...]
An exclusive branded vacation/soiree intended for some mommy bloggers—but not others—succeeded this week in raising some questions about transparency, PR, and free shit. Not, surely, the kind of buzz the fancy party was intended to start.
The party was thrown by market giant Johnson & Johnson. The location was DisneyLand, owned by the Disney Company, long [...]
December 23, 2007 – 11:44 am
Thanks to R.Walker, I came across the following post by Paul Lukas, who’s excellent ‘zine, Beer Frame, I discovered in my first year of college. Paul puts together some compelling arguments for keeping logos off team sports uniforms and in doing so, brings up some other interesting ideas about commercialism and our culture. [...]
December 18, 2007 – 1:48 am
You may have heard already about the A&E billboard beaming audio to the street in New York City. A speaker mounted above the billboard sends ultrasound waves from 7 stories up to a specific location below. Because it’s highly directional, for people outside the target area it’s hardly, if at all, audible. Here’s a demonstration [...]
December 13, 2007 – 5:38 pm
Emily’s been working on a piece about Facebook’s creepy Beacon software (you probably heard about it in the news). But in the midst of the controversy Facebook has taken the marketing of social networking profiles to a whole new low with facebookbusinesssolutions.com. Did they think we wouldn’t notice?
It starts with Facebook Surf and [...]
December 10, 2007 – 10:25 am
Thanks to Rob Walker for allowing to take this post entirely from his blog, Murketing, cause it’s just so good.
One of my running themes is that there is nothing new about contemporary consumers being fed up with advertising. We hear all the time about supposed discovery that what sets today’s consumers apart is that they [...]
October 24, 2007 – 8:05 pm
Introducing guest contributor Anne Elizabeth Moore. Anne is the most qualified person to ever write anything for the AAA because she is an actual writer who has written for magazines that I have heard of - and subscribed to - like Punk Planet, Stay Free!, Bitch, The Onion, and The Progressive. And she wrote [...]
October 16, 2007 – 10:40 am
I love seeing amazing musicians performing in subways around the United States. When I worked in community radio, I even recruited some for on-air performances. I haven’t been to Boston in close to 10 years, but I remember the music I heard performed on the subways.
Much like BART in the Bay Area, Boston’s [...]
August 17, 2007 – 2:01 pm
Here’s some miscellaneous links about advertisers seeing people in their everyday lives as a “captive audience” for their sales pitch. Enjoy!
Fillboard
Fillboard specializes in “handheld outdoor advertising” meaning they put ads on the pumps at gas stations. The site explains, “consumers interact with your with your ad during the 3-5 minute refueling process.” [...]
August 17, 2007 – 7:29 am
An excerpt from Aug 17 New York Times:
There is a reason for their survival: Public telephones are one of the stranger cash cows in city finance. Not because of the coins that are fed into them, but rather because of the millions upon millions that companies are willing to pay to put ads on them.
The [...]
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is considering adding televisions to their trains and platforms, which would show 20 minutes of advertising per hour. The article mentions the advertising becoming a source of revenue for transit, although BART has a surplus this year, and according to BARTs estimates the additional revenue would, at best, be [...]
Note: This post was contributed by guest writer, Emily Gallagher. She’ll be covering news about ad creep, artists projects, and other items of interest to us here at the Anti-Advertising Agency. This will allow us to keep the site active while I work on other things (as well as some upcoming surprises from the [...]
January 15, 2007 – 6:42 pm
The New York Times has done a good overview on the desperate attempts of advertisers to “get over the clutter” resulting in a proliferation of advertising on every possible blank space in U.S. cities.
