ad gossip

Running out of ideas on what to get your creative cats for Xmas? Here you might find some inspiration.

Our fave ad lady has revealed that she is the one who twittered the now more popular Betty Draper in her post I am @bettydraper.

By the time I learned that what I'd signed up for was a volunteer effort⎯I was too hooked to quit. There is a thrill that comes with taking on another persona, interacting with the world as someone else, especially if that someone is as complex and interesting⎯ and as sexy and glam⎯as Matthew Weiner's Betty.

I found myself scouting for back issues of Life magazines, searching for things for Betty and Francine to do together. I ordered books online ("The Golden Age of the 60s") and spent hours and hours googling 60s culture, making sure that my tweets were historically accurate.

She also reveals that bud Melman, the mailroom guy tried to get all the Mad Men twitters to do exiting things like storylines, what a great idea. I knew that I gave that guy the right review on his Linkedin Profile: “Bud is detail oriented, pleasant and particularly good at seeing great opportunities where other people don't. An ambitious talent that can't stay hidden in the mail room for long.”

Don't forget to check out the objects tweeting from Sterling Cooper, the office copier Xerox914 and the Boylan Seltzer bottle.

Brief: Motivate RTCRM employees to willingly show up at work at seven am twice a week and get down and sweaty.
Solution: Make funny T-shirts and posters, hope for the best.
Surprise: They actually showed up and joined in the extreme exercises!

I don't think you could ever pay lazy old me enough for that but I must admit, I love the "advertising stinks" T-shirt, as well as the "ass you kick" one. :))

I guess it's official: Naked women are the ultimate ad media when it comes to eyeballs. Since 1976 Ekstra bladet has had a topless "page 9 girl", inspired by the UK rag The Sun's page three girl, except in Ekstra Bladet the models are occasionally fully nude. Clicking that link, by the way, will bring you to topless chicks so if you work in an office where you might get fired for seeing mammaries don't click, please.

Times have changed and the page 9 girl is getting too expensive, Ekstra Bladet spend a lot of time scouring the beaches for Danish beauties who won't mind appearing topless in the paper and have a much harder time finding girls these days. The photos are expensive to keep on the web as well, there's a subscription based log-in on the web so that people can't browse all the girls for free and now Ekstra Bladet has decided to have sponsors finance the girls full on.

First out is AC/DC who sponsored Charlotte, from Aalborg, 21 years old here on the left. Their new album is out October 20th if you can tear your eyes away from all that skin to read the background. ;)

Who's next? Goldenpalace? Carlsberg? Hmm. Maybe I should look up how much it would cost to have our URL written in whipped cream on one of these gals.

Google: No gambling ads! (unless we need to make more money, like right now)

When we asked Google about its gambling change of heart, it didn't respond. But the company tells The FT it's been reviewing that four-year-old gambling ad policy "to ensure it is as consistent as possible with local business practices." According to James Cashmore - who describes himself as the company's industry leader, entertainment and media - Google hopes that lifting the UK ban "will enhance the search experience for users and help advertisers connect with interested consumers."

He did not mention that this would bring the company mountains of cash.

Aussies want less alcohol ads, as long as they can keep drinking. I keed.

YouTube will need at least two years to start making a meaningful contribution to parent Google Inc's revenue says the Guardian, so come 2011, bo-yah people, flashy ads all over YouTube. Looking forward to it. People are waiting impatiently for YouTube to show some sort of profit;

"This has gone on long enough. It's easy being the Web's largest video repository when you're giving it away," said Colin Gillis, analyst at Canaccord Adams.

Other voice concerns of youtube's basic idea is 'wrong' to advertise on - the youtube idea.

Experts say it isn't easy to monetize a majority of the user-generated and sometimes pirated videos. "Major advertisers don't want to advertise against the user-generated content that dominates on YouTube," said Jeremy Allaire, chief executive of Brightcove, a Web video distributor for a range of businesses.

Fstop mag has an interview with Julian Wolkenstein which is a great read. Julian Wolkenstein photographed dolled up horses (don't tell the "my little pony" people), ending up with these dark, painterly beautiful portraits like the one of the black beauty with the colored beads on the left here. “One of the things we learned from the test shoot is that a horse’s head is incredibly big,” said Wolkenstein to F-stop, and he shares more anecdotes from that shoot and advice on how to handle a recession.
F-stop have my number:

To the chagrin of certain art directors, this gorgeous image will never wear type. And that’s just the way Wolkenstein likes it. “People wanted to put in a strip line on the bottom of a neutral work and say it was theirs. I wouldn’t have been comfortable with that,” says Wolkenstein. “It’s just nice to do something that has no reason.”

Here I was hoping for a release of secret Stevie Wonder recordings from his late seventies genius-era with this on the cover instead of Stevie himself, visually punning what a workhorse that man is.

The new Pepsi logo has many people scratching their heads in bewilderment. The idea is simple: "The brand’s blue and red globe trademark will become a series of “smiles,” with the central white band arcing at different angles depending on the product." ... But will it look like a smile? The denver egotist thinks it looks like an asscrack.

Insert "Joe the plumber" joke here.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen - Liberal Party Leader in Denmark - uses his Facebook followers faces in ad campaigns to promote him says Politiken.dk.

The ads with Fogh in them pop up when you open the list of your friends, and typically carry a line like »NN is a fan of Anders Fogh Rasmussen - support Anders«.

The former editor David Trads is one of the unwilling "fans of Anders" used in the ads for Venstre, something he never gave permission for.

»I'm also a fan of Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Villy Søvndal on the net so I cover a big political spectrum. I have professional reasons for wanting to follow and see how the politicians use social media like facebook«, he said to Media Watch.

Now, I can't find anything about this on this Media Watch here - newspapers that don't link online sources quoted are a pain - but I did stumble on to another interesting story. Filleting Facebook at Media Watch abc.net.au where they are quite upset that a dead soldier family photo album was raided by journalists who printed the images in the newspapers.

For a start Facebook's terms of use mean it owns all the material on Facebook pages. Those terms prohibit someone taking the material for commercial use. That's called copyright law.

True, but have you considered this - perhaps the newspapers asked the new owners of those photographs copyright for permission. Don't forget, facebook states that it owns your photos and can do anything they please with them.

Back to the social media ads that use your face without you even knowing about it: see previous story: On Facebook, your face can be used in ads (without you knowing it) via SocialMedia - this quite possibly the engine for the current Fogh ad campaign. I'd check, but youknow, I don't have a facebook account. ;)

SpellingChange.com, allows supporters of Senator Barack Obama to create custom banner ads, t-shirts, bumper stickers, posters, and postcards using letters of the alphabet specially-designed by dozens of the nation’s top designers, photographers, and artists.

Contributors to the project include Stefan Sagmeister, Karen Collins, R.O. Blechman, Larry Fink, Jake Chessum, MC Paul Barman, and even a housewife in Texas who created an embroidered “S”. Each of the participants reinterpreted one letter of the alphabet in a way that represents what Obama’s candidacy means to them. In all, more than 100 letters were created.

Supporters can browse the alphabet and click on individual letters to learn more about the artist and the inspiration behind the design. To view the alphabet, go to http://www.spellingchange.com/browse-alphabet.php.

You can even go to make a word and create your own bumper sticker or T-shirt with the letters and people posing in Letter-Tee's available. Here's Adland with a particularly nifty looking "N".

The Times of India, which by some is considered a reputable newspaper, have happily made a practice of printing copyrighted images without the rights holders permission. It gets better, they defend this with; ..it is common practice to “use” free images from the net.

The photographer whose work was printed in the Times of India tells the full Story here:

When I asked TOI for compensation, I was told that they will pay what they pay to their own photographers, which is a grand sum of 250 INR. I am tired of using this word repeatedly, but yet again, I was shocked and told the editor to keep this princely sum with herself. I was then offered 1500 INR as a “last offer” since this picture had been taken and used without my permission (such euphemism for THEFT). Just who the hell is TOI to decide compensation for MY piece of work?