This really doesn’t make any sense at all to me.

These stencil ads are spray-painted around my neighborhood in Brooklyn. They’re for a Virgin America campaign. I know this because I fly Virgin America. Of course I’m very reluctant to remotely endorse any commerical product on this site, I gotta tell the truth here; I fly more than most people, I have flown a lot of airlines, and Virgin is better than most. If I can choose, I choose to fly Virgin because airlines like Northwest and US Airways are garbage in comparison. That’s not really my opinion, that’s just a fact. So full disclosure, I have a frequent flyer account with Virgin, I love that I can plug in my laptop under every seat, and I was tickled when I noticed your entertainment system runs on Linux.

Virgin America people, I know you are gonna read this, so what I am trying to tell you is I already like your company.  One can easily look around this site and get the wrong idea – we are not idealogues here at the Anti-Advertising Agency. We’re principled while knowing we don’t live in a fantasy world – it’s a subtle difference.

I also understand Virgin has a certain image – I’m supposed to think of you as rebelious, rock’n'roll, and irreverent, but also you want to provide better service and a quality product.

So why are you stenciling my neighborhood with your advertising?

I imagine you hired some cool marketing company that “understands” the “youth and urban market” like Shephard Fairey’s BLKMRKT?  BLKMRKT makes sense because you decided to riff off the whole chinese/russian propaganda thing with your “Flydealists Unite” campaign. (Unfortunately no once seemed to notice that BLKMRKT has been doing that for about 10 years and it’s getting stale.) Y’all probably thought you could associate Virgin with revolution and waving red flags.  You’d embrace the contradiction with the communist imagery because you’re cool! And anyone who disagrees is old! But of course imagery isn’t enough – someone said “we gotta have a street component” and that was put in the budget.

And no one fucking thought it through.

Graffiti is polarizing – it puts people in two groups. People who like graffiti and stencils don’t like corporate stuff.  They really, really don’t. The other group is people who don’t like graffiti: they don’t understand it and they despise it.

There is no one else.

So when you spray your campaign all over the neighborhood, you piss off the street art people and you piss off everyone else. It’s a lose/lose situation.  No one except the “creatives” who worked on the campaign and the people who signed off on it think it is cool.

It’s also illegal, but you clearly don’t care about that.

Perhaps you’re having that “there’s no such thing as bad press” thought. “At least our message is received” right? Of course it’s recieved – because we can’t ignore it after you sprayed it in our public space. But it’s received with disgust and irritation by everyone.  NO ONE LIKES IT EXCEPT YOUR CREATIVES. As I said before, I already like your company, and tagging my neighborhood isn’t helping. Why are you doing it?

So just stop.

As a strategy, it doesn’t make sense and it’s not working. Stay away from public space. Stick to print, video, and web (I know, I know, it doesn’t sound as fun or edgy and your ad guys will complain). But even smarter, just stick to being a better airline – that’s already working.

Please just stop with the fake revolution, stencil in the street bullshit. We’re all smarter than that.

Just a suggestion,

Steve Lambert

Related posts:

1. So why can they sell the street?
2. You + Scenic America = Legal Precedent?
3. Artists Strike Back! The New York Street Advertising Takeover (NYSAT)/Municipal Landscape Control Committee (Groundswell)

I just went to NYTimes.com, as I do multiple times a day. A split-second after I arrived at the homepage, it was covered up with a full-page ad overlay. That was irritating, but I’m willing to tolerate some annoyance in return for excellent free content. I found this particular full-page ad overlay downright disillusioning, though. Here it is: New York Times 2040 Yup–it’s a fake New York Times homepage from 2040, with jokey futuristic news stories and a redesign which consists of the Times dumping its logo, tagline, and typography in favor of a look which I’m guessing won’t end up resembling whatever is hip when 2040 does roll around. It’s a component of Intel’s big new ad campaign with the slogan “Sponsors of Tomorrow.”

Read the rest at Assuming There’s a New York Times in 2040, I Hope It’s Not This One | Technologizer.

Related posts:

1. From the New York Times
2. NY Times on Saturation Advertising
3. AddArt in NY Times

So apparently Butterfinger doesn’t think Chicagoans value the surface area of their skulls. Next Thursday the candy bar is making a desperate plea for attention by inviting folks to a Chicago barbershop to shave their heads and have a Butterfinger logo “spray painted” onto their scalp. All for a measly $100 “gift card”, presumably only to be used for purchasing nasty caffinated candy bars. Good luck with this one Nestle. If you go to Butterfinger’s website you can check out pictures of some of the tools who’ve already leased ad space on their crainiums.

(I figured I’d save you the trouble of going to Butterfinger’s website and posted the images below. I’m guessing everyone in these photos is an intern for the marketing company that came up with this. – Steve)

Also, anyone notice that the caffeinated candy bar is “limited edition?” I think that’s a euphemism for “a product failure humiliation safety net.”

No related posts.

“Michael Kraus saw the alert about the long taxi line. So he called his brother who lives nearby and got a ride home. Now he owes him a turkey sandwich.”

So advertising is about imagining potential futures. It is about hope, and aspirations and dreams. Is getting a ride home from the airport all those ad people could imagine using their service for? How about finding the subway station so they could take public transport. Now that would be something for the “community.”

No related posts.

The Image Is Familiar; the Pitch Isn’t

IN February 2007 the Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay was installing a solo exhibition of his work in Paris when he received an e-mail message from a friend about a commercial for the Apple iPhone that had been broadcast during the Academy Awards show.

The 30-second spot featured a rapid-fire montage of clips from television shows and Hollywood films of actors and cartoon characters — including Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Dustin Hoffman and Betty Rubble — picking up the telephone and saying “Hello.” It ended with a shot of the soon-to-be-released iPhone.

Mr. Marclay tracked down the ad on YouTube and watched it.

“I was very surprised,” he said recently by phone from London. Like many in the art world he saw an uncanny resemblance between the iPhone commercial and his own 1995 video “Telephones,” which opens with a similar montage of film clips showing actors answering the phone. That seven-and-a-half-minute video, one of Mr. Marclay’s signature works, has been exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States.

About a year before, Mr. Marclay said, Apple had approached the Paula Cooper Gallery, which represents his work in New York, about using “Telephones” in an advertisement.

“I told them I didn’t want to do it,” he said. His main concern, he said, was that “advertisers on that scale have so much power and visibility” and that “everyone would think of my video as the Apple iPhone ad.”

read the rest at the NY Times site.

No related posts.