A Reuters story titled "Viral Good for Advertisers" has a marketing agency stating that a video of a Canadian schoolboy playing with a light sabre, which received 900 million hits, could help advertisers tap into the younger Internet audience. But it's not always easy to tell what will successfully resonate with the audience enough to convience them to purchase something or even remind them of the brand. Especially as much viral advertising has very little to do with the product or brand.

"With viral videos, the audience is in control so advertisers have to engage this audience rather than bombard them," said Toni Smith, Head of Strategy and Communications at the Viral Factory agency. "They need to be cleverer and more inventive as they cannot buy the space."

"Our research showed fun, pointless and silly content were very popular with the young Internet audience and advertisers can learn a lot from that," Smith said.

"Advertisers should embrace the Internet medium by all means but they should not take advantage of it. Their campaigns should say what they need to but in a fun and entertaining way."

Is there a support group for adgrunts like myself, or do I have to start one? The addiction started well over ten years ago when I began posting Badlanders like Preem vs Good Guys Auto, welcome to Marlboro ads, Bang Bang you're copied, three drinks do the same thing - it got so bad I felt like I had double vision when looking at Nazi meat? posters.

HP's new digital cameras have a "slimming" feature that allows you to make someone look thinner. Via 3 Quarks and Feministing, where you can find more slimming shots. It's just the thing to make your teenage daughter commit to that eating disorder... and in time for Christmas!

Back in February we reported on KFC's commercial with a hidden message that required viewers to use their DVRs or go to the KFC website to view the spot for the Cheesesnacker. According to Promo Magazine, the commercial reveals a "punch line" to the hidden joke in the ad, "What do you put on your sandwich during rush hour?" The first 1,000 correct submissions will get a coupon for a buck towards a free sandwich. Spots will begin airing on Sunday, or can be viewed now at the site.

"KFC has long been associated with fun times and laughter," said Scott Bergren, executive VP-marketing for KFC, in a statement. "This time, we're letting our consumers share in the joke by giving them the chance to try our new Ultimate Cheese KFC Snacker for free."

Like last time where the "secret word" was lame, the punch line in this spot just makes me want to slug someone. The joke might be funny if you're 5 years-old. Anyway, see screenshots below which reveal the "joke". And don't say I didn't warn ya.

"The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion." veteran reporter John Lawton so famously quipped.

On Friday, Reuters reported that Chrysler is putting an end to the Dr. Z spots many of us have been tormented by for the last couple months. A large frequency media buy with ads that were supposedly humerous but fell flat in the laughs department were part of a $225 million ad campaign by BBDO.

Chrysler said its "Ask Dr. Z" advertising campaign had achieved the company's intent of focusing consumer attention on the American and German engineering behind the company's cars.

But sales fell during the two months of the campaign and critics said the ads risked distracting attention from the automaker's summer sales efforts intended to clear out an inventory of unsold vehicles.

It seems that no matter how much we point at the send in your reels and the other submit your work pages, few if any read it before contacting us. No worries, we're used to getting all the things we ask you not to send, like wmv files, or the press release text attached in a word document, or your beautiful commercial served up as a youtube link, and we tirelessly ask you kindly to re-submit if we're interested in what you send.

Now, we could mock silly emails we receive and post those sadly uninformed cease and desist orders here on the front page all day long if we didn't have better manners than some other blogs out there - but today I'm afraid, we've met the drop that the cup runneth over by. Don't worry, I won't make it a habit as then we wouldn't have time to post anything else.

Read on to see how not to chat up this particular website to be your "viral seeding" whore. Free advice: for starters, dear Dialog Solutions GmbH, you might want to come off a little less like spam by actually personalizing the personal email.

The current discussion at Ideas on Ideas is about The culpable designer.

In Steven Heller's review of Peter Adam's book Art of the Third Reich, he notes that, "The Nazis are often credited with the most successful national "identity," ever designed; and its visual propaganda was among the most effective in the modern world." He also acknowledges that "Hitler had such an acute understanding of the effect of images on the German people that nothing about Nazi art was left to chance." Their understanding of the power of visual communication, coupled with their absolute control and ceaseless consistency, helped build a brand identity that conveyed strength and power, wrapped around a symbol that still evokes fear today.

And when it's not invoking fear its being copied to sell US beef - see the badlander Nazi meat?.
Joking aside, have you ever had to make a tough call...? Have you ever engaged in harmful design? Wondered wether the job you were doing was a "good" one from a moral point of view? Have you sexed up things that were better left unsexy? Do you feel that you can as the designer make a moral judgement on the product you design for? What exactly is harmful design? Join the discussion over at Ideas on Ideas.

Yesterday was the day for Stockholm Pride Parade, and as we hung around the park waiting for the party to start I noticed the difference in sponsors. Here there were international brands as sponsors, not like previous years parades in Amsterdam and New york where gay night clubs and bars would be the most visable brands around. Another difference from previous parades was all the political parties marching in solidarity this election year, it gave me hives.

Swedens "Dame Edna", comedian "Babsan" with her beefy troop of merry men rush toward the start of the parade where their float awaits.

Yeah ...well at least I avoided "goulash" in the heading. I'm pissed off. The Hungarians have pulled my favourite Tourism ad. The link still works and there's a banner ad there but the vid appears to have been yanked. The lights are on but there's noone home, as it were.

You try - abalatoninyar.fw.hu What's it about? Hungary's tourism authority, Magyar Turizmus new marketing campaign is designed, it says, to attract young people to the land of goulash.

The animated commercial, for the Lake Balaton region, begins with a young bloke (presumably a tourist) giving a local babe the eye across a crowded bar. There's a close-up of the man's watch in fast-forward. Then the couple in a rowboat. Suddenly the gorgeous one's bikini top takes a hike and the fella, whose eyebrows have been doing the Hungarian Rhapsody, makes with a sleazy "how about it?" look.

Before long they are at it - a bit of the old in-out "avec gusto" or whatever the Hungarian equivalent is. Luckily some lakeside reeds get in the way before it becomes too Volga (yes I know that's in Russia).

Finally, he and she are lying side-by-side in the boat, post-coitus. She has pink hearts pulsating from both eyes; he is looking dead dodgey and it's no wonder. Turns out he's married! Shock horror. We see him hiding his wedding ring under the sheet. In the last frame he's doing a runner in a convertible. Alone. Poor bastard.

What are they trying to say here? Something like "Come to Hungary and shag the local girls" (Just be careful to hide your wedding ring).

Anyway, all this is academic as they appear to have taken the ad down. Either that or the server has shat itself or gone for a shnitzel. I tried to dig it up at YouTube and Google but no luck. I'm kicking myself that I didn't capture it while I could. Next time.

That brands as well as bands have their own myspace pages isn't new, Caffeinegoddess has already showed us that there are a lot of brands at myspace, hanging around making friends like everyone else. This morning when I was reading a Swedish newspaper Myspace was described as "Murdoc's advertising site". With all this intermingling between buddies and brands, can kids tell them apart? Wonder what it's like growing up today.

Stefanie Olsen writes MySpace blurs line between friends and flacks at c|net.

Media literacy experts say parents need to be aware of advertising tactics online and try to educate their kids about ads. Posing questions to kids like, "Who is behind this game, video or message, and what is their motive?"

"We need to work harder to recognize the new strategies used to reach into their psyches," said Hobbs.

Personally, I just wonder how long it will take before Myspace becomes a complete echo chamber with marketers shilling only to other marketers as all the real people moved on to virgin territory. ;) A week? Two?

Recall: Hell Hath no fury like a media-woman scorned?
Well here's the update - even after people sussed out that it was for CourtTV, the web was still buzzing about those posters. Did people get mad when they found out it wasn't real?
Not according to the The New York Times reports "Public Hath No Fury, Even When Deceived "

"Emily is really an amalgam of all of us who have been cheated on," said Marc Juris, general manager for programming and marketing at Court TV. "Clearly, this really resonated with people."
Whether it resonates into higher ratings for "Parco P.I." is another matter. The "Emily" ruse was originally intended to be a stunt to help promote the start of the show’s new season on Aug. 15, but Court TV's marketing group liked the idea so much that they made it a large part of the campaign. The second phase - ads for the show to be stamped over the original billboards - was to start next Monday, but Court TV moved it up to July 26 after all the attention.
Mr. Juris was still marveling: "It's like a flash investigation took place, and within 24 hours we were busted."

People liked Emily? That's not what I heard. She's a "woman" who describes her nipples as erasers and spams real blogs like the "Fork in the Road" where the post just described a car accident with the canned "my hubby is having an affair" message. I don't like Emily. I hate Emily. Describing nipples as "erasers" sounds terribly male writer/penthouse letter, and latching onto real blogs real life events with canned unrelated promo responses is nothing short of spam - comparable to that pharma-spammer who sprinkles his blogspot.com links all over this place these past weeks. But in the old "any press is good press" (as long as they spell your name right) apparently this campaign was a success.

All people not living in the US, but still hanging on the web, can be grateful that we don't get CourtTV I guess, because if that show is executed even half as mediocre as this ad campaign was, it'll blow chunks.
This poster below is on the I-95 North near Jerome Avenue in the Bronx, NY.

Macy's will have its own reality TV show come September on WE, the Women's Entertainment network.

Rather than featuring grumbling customers, as the A&E show "Airline" did in its portrayal of Southwest Airlines, "Unwrapping Macy's" will, for the most part, depict the daily lives of employees.

So instead, we'll see workers grumbling about low wages, the way they are treated poorly by customers, and on-the-job trysts. ;)

It's a bit much. First they win against Australia in the dying seconds of their WorldCup match with a dodgey penalty. Then they sledge Zizou until he explodes with a butt and now they've gone and pinched New Zealand's Maori War-Dance - the Haka - to advertise frigging Fiats. Fiats! Of all things. Not something decent like a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. But your common or garden variety Fiat. And to rub salt into the wound they've got women performing the ersatz Haka. The Kiwis are not amused, I can tell you. Have a look - How to re-start the Maori Wars.

Related story: Handbags in ads peeve Kiwi players

According to this article, the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) has done some research that says about a third of their 330 marketers feel that agencies are "infected by 'creative arrogance,' charge too much and fail to produce work that is on strategy."

I have felt many things about laundry, but I don't think I have ever felt this way.
(ad picture inside)

caffeinegoddess told us about: Brita claims tap water is dirty - upsets water providers

The Canadian Water and Wastewater Association has filed a complaint with the Advertising Standards Council.

The Advertising Standards Canada has been running an ad in London, Ontario, Canada for the past few months. Although many of the ASC ads have been replaced with other ads, I was able to track-down one of the remaining ASC ads in the city still on display. (image inside)

Sometimes you wish you could know what exactly happens in all the programs you place your commercials around. With feature films and TV shows you pretty much know what you're gonna get. But the real risky media buyers play the news. This one lost.

The Hidden Persuader (English, Portuguese) has an example of very interactive street advertising from Ogilvy One, Bangkok.
There's a motion sensor in a garbage bin, as soon as someone walks by the sound of the ad is turned on, which happens to be the wailings of a baby. So naturally any human still equipped with empathy will open the lid of the garbage bin - and what do they see there? "Find out more about the BIRTH CONTROL PILL" and the website url to turn to.

It seems that all that talk about childrens obesity possibly caused by advertising fatty foods and fast foods has made at least one brand of junk eats finally change their kid marketing tactic. It's Burger King's latest superman movie tie-in where all the toys are outdoor actitvity type things or an accesory for your workout. If your kids are only motivated by competition, you can find supermans scores on the website - try and keep up with that.

In previous does fast food advertising make children fat posts, I ended up arguing with Dan Jaffe in the comments. Fair warning - bring up that fantasy about Sweden not having ads targeting children one more time and I'll.. I'll.... Why I'll force you to live there so you can see how wrong you are. ;)
Bonus points for the text at the top of the page that yells: HEY KIDS THIS IS ADVERTISING! Nice.