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How Snooki Got Her Gucci: The Dirt on Purses
[Quote]:
Remember how Snooki, drunk or sober, was never seen without that Coach bag dangling from the crook of her arm? Snooki and her Coach were as synonymous as The Situation and his six-pack. But then the winds of change started blowing on Jersey Shore. Every photograph of Guido-huntin’ Snooki showed her toting a new designer purse. Why the sudden disloyalty? Was she trading up? Was she vomiting into her purses and then randomly replacing them? The answer is much more intriguing.
Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s the shocker: They are not sending her their own bags. They are sending her each other’s bags! Competitors’ bags!
Call it what you will — "preemptive product placement"? "unbranding"? — either way, it’s brilliant, and it makes total sense. As much as one might adore Miss Snickerdoodle, her ability to inspire dress-alikes among her fans is questionable. The bottom line? Nobody in fashion wants to co-brand with Snooki.
Cartoon
Microsoft quashed IE privacy controls for the ad industry
[Quote]:
Microsoft gutted a new privacy control system from Internet Explorer 8 at the behest of the advertising industry and its own marketing executives
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Slipcovers
Disabling Facebook Connect on Non-Facebook Websites
I’m not on Facebook, and I never will be on Facebook.
Yet more and more web sites pull this crap on their pages:
Fuck off. Really.
Luckily, there’s adblock. Just add facebook.com to your filters.
However, some of you are on Facebook – in that case just adding facebook.com to your filters is not something you’re going to do. Although this is a bit like not wanting shit all over you food yet setting up your dinner table below the elephants ass, there’s a way to disable it on non-Facebook websites only.
Nederland 6 juli 2010 novum ‘Webreclame verhoogt energierekening’
[Quote]:
Web site advertisements viewed by the Dutch consume as much energy as two thousand households in the Netherlands, concludes Randy Simons of the University of Twente.He connected a power meter on his computer and used a special program to disable the many web adverts on the internet. This way he could compare how much power is consumed when he let the ads load and how much power is consumed when he blocks them.
He concluded that on average two and a half watts per hour are consumed by web adverts. Previous research showed that all Dutch people surf 2.7 billion hours a year. By dividing those numbers he calculatedthat Web site advertisements consume as much electricity as two thousand households.
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London Olympics fans be warned – no Visa card, no tickets
[Quote]:
Sports fans who want to use a credit or debit card to buy tickets for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be restricted to using a Visa card, due to an exclusive deal between the Olympic organisers and the credit card payment system.
Payment for the 10 million tickets expected to be sold from 2011 through the Olympic website and other authorised sellers have been restricted to those that run through the Visa payment system.
On the official London 2012 ticket site, it says: "In recognition of Visa’s support of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, London 2012 is proud to accept only Visa payment cards (debit, credit and prepaid), along with cash and cheques. Sponsor support is crucial to the staging of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games and the operation of organisations throughout the Olympic Movement.
I’m proud to announce another exclusive deal between me and all Olympic venues: I won’t be visiting any of them.
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HP partners with Yahoo for targeted ads
[Quote]:
HP launched a line of Web-connected printers last week that allow users to print content directly from the Web or send content from their mobile phone to a remote printer using an e-mail address specific to that printer.
HP also launched a program called "scheduled delivery," where a user can regularly schedule printing, for example, portions of a daily newspaper every day at 7 a.m.
The company also sees a potential for localized, targeted advertising to go along with the content. While testing its ePrint Web-connected printers, HP ran two trials where consumers received content from a U.S. national music magazine and major U.S. newspaper along with advertisements, said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president in HP’s Imaging and Printing Group.
"What we discovered is that people were not bothered by it [an advertisement]," Nigro said. "Part of it I think our belief is you’re used to it. You’re used to seeing things with ads."
So now you’re paying for the ink to print ads as well. If I hadn’t already blacklisted HP for making absolute crap printers, I’d do so now.
The Process a.k.a. Designing The Stop Sign Video
The reason people aren’t just getting fired left and right is that people don’t really want to solve problems as much as just keep things moving and justify their jobs and call the next meeting.
Nothing can ever end, or everyone is out of a job. The phrase ‘continuous process improvement’ kind of sums it up nicely.
Start-ups and small companies are better. For a while. In the early stages, marketing is a little cell in the organisms doing its job, it is creative and engaged and usually someone you can go out with and have a couple of beers.
Then it gets irradiated by the gamma rays of revenue and sometimes profit, and it becomes cancerous and metastasizes and grows big enough to absorb all the radiation.
The time to quit is the first time marketing calls a meeting instead of just attending and bringing the donuts.
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American Able
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‘American Able’ intends to, through spoof, reveal the ways in which women with disabilities are invisibilized in advertising and mass media. I chose American Apparel not just for their notable style, but also for their claims that many of their models are just ‘every day’ women who are employees, friends and fans of the company. However, these women fit particular body types. Their campaigns are highly sexualized and feature women who are generally thin, and who appear to be able-bodied. Women with disabilities go unrepresented, not only in American Apparel advertising, but also in most of popular culture. Rarely, if ever, are women with disabilities portrayed in anything other than an asexual manner, for ‘disabled’ bodies are largely perceived as ‘undesirable.’ In a society where sexuality is created and performed over and over within popular culture, the invisibility of women with disabilities in many ways denies them the right to sexuality, particularly within a public context.
Too often, the pervasive influence of imagery in mass media goes unexamined, consumed en masse by the public. However, this imagery has real, oppressive effects on people who are continuously ‘othered’ by society. The model, Jes Sachse, and I intend to reveal these stories by placing her in a position where women with disabilities are typically excluded.
Pepsi
I’m not sure what to make of this.
Either there’s so much bullshit in that pdf that it has its own gravitational field, or the designer is a satirical genius.
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Surely the solution to homelessness is brand management
Just leave it to marketing to think that all a homeless person needs to get out of the gutter is a better sign.
and don’t get me started on his use of the word “bum”, and his entire “ha ha if this homeless guy was just smart like me” attitude
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Google remarkets behavioral ad eyeball creep
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On Thursday, Mountain View formally announced a behavioral targeting scheme that allows a third-party advertiser to place a piece of Google code on its website that will track your visits to the site and trigger related ads when you hit any one of the hundreds of thousands of other sites in Google’s web-spanning ad network. According to Google, its “content network” – a world of sites that display ads via Google AdSense – reaches 80 per cent of all net users.
[..]
Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network.
I wonder… if marketing is going to depend more and more on these features, and if analysis of users is going to depend more and more on following you around on the web, are we AdBlock users becoming more and more invisible to website owners? Can we expect an interaction in the store that goes like “I saw product X on your website and…” “No you didn’t!” Or perhaps something like “we would like to hire you, but we couldn’t find a trace of you on the internet” “correct – I don’t use Facebook and I have AdBlock turned on”
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The EU ACTA Consultation: European Commission vs. European Parliament
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The European Commission hosted a fascinating consultation on ACTA today. Luc Devigne, the lead European negotiator, opened with a brief presentation and proceeded to field questions for over an hour. The full consultation video is available online. The discussion touched on many issues including Devigne arguing that the WTO consistently blocked any attempt to address IP enforcement issues and stating that the treaty is limited to enforcement and not new substantive provisions (this assumes that anti-circumvention rules are a matter of enforcement, not substance).
The two big issues of the day, however, were three strikes and the European Parliament ACTA resolution. On three strikes, Devigne repeatedly stated that the EU was bound by EU law and that it was not supporting any inclusion of three strikes in ACTA. In fact, Devigne went further in claiming that no one had even proposed the possibility of three strikes. This despite the fact that a memo produced by his own department stated:
EU understands that footnote 6 provides for an example of a reasonable policy to address the unauthorized storage or transmission of protected materials. However, the issue of termination of subscriptions and accounts has been subject to much debate in several Member States. Furthermore, the issue of whether a subscription or an account may be terminated without prior court decision is still subject to negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council of Telecoms Ministers regarding the Telecoms Package.
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Champions League Match vs Classical Concert (Real Madrid, AC Milan)
Proof that fun marketing is still possible…
[Quote:]
On the night of the October 21st the Real Madrid played Champions League match against AC Milan.
Heineken convinced several university professors, girlfriends, and several bosses to convince their students, boyfriends and employees to go to a concert on that night. All of them couldn’t say no and had to go to the classical concert.
But…
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Cardinal Condoms
[Quote:]
Cardinal Condoms prepares legal action against the Catholic Church.
We find the innumerous scandals in which the church is involved damages to the brand name Cardinal.
The number of accusations against the Church made by adults everywhere in the world of sexual abuse in their childhood grows every day. Even worse was a huge scandal in Holland because of the refusal of the church to pay economic damages to one of the victims. The Church wanted the liability insurance to pay.
Recently a Catholic Church in Holland refused hosts to homosexual believers going to communion. Around the same time Angelo Balducci, a ‘Gentleman of His Holiness’, who serves as a ceremonial usher in the papal house, was caught enlisting Thomas Ehiem, a Vatican Choir member, to be the middle man in his male prostitute meet-and-greets. At least one time the men met in the Vatican.
We are a premium brand with an excellent reputation. But the negative publicity around the criminal behavior of the Church is causing damage to our brand. We have contacted a specialized law firm.
Of course this is just a way to get some free advertising, but I can’t help but laugh!
Instant Ads Set the Pace on the Web
[Quote:]
Advertisers have been able to direct online messages based on demographics, income and even location, but one element has been largely missing until recently: immediacy. Advertisers booked slots in advance, and could not make on-the-fly decisions about what ads to show based on what people were doing on the Web.
Now, companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft let advertisers buy ads in the milliseconds between the time someone enters a site’s Web address and the moment the page appears. The technology, called real-time bidding, allows advertisers to examine site visitors one by one and bid to serve them ads almost instantly.
For example, say a man just searched for golf clubs on eBay (which has been testing a system from a company called AppNexus for more than a year). EBay can essentially follow that person’s activities in real time, deciding when and where to show him near-personalized ads for golf clubs throughout the Web.
Advertisers can go ahead and buy anything they want in the milliseconds between me entering an address and the page appearing. As long as the actual appearance of the page is under my control (and on my computer it will be), Adblock will have the last word.
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Don’t Blame Your Community: Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites
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Back in December of last year, we signed an experimental ad deal to run a series of ads on the site, where a single advertiser would effectively have all the ads for a 24-hour period. As a part of that, there would be an ad at the top that temporarily “pushed down” the content for a few seconds, before pulling back up. Nothing was covered. Nothing prevented readers from getting the content. And the “pushdown” ad only showed once per visitor and never again. We went back and forth about it, but decided it was worth an experiment — especially since no content was blocked or covered. I won’t name the advertiser who was in the first test… but many of you did notice, and did not like it. We got a lot of complaints. So we killed the additional tests. I won’t lie: these deals were for quite a bit of money — a very large premium on the amount of money we typically make from advertising. But when we saw how annoyed our users were, we realized immediately what a bad idea this was and told the others who were scheduled to run similar campaigns, “sorry.” We gave up a lot of money to do so, but what it came down to in our mind was that it wasn’t worth it.
And when I say “wasn’t worth it,” I don’t mean just to us or our community — but to the advertiser. Most of the anger we saw over the original ad campaign wasn’t directed at us — it was directed at the company doing the advertising. So we told a bunch of companies willing to pay us a lot of money not that we didn’t want their money — but that they didn’t want to buy that kind of advertising, because it would only damage their own brands.
[..]
Along those lines, if you are running a media site, if you’re having trouble making money, it’s your fault. Don’t blame your readers. Don’t blame your community by telling them they’re “devastating” a site by blocking ads or failing to pay for a paywall. As the producers of that site, it’s your responsibility to do things to get that site paid for. If you don’t like what we’re doing on Techdirt, go ahead and block our ads. Sure, just like Ars, many of our ads are paid for based on impressions and we may make less money from those ads, but that’s our problem and the problem of advertisers who aren’t willing to do more unique, creative and compelling projects that benefit the community rather than annoy it. We want the advertisers, sponsors and partners we work with to get the best results possible in a way that everyone wins. And that’s not by forcing people who don’t want to see their ads to see them, or by pissing off our readers by blocking them if they use ad blocking. It’s by taking on the responsibility ourselves to put together compelling programs that make everything more valuable for all participants.
Magazine marketers give up on marketing magazines
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I fly a lot less than I used to (and I never flew that often), so I was surprised when I received this piece of mail that seemed to be about frequent flyer miles expiring. It was either open the junk mail or keep cleaning the kitchen, so clearly I had to open the junk mail right away. I was surprised to learn that the direct mail had hardly anything to do with frequent flyer miles; it was a solicitation to restart my subscription to FORTUNE.
This is how bad it’s gotten for at least one prominent print publication: It has to masquerade as something other than what it is to entice customers to open an envelope.
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Ars Technica
Ars Technica recently changed their site in a small way – if you were using ad-blockers, the content would be hidden for you until you disabled ad blocking for the site.
My first reaction was “fine, you can do that, it’s your right. As a result, I won’t read your content, and I’ll no longer link to your content either. If you think keeping me away is worth keeping away everybody I usually tell about the things I see, that’s your choice to make”.
The next day, an update to the AdBlock subscriptions disabled the blocking, which meant the overall effect was just another futile step in the war between advertisers and adblockers, and not really worth talking about.
But I’ve been thinking about what Ars is saying here. A summary:
[Quote:]
There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis.
[..]
Let me stop and clarify quickly that I am not saying that we are on the verge of vanishing from the Internet. But we, like many, many sites are greatly affected by ad blocking, and it is a very worrisome trend.
Let me paraphrase, and I’m sure some of you will disagree with what I’m doing here, feel free to use the comment box.
What they say is: “It’s really not right for you ad-blocking folks to deprive us of income we could otherwise make selling your page views to advertisers. We know you won’t buy the advertised products but, just between you and us, we can get away with selling the advertisers false hope because they can’t tell beforehand which page views definitely won’t pan out”.
Now let me ask you the obvious follow-up question: if Ars is this eager to lie to their advertisers about their public, just to make sure their income is a bit higher than it would be if they didn’t lie, what makes you think they won’t be just as eager to lie to you, the reader?
I always thought the content on Ars was high quality, well done work. Now, I’m not so sure any more.
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Eyes turn to “value for money” London 2012
Here’s why I didn’t talk about Vancouver much, and why I won’t talk about London either.
[Quote:]
Moves to safeguard company trademarks and stamp out ambush marketing, to preserve the monopoly of official advertisers and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) logo, are raising concerns among civil liberty groups.
Police will have powers to enter private homes and seize posters, and will be able to stop people carrying non-sponsor items to sporting events.
[Quote:]
I can already see how the London Olympics will go. Tickets will be available only to pre-selected goodthinkful rightpersons, and in order to enter the Olympic zone, you’ll be subjected to the same kind of probulation you undergo when you fly from Abu Dhabi to Washington DC with brown skin.
Once in the venue, you’ll only be allowed to look at authorized looking-at-zones, and any deviation from your vision permit will be immediate grounds for correctional therapy with the friendly constable. Excessively loud cheering, or cheering which is not quite loud enough will also be discouraged, and failure to cheer at the correct volume will incur a fixed penalty notice, which shall be issued at the discretion of your friendly constable.
Discussing the games in any fashion other than exhilaration and excitement at the wondrous event unfolding in this, your very own nation, will result in a special bonus fixed penalty, and shall cause future employers to be aware of your protected free speech disagreeability.
[..]
The olympics are in london. The olympics have always been in london.
[..]
They are a fine innovation of Airstrip One, and have been happening in London every year since they began. Taking three random datapoints from the last century and a bit, say, 1908, 1948, and 2012, we can see clearly that the Olympics have always been in London. Some Eastasians may propone the preposterous view that they have occurred elsewhere, yet without doubt these nefarious attempt at propaganda have only misled the most gullible, lowest echelons of our great society.
Google knows…
… that marketing folks are not the smartest cookies in the jar when it comes to graphs and statistics, so they tune their displays to make it look attractive to pay 400% for a 15% increase:
Inschrijving bel-me-niet-register heeft gevolgen
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Wie denkt, na zich te hebben opgegeven bij het ‘bel-me-niet’-register, dat hij niet meer wordt lastiggevallen, komt van een koude kermis thuis. Dat schrijft het AD.
Het is volgens de krant gebleken dat verkopers aan de deur de lijst met adresgegevens van het register gebruiken.
Translation: the Dutch do-not-call register is being used by door-to-door salesmen to compile lists of places to visit.
I gave up my land line a long time ago, because sales calls were about 75% of my call volume, so I never had a need to register, but these bloodsuckers don’t seem to learn.
shakedown!
(you also wouldn’t believe how many advertising networks have contacted me asking me if I want to “monetize” my apps…)
BT blamed for Davina McCall spamcalls
[Quote:]
The Reg was contacted by an angry reader who found a message from Davina McCall on his 1571 voicemail telling him about BT’s sponsorship of the Sport Relief charity. He was annoyed because his number has been registered with the no-pester register the Telephone Preference Service since February 2007, which should ensure he doesn’t get unsolicited sales or marketing calls.
You might think the issue here is whether or not a charity call is really a sales call, but in fact it’s even murkier than that.
When the reader complained to BT he was told that the message did not qualify as a call because the messages were sent straight to subscribers’ mail boxes; since no actual two-way phone call was made, the communication is not covered by TPS rules.
BT said: “As part of this year’s Sport Relief campaign BT is sponsoring the BT Sport Relief Million Pound Bike Ride. To raise money BT is operating Chat for Change Day on Friday 26th February where 1p will be donated to Sport Relief for every call made on a BT landline.
Perhaps the letter of the rules allow this, but the spirit definately doesn’t. It’s a clear message BT is sending its clients: BT doesn’t give a flying fuck about your wishes.
It’s the same with political parties over here in NL. There’s a local election coming up, and three local political parties have already made it impossible for me to ever vote for them – I have a very standard sticker on my mailbox stating I don’t want any non-addressed mail, but these political idiots think their message is more important than my wishes and crammed their party political program down my mailbox. If they’re going to ignore me on such a minor issue, odds are that they’re going to ignore me on pretty much everything else as well. So fuck them, I won’t vote for them.
Good News!
[Quote:]
[A]dvertising will in the future world become gradually more and more intelligent in tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour, a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already being greatly replaced, by serious exposition; and advertisements, instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies to his customers.
– T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906
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Aspartame has been renamed and is now being marketed as a natural sweetener
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In response to growing awareness about the dangers of artificial sweeteners, what does the manufacturer of one of the world’s most notable artificial sweeteners do? Why, rename it and begin marketing it as natural, of course. This is precisely the strategy of Ajinomoto, maker of aspartame, which hopes to pull the wool over the eyes of the public with its rebranded version of aspartame, called “AminoSweet”.
Michael Pollan on Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual
Ad placement
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Comcast Rebrands Itself as Xfinity. Seriously? That’s… That’s All You Got?
[Quote:]
So, Comcast has some public image issues. And what do you do when you want to fix the perception but not the underlying problems? Change your name! Change it to the worst, pseudo-pornographic, retro-futuristic garbage marketing dollars can buy.
Do you get it, people? It’s infinity, which is awesome, and X, which is dangerous. It’s, like, dangerously awesome.
The overhaul will apply to Comcast’s technology platform and products, which means all you malcontent Comcast cable, internet, and phone customers will soon be malcontent Xfinity cable, internet, and phone customers. They’ll start rolling out the rebranding next week in about a dozen markets, with the rest of the country getting the Xfinity treatment later this month.
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What the hell, I can’t understand all that jersey shore thing. Isn’t it just the usual, overused stereotype of a reality show?