All entries for the month of August, 2009.
An understated emotional ad by The Salvation Army on behalf of their disaster relief efforts. Simple. And sweet. Their site is salvationarmyusa.org.
How delightful that in a business known for its dull charts and diagrams, an insurance company has used diagrams to tell light-hearted tales of woe. Delicious simple visuals, funny little stories, and you know exactly how DEVK fits into the picture.
We love these ads, which we found on scaryideas and tweeted about some time ago. Just wanted to be sure you saw them. Especially those of you who are art directors.
In this long copy ad for IBM’s business analytics systems, IBM claims that our planet is getting smarter. This assumption is based on observing the sheer glut of data we generate everyday. 43,000 gigs of it. Yes technically, ‘Waiting in line at pharmacy and am sooo bored’ tweets and ‘Kittens Inspired by Kittens’ parody videos are data. But there’s a huge difference between the rasher of digital effluvia we produce every day and real information.
Not that there isn’t vast amounts of data out there to be analyzed, patterns to be recognized, trends to be identified. (And our overwhelming love for kittens probably does say something meaningful about us.)
But more information doesn’t = more smarts. It’s a little more complicated than that. And, there are those who maintain that the time we expend creating and consuming all this digi-garbage actually makes us less smart, because it leaves us less time to do the kinds of thinking that makes smart things happen. A company working in the precise field of anayltics ought to offer up something more compelling than this sort of Simpleton Equation.
Right smack in the midst of the latest Rodriguez, Ortiz, Ramirez, juicing scandals, Beck’s has created this remarkably mindless ad celebrating technological advances in baseball performance. As the game suffers body blow after body blow with every new revelation of performance enhancing abuse, it’s hard to imagine why Beck’s would throw its hat into the ruckus with this cagey endorsement of ‘the game that said no to old school’ and ‘throws a curveball at yesterday’ (we’ll say!) by taking ‘a technological leap into the future.’
What technological leap could they possibly be referring to? The bats aren’t better — they’re snapping like matches. New batting glove synthetics? No, it’s the raw power and roid rage cooked into the game by Anabol and Deca. Just look at the guy’s thigh sized forearms!
Incidentally, what makes this ad even more inane is that Beck’s is, for some reason, attempting to hitch itself to America’s favorite pastime. Which is why its concluding line of copy — the “#1 selling beer in Germany” — really left us giggling. The steroid thing got our attention, but this ad delivers idiocy and bad judgement in so many fabulous ways!
Back in February, we were appalled by the Cattlemen’s Beef and Board and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’beef as land-mass’ campaign. But we recently came across this sweet meat scene which caught the eye of our salivary glands (yes, they have eyes).
It reminds us of places in the Pacific Northwest where mountains drop off to delicious licks of white sands, and chunky off-shore islands appear tantalizingly close enough to swim to. And we found ourselves being aroused by this ad — both its geography as well as its ‘mouth feel’. So, assuming agency and client have learned enough to stay away from the glumps of thickener and rivers of bubbing fat in the future, we withdraw our original objections.
