Archive for September 2008

One of the few campaigns that I genuinely can’t wait to see the next installment of has been that of Orange cinema. To date they’ve featured Patrick Swayze, Macaulay Culkin and Snoop Dog to name but a few.

The latest features Anjelica Houston as the star who’s at the mercy of the Orange Film Board.

An ad that may have drawn some attention by its ‘Make Face Time’ posters on subways and other forms of public transport in the US, Dentyne’s eponymous campaign aims to encourage people to go out and spend time with the important people in their lives, rather than sitting cooped up facing a computer instead. It’s a nice concept, and made all the more interesting by initiatives such as the Make Face Time website, that automatically shuts down after 3 minutes. It doesn’t count the time you spend checking out various parts of the site though, so I don’t know if it’s as good an initiative as it sounds, though the premise certainly is. The site, for example, also has a ‘Smiley Chamber of Doom’ that purports to smash all smileys into bits because they try to subsitute those faces for actual human emotions, which, Dentyne is trying to tell us, isn’t quite right. 

[Via International Herald Tribune]

It’s interesting to note the change of language retailers are using in their advertising and promotions in the UK. Tesco now wants everyone to know that they are, infact, Britain’s Biggest Discounter. Every little helps, we suppose.

Interesting advertising in London. No news about who’s behind it yet.

Seen at London Victoria Train Station.

In our final installment of the NYC Innovators Series, PSFK spoke with with Michael Galpert of Aviary about how his company is enabling amateur artists to start flexing their creative muscles.

Michael explains how the high barrier of entry for existing design suites, such as expensive software and complicated interfaces, deter potential artists and how Aviary capitalized on that by creating an easy to use, web-based platform.

Aviary

Also check out:

Michael Sharon of Socialight
Philip James of Snooth

Yahoo! is attempting an overhaul of their brand image by going purple. Just as Microsoft is going into pseudo-battle mode with Apple and their ‘I’m not a PC’ ads, Yahoo! seems to be focusing on themselves:

Earlier this week, we introduced Philip James of Snooth.com, a forward-thinking entrepreneur bringing location based services and personalized recommendations to the wine industry. For our second installment in our NYC innovator series, we sat down with Michael Sharon of Socialight, the urban navigation service for mobile phones and the web. Sharon shared a bit about his startup and how it’s helping users explore the world around them. In this video, Michael discusses the opportunities the iPhone presents for application developers and mobile advertisers as well as how Socialight is helping align brands with secret parties, art gallery openings and other local events.

Socialight

Ford has a very interesting campaign in place to promote their new Fiesta model. Based on the central theme of ‘This is Now’, they have set up a collaborative art project which has four stages. The first involves a series of work commissioned by animation artist Noah Harris. Some of the art work from this stage broke in an ad released last week, which was directed by Harris himself.

Ad Age has an amusing article that details the reasons why presidential advertising is like automobile advertising. While comparing Obama to a Ferrari and McCain to a Toyota Camry, Vinny Minchillo says:

Both decisions come with a commitment of two, four or six years

Potential customers are engaged for a short period of time

People actually do their homework before committing

People want us to believe they decide based on facts, when it’s really an emotional decision

There’s plenty of negative advertising

A good read.