When ads go rogue
Posted: Monday, June 30, 2008 12:19 PM by Will Femia
The folks online are calling it the viral ad JC Penny doesn't want you to see, which sounded suspicious to me since of course if it's an ad they want you to see it. But now I see it's being forced off of YouTube so maybe they really don't want you to see it. Luckily,
AdAge has it on their own server and since they've written about the story they can probably argue some kind of fair use.
NOTE: I think this is work safe but be advised, the plot of the video is two teens practicing speed dressing from underwear to fully clothed. So at a few points in the clip, as they practice, you see these two teens in their underwear. But not sexpot underwear and not really long lingering looks. The controversy here is not teens in underwear but the overall impression that the teens are doing this speed dressing so they can avoid getting caught kanoodling in the basement later on.
What's separately interesting about the JC Penny ad is how it seems to be part of a class of renegade unapproved advertising. That clip we saw the other day of the ball girl making the amazing catch was a Gatorade ad but actually wasn't because Gatorade never approved it.
WSJ requires a subscription but here's the relevant part:
The sleeker version of the ad (which was to carry the tagline: "Never Underestimate the Power of Superior Hydration") was supposed to air on TV. But the spot and online video were never green-lighted because the Chicago agency was dropped from PepsiCo's Gatorade and Tropicana ad account, according to Dennis Ryan, chief creative officer at Element 79. He says he doesn't know how the spot made its way to the Web -- nor does Gatorade.
I don't have any insight in this specific release but I think if I spent a lot of time, money and effort to make what I thought was a clever ad, I'd want to share it with the public too. And of course the irony is that if either company had set out to launch a "viral campaign" you know it never would have done as well as these.
By the way, a funny perspective on that ball girl clip is
what it looked like to the minor league team that served as the setting.
In spite of sitting just a few rows from the folks who produce the Today show Web site I don't have a whole lot of insight into the show's planning. That said, I think I can predict
a certain couple's appearance on the show in 3, 2, ...
Speaking of what happens when you give talented and musical people control of a microphone in front of a group of people,
this graduation speech is making the rounds and is good for a laugh.
And if you're a fan of musicals,
Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog is something to keep an eye out for. “It’s the story of a low-rent super-villain, the hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat he’s too shy to talk to.” Looks like the whole thing starts in mid-July.
I don't follow sports very closely but wow, I had no idea
the NBA draft was such a
spirited event.
Every once in a while someone makes a jerk of themselves on a recordable medium and is transported to Internet stardom. Such appears to be the case for
Dimitri who it turns out has quite a
back-story. (Oh! And a
Web site.) He's already made number 1 on Gawker's list of
Scariest Seducers.
Y'know, at a certain point you can see so many trailers for a movie that it starts to ruin the movie itself.
Batman is not such a movie. I could watch 20 of these and it wouldn't put a dent in my eagerness for its theatrical arrival.
Speaking of Batman movies, I also enjoyed
this little mash-up of fighting Bat-men.
For all the coverage of the
life-friendliness of Martian soil, the discussions about terraforming the place have been cursory at best. If you're telling me the dirt can sustain plants and it contains water, aren't we just a few short steps away from
planting the place full of asparagus and coming back ten years later to a nice breathable atmosphere? Obviously I don't know anything about terraforming,
so I clicked this. Speaking of fantasizing about Mars, I also read this one about
the unspoken hope of discovering signs of life there.
One more on Mars, when someone writes the history of significant Tweets on Twitter, the
MarsPhoenix discovery of water ice on Mars will probably make the list.
The best thing about this
donut bacon burger is that bottle of mustard in the background. Mustard on a donut bacon burger? Bleh!
Thing I'm foolishly hopeful about but will soon be realistically disillusioned and go back to spending my morning commute playing solitaire on my phone: the free Mandarin Chinese lessons on
Chinesepod.com. (I already gave up on
One Minute Polish.)
Speaking of giving up,
One Post Wonder is a blog that features blogs that have only managed a single post. Blogging seemed like such a great idea until they actually tried it.
Here's
the original blog entry from that guy who's started a movement to
take back the name Hussein.
10 cool and free bar tricks - Not all ten are cool but they are all free and a few are worth knowing if you have kids.
