Posts Tagged ‘advertising’
Kerry Katona payday loan ad banned
May 8th, 2013 • 14 CommentsEver since Warrington-born sausage roll botherer Kerry Katona came on the scene brandishing with her relentlessly chirpy coke habit, she’s been in a shedload of trouble.
Now, her new ad for payday loan company Cash Lady has been banned for being a blatant attempt to encourage daft young lasses to get into debt. (Cash Lady offers a gobsmacking APR of 2000%).
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‘We’ve all had money troubles at some point, I know I have.’ drones a pissed-sounding Kerry. ‘You could see your bank and fill in loads of forms, but is there an easier way to get a loan … So if you need extra cash go to http://www.cashlady.co.uk. Fast cash for fast lives.’
Responsible, eh? Well the ASA didn’t think so, and it got pulled after receiving 29 complaints. PDB UK, who trades under the Cash Lady, defended their decision to use Kerry, saying their customers would be able to relate to her. (Yikes!)
Katona, who was declared bankrupt in 2008 after she spent all her money on Aston Martins, marching powder and chicken jalfrezi, is the perfect poster girl for debt, but the ASA upheld complaints that it encouraged others to be as stupid as she is. Changes must be made before the ad can go out again, they said.
Perhaps the new ad should instead show Kerry in disarray, the wind whistling through the hole in her septum, raking through some bins at the back of Iceland for a stray prawn ring and 250 Hoisin duck filo parcels?
Choose your own ads – with YOUR EYES
May 1st, 2013 • 4 CommentsEye tracking technology is something marketing gurus get their coke spoons in a twist about on a regular basis. It’s so…Robocop! It’s so futuristic! You can like, see inside people’s BRAINS and sell them what they’re thinking about right now! (in my case, usually chips).
Until now, it’s been pretty duff, but now researchers at Lancaster University have developed an advertising system called ‘Sideways’, which zooms in on faces and eye movements while people are shopping. Then a video screen can show them ads related to what they were looking at as they shopped. More usefully, it can also allow people to use their eyes to control advertising on screens, or scroll through content. An eye swipe, if you will.
Senior researcher Andreas Bulling says it can monitor the eye movements of 14 people at a time using a camera positioned behind the screen. “The system detects the faces of people walking by and calculates where the eyes are relative to the eye corners.” He explained.
The creators hope it will be in use in shops within 5 years, but it’s hard to see how this will work for targeted ads. I don’t know about you, but I look at a lot of things I’m not particularly interested in every day, because I have EYES, and that’s what they do – they look at stuff. Pigeons. Dog poo. Tins of beans. So if this catches on, expect to see a lot of ads you don’t give a toss about.
Business as usual, then…
Thousands Go Complain about Go Compare ads
April 30th, 2013 • 3 CommentsEverybody universally loathed the original Go Compare ads, so a new campaign was created to acknowledge the fact it was so hated, featuring the Go Compare man being kicked in the stomach by Stuart Pearce and blown up by Sue Barker in a balaclava. Clever eh? Oh I bet there were some wry meta chuckles in the idea pod that day.
But those smart arsed advertisers have been hoisted with their own petards, because now THOSE adverts have become the most complained about ads of 2012 – with nearly 2000 complaints.
31,298 complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority last year, mostly from people with nothing better to do. Thanks to the big response to the Go Compare ads, complaints about financial services ads skyrocketed by 86%. The Wonga ads, with their cunningly hidden terms and conditions, were also on the ASA list of doom.
People also took exception to Channel 4’s ‘Bigger’, ‘Fatter’ ‘Gypsier’ campaign to promote My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, which was third on the list with 373 complaints.
But nobody is more hated than the Go Compare man. It’s enough to make poor Gio Compario sing a heartbreaking aria from Madame Butterfly as he waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Vauxhall Nova.
Twitter: Pop-ups and surveys abound?
April 25th, 2013 • 1 Comment
Twitter might look rather different soon, thanks to a number of brands opting for a new campaign from media agency SMG. Basically, we could all be faced with in-tweet surveys and pop-ups later this year.
Lisa Weinstein, president and global digital and search officer at Starcom MediaVest Group, said beta-testing has seen “very high” response rates for in-tweet surveys. She said: ”How we would envisage it is you are reading a tweet on your homepage and a little action will pop up asking you to participate in a survey.”
“Those are ongoing every week once they are in market and I think they are highly valuable.”
Of course, one of the things that made Twitter so appealing was the lack of intrusive advertising, so this is very likely to put a few noses out of joint.
Naturally, Twitter needs to make money and are giving you a service for free. It is a fine balancing act.
Hide, the Evian babies are back
April 23rd, 2013 • 2 CommentsIf you ever had the slightest ambivalence about children, those computer generated Evian babies would have put you off procreation for life. Well, the weird mutant infants are back to torment us, but this time, they’re not on rollerskates. It’s worse than that. MUCH WORSE.
Called Baby and Me, the new campaign shows a very French, very balding hipster in a V-neck seeing his young self reflected back in a car rear view mirror, then in a mirrored window on the street. Soon, other passers-by stop and see themselves as babies too and they all do a ‘funny’ dance to ‘Here Comes the Hotstepper’ by Ini Kamoze – and the world just got that bit more rubbish.
The first Evian campaign to show the dancing babies was the most viewed advert when it came out in 2009 – now this one has notched up over 20 million hits already. It seems that the world loves babies doing improbable things even more than it likes cats falling off tables.
It all just makes you want to get your water from the tap and throw the Internet in the bin, doesn’t it? I need a drink.
Mobile advertising triples!
April 10th, 2013 • 1 Comment
While some people in media still think non-print outlets are nothing but a fad, the rest of the world progresses onward and newspapers are dying left, right and centre. A huge growth industry is advertising through mobiles and the market has seen a spike in spend.
Mobile advertising has nearly tripled to record levels, with UK digital ad spend hit £5bn for the first time. Huge. Advertising through UK mobiles grew a whopping 148% year-on-year and it doesn’t look like slowing down.
With around two thirds of the population having a smartphone or tablet, there’s a lot of money to be made.
Only five years ago, mobile advertising was making a weedy £25m. In 2009, mobile accounted for a paltry 1% of the total UK digital advertising market.
“There is simply so much buzz around mobile,” said Tim Elkington, director of research and strategy at the Internet Advertising Bureau. “Marketers are becoming more attune to the ‘always on’ nature of consumers who expect to engage with content wherever they are.”
The 4G rollout is only going to see ad spend increasing and marketing companies will increase their interest in social networks.
Commercial Break: Courtney Loves fake fags
April 3rd, 2013 • No CommentsYou wouldn’t expect Courtney Love to be brand ambassador for anything remotely socially acceptable. I mean she’s not going to be flicking her rat tails for L’Oreal or smoothing her gnarly track marks with Oil of effin’ Olay, is she?
So the decision to feature Court in a quite stunningly hilarious ad for Njoy e-cigarettes seems just right, somehow. E-cigarettes, with their mystery non toxic vapours, share all the unpleasant/exciting characteristics associated with actual cigarettes, but you can’t chuck anyone off the Megabus for pretending to smoke a clown fag. Similarly, Courtney is disturbing and inappropriate, but she’s there, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it.
The ad is an undisputed classic, featuring a ravaged, decadent Courtney at the kind of swanky party she would definitely not get on the guest list for, being told off by a haughty dowager for lighting up.
‘Relax’ she growls, like the Oscar nominated badass she is. ‘It’s a f***** Njoy.’
Sheer marketing genius.
Google’s elephant in the room
March 5th, 2013 • No CommentsGoogle ads are usually pretty annoying, like ‘Check out this 1 weird old tip to get rid of belly fat!!’ But a conservation group has now accused Google of encouraging the sale of IVORY, thanks to ads on its Japanese shopping site.
Apparently there are over 10,000 ads for ‘hanko’, which are carved wooden stamps inlaid with ivory. The stamps are sold legally in Japan, and are used to sign important documents, but their manufacture has a devastating effect on African elephant populations.
Google told the Associated Press that: “Ads for products obtained from endangered or threatened species are not allowed on Google. As soon as we detect ads that violate our advertising policies, we remove them.”
But The Environmental Investigation Agency say that they wrote a letter (presumably unstamped) to Google boss Larry Page demanding that the ads be taken down, but had had no response.
Let’s hope Google will sort this out during their morning brainstorming air hockey session in the Idea Pod – before any more elephants bite the dust.
‘Eeee, I could murder a Nespresso, Betty.’
March 1st, 2013 • 9 CommentsBritish TV used to be refreshingly free of product placement, with people in Emmerdale religiously turning their Corn Flakes packets away from the camera and Rita from the Kabin selling dummy copies of ‘Hiya!’ magazine.
But 2 years after Ofcom relaxed regulations, a report by KPMG today predicted a big growth in product placement on UK TV.
The report, catchily entitled ‘Taking a subtle approach: How product placement will breathe a new lease of life into UK TV advertising’, basically said that it will soon be more common to see newsreaders wearing hats with ‘Foxybingo.co.uk’ written on them in luminous pink.
Product placement deals since the Ofcom ruling have included the appearance of Nationwide cash-machines on Coronation Street and prominent positioning of a Nescafe Dulce Gusto coffee machine on This Morning. Also, everyone in Hollyoaks now has a Nokia, and looks at it every five minutes.
KPMG’s Clement Chan said: ‘Technology continues to disrupt the way content is consumed, content creators are hungry for new revenue models and consumers seem to be increasingly comfortable with the idea of product placement on UK TV’
This report was brought to you by Lucy Sweet (sponsored by Harvey’s Furniture).
Advertise your wares on a Japanese girl’s thigh
February 22nd, 2013 • 1 Comment
Advertisers are always looking at new ways of flogging products to us gormless saps, and in Japan, the idea of marketing is being taken next level, as they promote products on the thighs of Japanese girls.
Japanese PR company Absolute Territory have started paying young women (over 18, you’ll be thrilled to hear) to wear advertising stickers on their thighs, just beneath the hem of their miniskirts and above their knee-high stockings.
And it is beyond creepy… and clearly going to work.
As of November 2012, over a thousand women applied for this odd service. Basically, the girl chooses a sticker ad and they have to agree to wear it for at least eight hours a day or more.
To prove they are actually doing this, they have to post photos of themselves wearing the stickers on their social networking sites.
And creepier still, it turns out Green Day rather liked this idea, employing Absolut Territory to promote the Japanese release of their new CD ‘!Uno!’ It would’ve been funnier if it was clap cream or something, but there you go.
We eagerly await elderly, busty landladies with adverts for Mr Porky’s pork scratchings plastered across their bosoms.
[BF]
Microsoft paint over street art in huge marketing fail
November 27th, 2012 • 7 CommentsBig companies are not known for sensitivity when trying to promote new products, but usually, they’re mindful of the fact that bad publicity is sometimes the absolute pits for their sales figures. And Microsoft may well be looking at getting a new marketing company after one of their Surface ads ended up being painted over some street art.
The Microsoft advert was painted over a large piece by Mr. Wany in London, which is really, really stupid. Most technology companies want to aim their products at the young and the achingly hip, so whacking their brand over a piece of existing art is PR suicide.
Global Street Art, who shared the offending image above, noted: “How is ruining art good for any brand?” It does seem remarkable that someone could look at the existing artwork and think ‘I know, we’ll just go over what is already here. No-one will mind, surely?’
Idiots.
At last! New rules arrive to stop broadband speed claims!
April 4th, 2012 • 10 Comments
At long last, the change in rules about broadband speed claims is coming into play this week. Now, providers are going to have to be more upfront about how fast download speeds really are.
Will this finally see an end to the irritating ‘up to’ claims?
Well, where a broadband provider would once advertise an “up to” speed of 24Mb, that would now read a much more realistic 13Mb. This move by the Committee of Advertising Practice and Advertising Standards Authority comes just in time for Virgin Media launching their super-fast broadband package of 100Mb, where you will have seen Usain Bolt and the whole “superfast as standard” broadband offers on TV.
This is particularly good news because, there have been claims made that standard speeds have been around 2oMb, when in actual fact (according to a recent study by watchdog Ofcom), the average speed across Britain last year was 7.6Mb.
Some berk called Charles Ponsonby of comparison site Simplifydigital said: “Currently they can lead with ‘up to’ claims of 20Mb despite the fact the majority of customers will not receive anything like that. Advertising will now be less misleading, but the rules still give providers a lot of leeway.”
The leeway here is that these new guidelines state that providers can onlyadvertise an “up to” speed if they’re able to deliver that speed to at least 10% of their customers.
Almost seems pointless to change the rules when you look at it.
Wifebeater takes a battering from Brown Ale…
April 3rd, 2012 • 19 CommentsUp in the north-east, they don’t stand for any sort of pretentious, fancy-pants nonsense. And it’s good to see that Stella Artois, that poncy Belgian upstart lager, has had its latest Newcastle-based ad campaign scuppered by a rival poster from the local Brown Ale. Do one, you chalice-wielding weirdos….
Google get patent for salient weather-based ads
March 23rd, 2012 • 1 Comment
It’s honking down! Buy an umbrella-ella-ella-ey-ey-ey! Oi! Pink chops! Buy suncream! You’re beginning to smell like crackling! These are some of the things that your phone could howl at you in the not too distant future.
Why?
Well, Google have been awarded a patent that could allow it to offer up advertisements based on your environment while you hopelessly prod at your smartphone.
Of course, this patent hasn’t been well received by privacy organisations who think that its all a bit Minority Report, which sees us dead-eyed plebs heavily targeted by commercials while living in some ghastly dystopian society. A world where your phone demands you buy a scarf and wellington boots! THE HORROR!
The filing submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) says that “information about an environmental condition of a remote device is received, the environmental condition being determined based on a signal output from a sensor of the remote device or a sensor coupled to the remote device. An advertisement is identified based on the environmental condition, and the advertisement is provided to the remote device.”
That suggests that we could see a future where we have weather sensors included in our phones, but it is more likely that it’ll work through the weather updates and data accrued from it.
“When determining what ads to serve to end users, the environmental factors can be used independently or in combination with matching of keywords associated with the advertisements and keywords in user search queries,” said the patent. “A web browser or search engine located at the user’s site may obtain information on the environment (e.g. temperature, humidity, light, sound, air composition) from sensors.”
“Advertisers may specify that the ads are shown to users whose environmental conditions meet certain criteria,” it added. “For example, advertisements for air conditioners can be sent to users located at regions having temperatures above a first threshold, while advertisements for winter overcoats can be sent to users located at regions having temperatures below a second threshold.
Google have also patented a method of detecting background noise when a user makes a phone call. Combined with GPS functionality, this could see ads generated after it has been determined that a user is at a festival or football match, meaning you’d get ads for albums or pies.
Celebrities endorsing Snickers through twitter are fine say ASA
March 7th, 2012 • 16 CommentsAre you following Rio Ferdinand, Cher Lloyd, Katie Price and Ian Botham on twitter? Jesus. You’re a monster. What kind of person follows four people like that? Anyway, have you noticed that they’ve been keen to show off their Snickers?
Well, people were getting their gruds in a bunch about it all, meaning that the Advertising Standard Authority has to wade in and make sense of it all. Were these tweets adverts? An investigation was underway! The first twitter investigation ever! How thrilling.
The ASA investigated whether the celebrities’ ‘teaser’ tweets should have indicated that they were part of an advert and whether the hashtag #spon, made it clear enough that the tweet was an advert. They said:
“We noted the first four tweets in each series served as ‘teasers’, which, due to their nature, were likely to generate additional interest in the celebrities’ postings. We also noted those tweets did not make any reference to Snickers or to Mars and were posted in relatively quick succession. In addition, we noted that the fifth ‘reveal’ tweets showed the celebrities with the product and included the text “You’re not you when you’re hungry @snickersUk #hungry #spon …”.
“We considered the combination of those elements was sufficient to make clear the tweets were advertising and that consumers would then understand each series of tweets was a marketing communication. In that particular context, and given the relevance of the first four tweets to the “You’re not you when you’re hungry …” strap line in the ‘reveal’ tweets, we considered it was acceptable that the first four tweets were not individually labelled as being part of the overall marketing communications. We therefore concluded that the ads did not breach the [advertising] Code.”
A spokesman for the ASA described this decision as a “landmark one” which will invariably open the door for celebrities to start pimping their feed to anyone who’ll listen. Thank God for the ‘block’ function, eh?
