A little backstory. Cottonelle had a problem on its hands. People who bought moist wipes were keeping them out of view in the bathroom, down in the cabinets somewhere. So they were forgetting about them and not going through them fast enough.

Cottonelle’s solution was simple: Make moist wipes part of your daily ass-wiping regimen as opposed to a some-time thing. And create a social media space where fans could share their thoughts on moist toilet paper wipes. To Cottonelle’s credit, they crowd-sourced the name of their product care routine. Genius, huh?!

Have you heard about Depressed Copywriter?

It's a website where someone takes little strips of paper and changes a headline on some ad to make it more, well, depressing. The site is one instagrammed photo after another, with depressing additives to random headlines.
Oh, and there's a quote by Banksy in the about section. Because you know, adding a Banksy quote makes stuff become very intelligent.

It's getting all the raves now. On Creativity and Huffpo and the San Ramona High Senior School newspaper, too. Have you seen it? Have you seen the image above?

Have you seen it anywhere else?

Work Labs is mad and they're taking it to the interwebs. According to their site they are convinced their campaign concept for craft brew Work Beer was stolen by another agency for a different beer.

If you look at the first set of ads (and the rest on their site) it does seem to be a prime Badland candidate. Same headline. Same work-inspired art direction.

Further reading explains the kerfuffle. It seems Work Labs showed their Work Beer ads to New Belgium Brewery, who then may or may not have gotten their current agency of record to create work in the same playground.

Continuing on with an exploration of U.S. Armed Forces advertising.... Military Intelligence is an oxymoron, Part 1 is under that link.

The Air Force

While The Air Force's official .mil site is RSS heavy and more like a community bulletin, the recruitment website is the most high-tech and modern I've seen so far. It's modern in the same way “Tron,” is modern.

Its navigation borders on futuristic, making its tagline “It’s Not Science Fiction,” quite ironic. The center navigation is easy enough, leading to separate three-dimensional components for more information, a video game and other things designed to get you learning.

We harbor the somewhat delusional opinion that consumers are waiting with bated breath to follow our communication across all media channels. See the Youtube video, click the Facebook link at the end. See the sneak peek behind the scenes short at the cinema, so you can then share it on your special app.

The reality is that it’s hard enough to get someone interested in viewing even one ad. But let’s assume for a second it is true. Some brands do an excellent job of maintaining the unified message. Adidas and Nike and Starbucks are consistent across all media. So no matter where you are, you see the same message, even if the executions change.

And hand you a toothbrush so you could scrape the saccharin off of your gums.

Nike spells twee with a capital T in this spot for Nike Free Run+. It's a duet between a man and a woman in a Long Distance relationship who have made a pact to run across the country to be with each other. Except the man craps out early, ends up in the hospital like a pathetic schmuck who can only lay in a heap until his lady woman shows up to smother him with kisses and cause his EKG to go on the fritz.

Pinterest. The confusion of it all. Why is it that Pinterest gathered so many worrying about the copyright holders interests, when so many (buzzfeed, Facebook, Twitter, and so on and so fourth) others have not?

It could be because of Pinterestes own confusing terms, vs copyrights vs etiquette pages. Lets check!

Pintererest Terms of Use

By now you, your mom, and even your chia pet has seen the film Invisible Children unleashed in the world on tuesday. This film with 5.35 million Facebook shares and 3,277 blog posts out-viraled every funny cat and car advert on the internet this week, despite, or perhaps due to, the fact it's thirty minutes long.

This chart found at Campaign is produced in conjunction with Unruly media ranks how often the video has been shared on Facebook, Twitter etc. It was a runaway suceess in sharing.

A rant about digital and the future and that kind of stuff.
Or why your digital ad is a ‘fart button’.

Lately I’m meeting more and more people who ‘know about digital’ and to be honest I think I’ve uncovered a latent tendency to self-harm. Or Tourette’s.

Time was when we (that’s not the royal we btw) could impress people with our digital magic. “And when you click this here, tadaaaaa that thing happens…” Sigh.

Not now.

Advertising has caught up. Clients have caught up. And now they know that if you click ‘this’ then ‘that’ happens. Because any tool can do that. And when I say tool I mean dick. Or Tom or Harry.

Digital is now a staple on the media plans. It’s a channel. And for a lot of agencies that’s it.

There’s a formula now. They do a TV ad. They pull some stills. That’s the Digital Display ads done. Yay! And now we’ll put the ad on You Tube.

Stabs leg. FUCK!

Here is an infomercial starring the former Sham Wow/Slap Chop spokesman who was last seen "getting the crap kicked out of him" by a prostitute.

The Guardian spells out doom. Zuckerberg is King, even if I didn't vote for him. In "Why Facebook's new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass" Adrian Short even pulls out the old 'if you're not paying for it, you are the product', a cliché I am also guilty of using when hating on Facebook. He dubs the phenomena of 'if you're not on Facebook you're not on the web' to antisocial networking.

Left to right: Vince Cullers Advertising self-promo ad, the Afro Sheen 'Wantu Wazuri' campaign and a promo-poster for Putney Swope

Season five of AMC's Mad Men is soon here and fans are eagerly awaiting it, while others are still asking the question: Where are all the black mad men? The Root shines a spotlight on a few of the African American pioneers in advertising, pointing out Vincent Cullers, Georg Olden and Tom Burrell, and say:

The oldest advertising trick in the book to attract the straight male buyer is to drape a half-naked lady across the product. The second oldest is to color something pink, when your advertising target is a woman. Bonus points if you manage both to pink-ify a traditionally 'male' item, such as a toolkit, and have a nude woman drape it across her. Win-win, both targets love it, right?

Wrong.

The sharp tack Lucia Elliott, whom I had the pleasure of chatting with at the CampaignBrief party, shares a few thoughts on the third days session in Cannes, called "Beyond Mad Men; Gender Balance in Creative Roles". She writes The end of the boys club?.

In fact I suspect that the same topic at Cannes a decade ago would have uncovered identical themes and language: life balance, gender hard-wiring, male ego/female self-doubt, ‘having it all’ and the glass ceiling. The tempo may be a little jauntier these days, but the song remains the same.

One of our favorite hobbies in the ad-business is the rename old phenomena with new buzzworthy lingo, then hold seminars write books and sing ka-ching all the way to the bank with it. I always felt that WOM was a bit like tupperware parties 2.0, and The Denver Egotist found this example of old school ambient from 1955. We may think we're breaking new grounds, but what we're actually doing is using the same tried and true working methods in new grounds.

First, let’s define a ‘Scam’ ad.

A scam ad is the industry term for an ad made simply for the purpose of entering it into advertising award shows. It’s made for a client without the client’s consent, and sometimes, the agency or creatives don’t even have that client on their roster.

It may run once, paid for by the agency. Many times, it never runs at all.

Crispin's Tiffany Rolfe ponders this and offers as solution at Creativity.

Women are hardwired to kick ass and nurture at the same time. But unfortunately the advertising business isn't known for nurturing. It's competitive, it's fast and it's filled with insecurities. We don't want to be replaced by the newer, younger, better model.

Hello I'm David has posted "Crowdsourcing fucks us all in the ass, and here’s how" which is a good read. He deduces those who do participate in crowdsourcing competitions are either insane, don't care about being professional, or live in India, and none of them have cotton socks!

Today it's nationaldagen in Sweden, and as Wikipedia will tell you, it's sort of a recent holiday: "National Day of Sweden (Sveriges nationaldag) is a national holiday observed in Sweden on June 6 every year. The day was renamed and finally justified as national day by Riksdagen, the Swedish parliament, in 1983. Previously it was commemorated as svenska flaggans dag, Swedish flag day." We're confused about this as we don't have the 4th of July bombastic fireworks tradition, or the 17th of May all-day family friendly Norwegian happy party. Nor do we have a national day of massive parades, wine and cheer like the French Bastille Day which is so contagious even other countries celebrate it.

The most recent example of a shared photo that made its way around the web and into the paid news is Stefanie Gordon's shuttle launch photo. MSNBC tells the full story in : That famous space shuttle photo: When is sharing stealing?

Gordon's photo has been viewed nearly 1 million times, and shown by media TV, Web and print news outlets around the world. She was paid by precisely five news organizations.