Entries Tagged 'Copywriting' ↓

See all the Apple commercials you may have missed. Lots of them are stored happily here.

See further comments at this blog (And be patient for those slow downloads.)

A new commercial which airs tonight actually has that memorable Aflac duck talk. This is the 22th Aflac duck spot done by the Kaplan Thaler Group.

After five years of only quacking “Aflac,” the spokesduck finally talks. The commercial features Melania Trump.

Dan Amos, chairman and CEO of Aflac says, “The commercial gives the duck a voice in a very clever and entertaining way.”

A student carried a suspicious long package into a Clovis, New Mexico junior high school today. The SWAT teams were summoned a la Columbine. The police were amused to discover what the threatening object was.

It turrned out to be a 30-inch burrito wrapped in aluminum foil and a t-shirt. It was an advertising project for school, advertising a restaurant creating oddly-shaped burritos.

Is that a burrito in your pocket or — oh, never mind.

Moveon.org, the vitriolic anti-Bush political group, has issued a new call to arms. It’s a TV spot — first aired yesterday — where rogue elephants destroy the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court.

It’s about as creepy as an animated commercial can get and certainly a lot scarier than anything Disney has done.

Supposedly, “radical Republicans” — to use the commercial’s phrase — are attempting to pack the courts with more extremist judges.

Some Republicans are trying to eliminate the right to filibuster on judicial nominees. As the rules are now, 60 votes in the Senate are needed to end a filibuster. If the rules are changed, a simple majority, 51 votes, will be needed to confirm a nomination.

Filbustering — unlimited legislative debate — is used by a minority to prevent an issue from being voting upon by the entire Senate. Historically, both the House and Senate had have the privilege of unlimited debate, but over the years, the House has put rules in place curtailing it. It has remained in the Senate, though the votes needed by law to end a filibuster have been reduced from 66 to 60.

Bob Dole in The New York Times has some thoughts on the filibuster rule, and the need for a speedy up or down vote on current judcial nominees. (He favors a yay or nay vote, after adequate debate.)

Given the likelihood that there will be some U.S. Supreme Court vacancies in the next few years, a bad judical confirmation can last a lifetime — the judge’s lifetime.

See the :30 spot fueling this debate at AdAge.com.

It was created by Zimmerman & Markman, political consultants, of Santa Monica and produced by FlickerLab in New York.* I guess that makes it a bi-coastal attack on the President.

*By the way, FlickerLab produced the spot in only 44 hours!

One of most interesting high-tech well-travelled blogs is that written by Joi Ito.

He’s touring the world now: having left Japan; he’s just hit les blogs in Paris.

He praises Seth Godin and his latest book All Marketers Are Liars. The idea is that facts don’t sell products: the story behind the products sells them.

That’s true, for lots of products from things as inexpensive as cola to things as expensive as automobiles. (Consider the safety story of Volvo. It’s probably a well-engineered safe car, but the way Volvo has taken the high ground about safety makes the consumer think it’s the safest car — a very different thing.)

Another useful book by Godin is Free Prize Inside!: The Next Big Marketing Idea which stresses the power of small improvements to give a product a selling edge. Godin calls this “soft innovation.”

There’s a popular article in The New York Times about the trend toward expensive jeans.

Apart from 19th century antiques, the current leader seems to be a Japanese brand Evisu that’s $625 for a hand-painted pair of jeans. That’s up there with the current record high price to gas up your SUV. The company was founded in 1991 by a Japanese tailor tired of paying high prices for classic US jeans.

“Every consumer decision now carries with it class and status implications in a way it didn’t used to,” according to Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, flipping Mies van de Rohe’s maxim around. This multiplying of choices turns the customer into an endless, frustrated seeker of status and cool.

The only advertising for these luxury goods I’ve found is on the Evisu website itself. By the way, the name and logo come from the Buddhist god of money (and fishing.)

Both seeking for status and money seem to me, as a non-Buddhist, so against Buddhist teachings. Where is the meditation in search of deep and transforming insight?

By the way, is this product so buzz worthy that there is no advertising for it? (I do not read women’s fashion magazines that would be the most likely advertising medium.)

There’s a great commercial by two adguys, touting the same two adguys. It’s at www.ad-rag.com The art director is Tom Millar, and the copywriter is Marc Guttesman. It’s a mini saga of how ad people would handle jobs in other fields. It’s a hoot.
(Of course, only the silliness of the art director is true to life; a copywriter would never really act like that.)

A Swedish firm, GB Glace, has apparently released a new ice cream that pushes the bounds of good taste in the English language. (Personally, I wouldn’t go to Sweden to study the finer points of English.)*

There’s an attack and defense (defence?) going on, stating that these ice cream bars are or are not offensively named: Nogger and Nogger Black. Apparently Nogger means nougat in slang Swedish English and now the addition of a licorice coating makes the ice cream on a stick a Black Nogger. Sheesh.

The Center Against Racism in Sweden is protesting the product name.

*I really thought this was a British product as company making it is called “GB” as if it were the writer’s shorthand for Great Britain.

Apparently, I beat the excellent ad blog in Europe by one day on the New York Y & R story.

I guess that’s a bit of journalistic success.

Ann Fudge, the 2-year-new CEO of Young & Rubicam, has been on a losing streak lately. She has been presiding over execs and clients abandoning ship.

Big billing losses include Burger King, Computer Associates International, Sony and Kraft Foods. The last loss really hurt as CEO Fudge had been a Kraft marketing hotshot before taking the helm at Y & R, and its parent company, Y & R Brands, which includes PR agency Burson-Marsteller, branding expert Landor Associates, and Wunderman, the well-known direct marketing agency.

Now comes word that Y & R has lost Jaguar, which bills $150 million globally to Euro RSCG Worldwide. Fudge neglected to attend the apparently key first meeting laying out the agency review, supposedly with the car maker’s consent.

Jaguar is owned by Ford which has three larger brands still handled by Y & R.

Staffing has been cut at the New York office alone by more than 10%, through both resignations and firing.

Fudge has admitted in a Business Week interview that she will relinquish the advertising hot seat at Y & R, while maintaining her top position at the parent company.