Three Little Pigs - the real story

A brilliant video from the Guardian showing how the incident of the Three Little Pigs might be reported in the media today. Not everything is as it seems.



Perhaps most of the rhymes, stories and tales by Mother Goose, Aesop and the brothers Grimm could be reinterpreted.

Shop window dummies. Alive.

Reported by AFP via France24 on 18 July 2011, Italy's union Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) has expressed displeasure at Milan department store Coin for displaying live models in place of shop window dummies claiming to "protect workers' decorum and customers' intelligence" against the 'commodification' of the body.



In turn, the models have also protested the union's claims holding signs saying "Anche fare il modello è un lavoro".

See also Corriere della Sera on 15 July 2011, which suggests the union won with Coin withdrawing the models.

One would think that in the prevailing economic circumstances in Italy, the union would be supportive of young people being employed.

How to ruin a good song

The song Downtown was written by Tony Hatch and first recorded by Petula Clark in 1964. Petula Clark's rendition became a huge hit, particularly in the United States and Australia, where it reached number one in the charts.



Unfortunately, in Australia, the tune will soon be associated with a very annoying television commercial.



Sacrilege.

Watching watches 2

Last week, I wrote about the falling sales of watches as revealed by a consumer survey. As a functional item of time-keeping, young people have replaced the watch with other mobile gadgets.

Fitting, then that Dolce & Gabbana have marketed their watches, as fashion accessories.



Of course, to Dolce & Gabbana consumers, it has always been about style. Indeed, for Swatch and most watch brands, marketing has never been about functionality but about fashion.

Perhaps to young people, a watch is just another optional item.

Grover. From Sesame Street. Still. Cute.

Grover's take on the Old Spice commercial



The original

Stealing Cristiano's shirt and refusing a tip from Megan Fox

Latest campaign adverts from Armani Jeans


Cristiano Ronald does not have any tattoos. He did not look at the housekeeper once or talk to her.


A room service waiter refusing a tip from Megan Fox? She has tattoos but they aren't that interesting.

i was lovin' it

From Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) news release

Sept. 14, 2010

MEDIA CONTACT: Vaishali Honawar | 202-527-7339 | vhonawar@pcrm.org

Provocative Commercial Targets McDonald’s High-Fat Fare
Doctors Link Washington’s Heart Disease Rates to High Concentration of Golden Arches, Other Fast-Food Outlets

WASHINGTON—A provocative fast-food commercial set in a morgue will air during The Daily Show and local news broadcasts Sept. 16. The ad, produced by the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), takes aim at McDonald’s high-fat menu, with the goal of drawing Washingtonians’ attention to the city’s high rates of heart disease deaths and its high density of fast-food restaurants.

“Our city’s addiction to Big Macs and other high-fat fast food is literally breaking our hearts,” says Susan Levin, M.S., R.D., PCRM’s nutrition education director. “It’s time to tackle the district’s heart disease problem head-on. A moratorium on new fast-food restaurants could be a critically important step toward fighting this epidemic.”

A PCRM survey shows that Washington has more McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC outlets per square mile than eight other cities with similar population sizes. Offerings at these restaurants include high-fat, high-sodium products such as McDonald’s Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Extra Value Meal, which has 61 grams of fat and 1,650 milligrams of sodium.

McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast-food chain, serves a long list of high-fat, high-cholesterol items and offers almost no healthful choices, according to an analysis by PCRM dietitians.

Heart disease kills more than 1,500 residents of the district each year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the age-adjusted death rate from heart disease in the city is the second highest in the country, above high-obesity states like Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

Studies, including one from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, show that people who consume fast food are at a higher risk of obesity, a key risk factor for heart disease. Regular consumption of high-fat, high-cholesterol foods increases the risk of heart disease, and studies have found that even a singly fatty meal can raise blood pressure, stiffen major arteries, and cause the heart to beat harder.

The commercial will air in other fast-food addicted cities with high rates of heart disease over the following months.

Founded in 1985, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is a nonprofit health organization that promotes preventive medicine, conducts clinical research, and encourages higher standards for ethics and effectiveness in research.

Here is the commercial


This is the response from McDonald's

“This commercial is outrageous, misleading and unfair to all consumers. McDonald’s trusts our customers to put such outlandish propaganda in perspective, and to make food and lifestyle choices that are right for them.

If that was the case, McDonald's could try and sue PCRM. However, there is no such thing as good publicity in the case of fast food chains. The response from McDonald's appears to use the same logic that tobacco companies use, without having a counter argument.

Hipsters

Hipsters are today's alternative counter-culture fashionable wannabes.



Look at some of my links of favourite websites on the right-hand-side. Oh dear.

Venez comme vous êtes

A McDonald's television advertisement in France in which a boy talks to his boyfriend on the phone before his father arrives with their meal was barely mentioned in the French media. Unsurprisingly, it created a few ripples outside of France, considered to be 'controversial' enough to be news. See UK Daily Telegraph, Montreal Gazette, New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald.

The Sydney Morning Herald even published a reader poll. Of 10469 votes, 82 per cent rated it as charming, while 18 per cent rated it as alarming. In other words, nobody really cares in Australia.

Despite not even being aired in the United States, fringe conservative groups are outraged including the American Decency Association, which has threatened to boycott the chain and Henry Makow who considers the boy in the advertisement to have a 'disorder'. It seems those who crow the loudest have skeletons in their own closets (George Rekers anyone?).

Here is the original


The advertisement with English subtitles added


The advertisement began running on 21 May and will continue until 26 June.

Why the French would even consider eating at McDonald's given their fine cuisine is another question.

Why all women need an alarm system

Sarah Haskins is a comedian, writer and performer for Current TV's infoMania where she has a 'column' called Target Women.

I like how she deconstructs the Broadview Security television commercials from a feminist perspective



It appears that burglar alarms are so yesterday. The latest are intruder alarms.

And today is still International Women's Day.

I want a beer but I don't want it

Created by Sophie Farquhar, copywriter for The Works, for Canadian Club





The bartender seems to be confused by what the customer is asking and wanting, but strangely, I can identify with the customer's logic. It's quite clear really.

Most of the time, we communicate with people in simple linear terms so as to be understood. It's not really worth confusing other people if you have a multitrack mind, which is entirely different to multitasking, which is also nearly impossible.

child of WD-40

The Times (of UK) reported that the WD-40 company has gone out to its customers in a bid to diversify and develop a new product or modification.

They should improve it so that it will dissolve a T-1000 model from Terminator - the liquid metal one.


the smart straw version is unfortunately not sold in Australia

Red Bull coked up... giving people wings

In Europe, Red Bull has been found to contain traces of cocaine. or rather, Kokain.

A temporary ban might be in place in Germany, but sales elsewhere are likely to rise.

This is the television commercial that has been shown in Australia
(Red Bull gives you wings)


from The Inquistr (now we know where the wings line comes from)

public weighing

Clever marketing of Fitness First in Rotterdam created by N=5.





Public shame as a motivator. Still, original and creative.

corporate drivel

Some philosophers, particularly in France, misappropriate scientific concepts when they want to sound impressive about nothing. Alan Sokal knows all about this.

It doesn't stop there. It seems that physics concepts are now being misappropriated by marketers. See for example, this article in The Guardian

Metaphorically speaking, Pepsi's gibberish is hard to swallow

Ben Goldacre
Saturday 7 March 2009

An extraordinary document called The Pepsi Gravitational Field has been leaked on to the internet. The claim is that this 27-page wonder represents a successful $1.5m (£1.05m) pitch to make a slight modification to the Pepsi logo. Welcome to the science of PR.

"By investing in our history and brand ethos we can create a new trajectory forwards," they explain in the opening pages. This is entirely reasonable. A cognitive linguist by the name of George Lakoff has done some fascinating (and no doubt gruelling) empirical work on metaphors in English literature. He has shown, for example, that we often conceive of the abstract in terms of the concrete: anger is an overheated fluid in a sealed vessel, emotional states are locations, and fascinatingly, we don't just talk about things in this way, we may also reason using these metaphors.

How else can you explain the fact that "baby, we're riding in the fast lane on the freeway of love" is so instantly meaningful to us? Perhaps - and this is speculation - we think about abstract things using brain hardware that originally evolved to deal with more simple visuo-spatial manipulations.

I am open to new ideas. Lakoff may or may not be entirely correct, but he is not throwing words around at random: his ideas are often coherent and stimulating, and they may have explanatory force for real world phenomena. Let us return to the Pepsi document. It is gibberish. "The investment in our DNA leads to breakthrough innovation and allows us to move out of the traditional linear system into the future". This is accompanied by a helpful diagram, which is reproduced here for your delight. "The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations," they explain. There is talk of an "authentic geometry". "The breathtaking colour palette is derived," they explain, "using a scientific method of colour assignment based on the product's essence and primary features." They go on to discuss "attraction theory", and the "Pepsi proposition".

This involves the "establishment of a gravitational pull to shift from a 'transactional' experience to an 'invitational' expression." The accompanying diagrams show a "typical light path" being subjected to gravitational pull, and then the gravitational pull of Pepsi. The words "relativity of space and time" appear next to a curved light beam, but the diagram for Pepsi shows many Pepsi logos, distorting the human path through "typical shopping aisle".

Here we find further parallels with conventional physics. "The universe expands exponentially with f(x)=e^x (1 light year = 671 million miles per hour)." One light year is not - if I can anally interject - 671 million miles per hour. Maybe that works because "the Pepsi Orbits" "dimensionalise exponentially".

This might be a useful moment to mention that the new logo is basically the same as the old one, except one of the curves has been changed a bit to look more like a smile.

The Arnell agency has yet to comment on the veracity of the document, but Pepsi certainly announced a revamp in October last year, and from reading his work, Peter Arnell does quite like the word "dimensionalise". At a recent news conference, he also compared his advert for SoBe Lifewater to the achievements of Thomas Edison in inventing cinematography.

And even if this is an elaborate 27-page long spoof, the horror is that it's believable. Across huge swaths of the world, scientific reasoning is regarded as decorative: a rhetorical stance, or a speech in a white coat from a 1950s B-movie. We live in a world that has indulged these buffoons for so long that they think they are heroes, while nerds are regarded with contempt. Our only hope is that after the robot wars, you will all starve, cold and in the rain, wearing leaves and eating mud.

27 page document can be found here (6MB PDF, right click to save)

It's up there with French philosophical texts as amongst the most stupid ever written. Good for a laugh.

Incoherent gibberish enough and a physicist's joke.

Australia... more than the outback

Baz Luhrmann's film Australia premiered last night to much hype. There is a quintessential image that is always invoked in film to represent Australia.

The outback.

Telstra advertisement featuring verses from the song 'I am Australian' written by Bruce Woodley (of the Seekers)


1998 Qantas advertising featuring the song 'I still call Australia home' written by Peter Allen


Interestingly, it took a foreign film director to point out that most Australians have little association with the outback. From a review for his film Newcastle in the Sydney Morning Herald

WHEN Dan Castle set out to make an Australian surf movie, the US director expected such a surf-crazed country would be replete with gnarly surf films. Yet all he found were two films: Blackrock (1997) and Puberty Blues (1981).

Castle was "astounded and dumbfounded", he says. "Not just with the lack of surfing movies but with how few coastal films are made in Australia."

Why the reaction? "About 98 per cent of your culture, of your society, lives along the coast somewhere, yet every film-maker goes to the outback to make films about Australia.

"OK, that's a part of it," Castle qualifies. "But the psyche, the lifeblood of Australian culture has been, and always will be, on the coast. The myth of Australia might be in the outback but the drama of everyday lives is definitely on the coast."

Yet, when most Australians refer to the middle of nowhere, they think of the outback, in particular, the back of Bourke as a place they do not really want to visit. Woop Woop really. Yet images of the outback are etched into the national consciousness.

See also

- Qantas campaign, I still call Australia home since 1997 (The Inspiration Room)

- original song 'I am Australian' performed by The Seekers


- trailer for film 'Newcastle'


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Happy Wednesday

that drumming gorilla

A drumming gorilla has started appearing on Australian television.



He drums to Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight - still a fantastic song after all these years.

In fact, the advertisement took out the top award in the film category at the Cannes International Advertising Festival this year for Fallon.

I had no idea what the gorilla was selling until the very end.

The original advertisement aired in the UK last year. Their gorilla is now drumming to a different beat.



In fact, the gorilla drums to lots of different beats now (remixes).

Cool!

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I could do with a holiday.

Havidol

Havidol (avafynetyme HCl) is the only treatment available for the newly recognised disorder of Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD).

Print media advertisements






Television advertisements





Before asking the doctor to prescribe, it might be worth reading this. Now if only Justine Cooper could earn as much as a product manager for a giant pharmaceutical company.

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Monday. It rained.

pitvertising

Reported in The Guardian

'Pitvertising' - the new whiff of adland

July 17, 2008 5:30 PM

TV is the pits! No, I'm not moaning about the quality of the programmes on British television - I, for one, can't get enough of Kirstie and Phil's Property Guide on More4. It really is the pits with this ingenious new advertising idea - "Pitvertising"! The landmark, ground-breaking, never-been-done-before initiative features digital TV screens built into the armpit of a shirt to promote - what else? - Right Guard deodorant. Of course it does! "Pitvertising is a new and unexpected way of reminding the consumer to stay cool this summer!" says Right Guard. Yes, and another reason to slap your forehead and yell: "Oh Lord, what is the world coming to and why do I appear to be so out of step with it?" Coming soon: pantvertising (condoms), footvertising (thought about buying a new pair of shoes sir?) and specvertising - adverts stuck to the front of your glasses. For Specsavers, obviously.

One would hope that the people used by the deodorant company or their advertising agency would smell nice.

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It's only Tuesday. Sigh!

monkey see monkey do

This is a television advertisement for Orange from Israel.



Cute.

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Happy Monday.