I envy the guys who create the Peta campaigns.
Seriously.
Can you imagine a briefing that has just this mandatory?
“Attention, creatives: we really need to use a hot chick naked in the ad! It’s a policy, so please do not complain.”
Other brands worked for decades to create famous and charismatic characters as the Kool-Aid jar, the Green Giant, Tony the tiger, the Bud’s Clydesdales, the Energizer bunny.
But not Peta. There, some guy just saw the light in the middle of a brainstorming.
-          I had an idea! Naked girls!
-          Tonight? Again? But my …

Simple, effective use of Facebook for Ikea, done by agency Forsman+Bodenfors.
But we wont be seeing imitators because Facebook now requires anything like a “competition” to happen within an application, so the low-tech simplicity of this idea was a one time deal.
Pretty smart.
http://adsoftheworld.com/media/online/ikea_facebook_tag
-Shannon McGlothin

What is an ad, exactly?
All those logos on the boards in hockey rinks,  are those ads?
Most people, if asked, would probably say yes.
But I’ll bet they never jumped up in the middle of a hockey game to make a phone call just because they saw a Verizon logo on the boards.
My vote is a big, fat no – that random collection of logos are most definitely not ads.
Indeed, they are naught but a complete waste of money that could well be spent on real ads.
Like the Home Depot logo in …

So I was watching a little TV the other day, as I’m prone to do, when I was assaulted by a commercial for GAP Kids. I’m still not sure I’ve recovered fully.
In this spot, a group of overly precious, overly accessorized and overly choreographed kids shriek unintelligibly, in unison (like cheerleaders, so cute!). I presume they are saying something along the lines of “The decline of civilization is accelerating rapidly, buy us little pants!”
Must we turn our children into little mini-fashionista versions of ourselves? What happened to kids looking like …

Tracing your family tree is usually a pastime most fitting for octogenarians. But focus on the Porsche family and you get a pretty damn engaging ad campaign. Kudos to my good friend Markendeya Sendan who worked to develop this nice Web arm of the campaign.
(click the pic to go to the site)
- Glen Day

Digital is not the solution.
Despite what you might read in the trade press (especially Ad Age where every second article is about Twitter and those that aren’t mention Twitter two or three times), digital is not the solution to all of advertising’s problems.
If anything, digital is the best representation of the problem.
And that problem is audience dispersion.
What is brilliant about the Internet (and, from an advertising point of view, its Achilles’ heel with an added helping of Achilles’ athlete foot) is that it is, for all intents and purposes, infinite.
When …

Retail. Brand. Direct Response. Digital. Traditional.
Oh, how people in the biz love to parse advertising into different types.
Trouble is, it’s all bullshit.
Because to consumers, an ad is an ad is an ad is an ad.
They don’t differentiate.
To them, there is only one kind of advertising and that is brand advertising.
Why brand?
I say brand simply because every piece of communication you put out there says something about your brand.
Every ad – indeed, every point of contact with the public – positions your brand in the marketplace.
By way of illustration, when I …

First, can you imagine naming your tutelage business Come On?  What, do they nag you into doing better?
Second, can you imagine presenting that logo design?   ”We’ve decided to literally associate your brand with apathy by using an indifferent facial expression on the character within the ‘O’ of your company name.”
- Chris Soskin