Your biweekly, massively undercooked take on the world of advertising.Â
Oh, baby.
Nothing makes you want to kick open the emergency exit and take your chances with a pillowcase parachute more than a screaming baby on an airplane. (Except maybe when the inflight movie is starring Rob Schneider.) As a Mothers’ Day stunt, JetBlue decided to reward passengers for every sobbing baby—by knocking 25 percent off of everyone’s next JetBlue flight for each conniption. Does JetBlue condone smacking babies around to make them cry? It certainly seems like it.
Nerds aren’t as smelly as they used to be.
Before Axe rolled out their brand, their marketing team had a big question: What subsection of young males are we going to target? So they broke down the demographic into six groups: “the natural talent,” “the predator,” “marriage material,” “always the friend,” “the insecure novice,” and “the enthusiastic novice.” They decided on the insecure novice—and Axe became the #1 deodorant brand almost overnight. But this created a problem: Axe became known as the preferred deodorant for nerds and losers. The morale of the story? In the stinky world of deodorant, there are no winners.
Fewer commercials ≠more comedy.
People say Saturday Night Live is getting better. I say people are getting dumber. Regardless, the iconic late-night show has plans to remove 30 percent of commercials next season in favor of adding original branded content “pods” in six of their shows throughout the year. In other words, they’ll be doing product placement. I guarantee you it won’t be better than this:
The “a” word.
If you haven’t noticed, “advertising” has become a bit of a taboo word lately. And also, if you haven’t noticed, I think Mark Duffy is f-ing hilarious. Which is why his observations about the bastardization of the word really make me laugh. For example: We don’t advertise anymore, we “engage brand advocates” to tell them “authentic stories.” And by the way, don’t refer to me as a copywriter. I’m a “change agent.”
Say what?
Thanks to people at Stanford with abnormally efficient brains, you can’t trust video anymore. The newly developed Face2Face software (not yet publicly available) allows users to manipulate the facial expressions of anybody in real time with frighteningly convincing results. Add in a bit of clever audio editing, and you can literally make anyone say anything. What are the implications to advertising? Probably a lot of lawsuits. And hopefully a few Ted Nugent PETA commercials.