Tag: Advertising
Do the Keystone Kops ride again? This “dumbest cops” video has gone viral, initially billed as “actual bank robbery in Detroit.”
Two compilations of “doing it all wrong” moments taken from tv commercials that promise to fix all that.
In July, I did a post on Beating Yourself Up for Fun & Profit. Good stuff, if I don’t say so myself. Planning my Bloomfield College visual effects class for the fall reminded me of this pretty sharp VW commercial. All VFX, but a variation on the same theme…
I thought some of you might get a chuckle over this piece from the Salon.com web site. Opponents of Mc Donald’s lay some of the blame for childhood obesity directly on the company’s trademark clown, but Mickey D’s PR people claim he’s a symbol of physical fitness. You decide….
We interrupt all these reports from San Francisco to bring you this emergency message. There was a Super Bowl yesterday. There were a lot of commercials. Advertisers paid $3 million for a 30-second spot. The least you could do is watch.
We all know how hard it can be for a Hollywood star to make ends meet these days, what with the economy and all, which is why so many famous actors and directors have to choose between waiting tables and doing Japanese commercials. These commercials are so demanding that only a select few choose to go this route. Thanks to guest poster Jonathan Lyons for alerting me to a practice that recalls the slave trade of centuries past.
I returned from San Francisco last night and found Manhattan’s West 4th Street subway stop plastered with posters for Diesel’s new ad campaign based on the theme “Be Stupid.” Apparently the idea is to equate “being stupid” with being a daring non-conformist, with such tag lines as:
Hey guys, imagine you lived in a city where every move you made was a death-defying Hollywood stunt. Well, if you think that might get you a little wet under the arms, then you need Rexona, the man’s deodorant. That’s what I learned from this funny enough commercial, Stunt City. It was filmed in Australia for a UK audience and won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in 2005. Directed by Ivan Zacharias; visual effects by The Mill.
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My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin