Tag Archives: ad creep

Saving the Planet one Facebook Ad at a Time

Several people have sent me invitations to this Facebook application called (Lil) Green Patch. The invitation says “Here is a Jenny Appleseed plant for your (Lil) Green Patch. Could you help me by sending a plant back? Together we can fight Global Warming!” So a little research later, I have learned that this game is […]

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NY Times: Billboards That Look Back

Note: I am skeptical of how effective and accurate this actually is. Sounds like something the manufacturer could easily over play to attract investors. Creepy none the less. By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD In advertising these days, the brass ring goes to those who can measure everything — how many people see a particular advertisement, when they […]

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Advertising Age: “We Hate Ourselves”

Ok, I’m paraphrasing. Here’s some choice excerpts from the piece: Self-loathing has become all too commonplace in marketing, as Bridge Worldwide CEO Jay Woffington sees it, and not entirely without reason. Young marketers or agency executives don’t take long to learn they’ve dedicated their lives to creating stuff people seek to avoid, and with increasing […]

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Giant floating bubbles?

Update: here’s a video we found on youtube (which doesn’t seem top-secret) 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 […]

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BLF Escape; Publish Book!

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 & […]

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The Cute Boy on the CTA

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 […]

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Branded Event Radicalizes Mommy Bloggers

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, […]

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Our Brands, Ourselves

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. His latest […]

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Marketers, the Military, and Me

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 […]

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Facebook Business Solutions

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 goes […]

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120+ years of hating advertising

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 […]

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Damnvertising

New term, folks: “Damnvertising” is when a new ad campaign or mode of advertising comes along that is so brilliant, it makes you go, damn! Which is exactly what I said to myself when I received a forwarded press release heralding the arrival—finally!—of Handvertising. Handvertising, according to the press release, is a new advertising trend […]

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Boston Boots Musicians for Marketing Messages?

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 MBTA […]

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You Are A Captive Audience

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.” (What […]

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NYT: Pay Phones Turned Mini-Billboards

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 […]

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