This gut-wrenching PSA used a children’s song to depict the ravages of ALS. [Read more]

This PSA conveyed the experience of an asthma attack on a shockingly visceral level. [Read more]

Another disturbing PSA: this one from Amnesty, depicting the waterboarding torture technique. [Read more]

These anatomically jarring PSAs from Singapore made the case that verbal abuse can be just as horrific as physical abuse. [Read more]

What can you say to your chicken dinner when he asks you to hook him up with a girl just as you’re marinating him? [Read more]

After dreaming of hash browns filled with cheese, the hero of this BK spot woke up with a nasty case of “morning tongue.” [Read more]

This gross print campaign made you wonder if you’re actually feeding your dog—or the worms inside him. [Read more]

The rotting undead, doomed by high cholesterol, livened up this Colombian health campaign. [Read more]

Ross taught many a lonely Web surfer how to kiss, with gusto, on his very own Converse-branded Web site. [Read more]

A trip to the tanning booth did not end well for this young woman. [Read more]

When you die, said this non-profit, donate your organs to your fellow humans, not to insect larvae. [Read more]

A wayward spicy tongue ruined a young couple’s date in this Doritos commercial. [Read more]

This ultra-creepy German ad depicted the lingering trauma of sexual abuse. [Read more]

What’s that? You want to see a nude 86-year-old woman criticizing Holland’s homecare policy? OK, you got it. [Read more]

The troubled singer stripped down for this British magazine’s breast-cancer awareness campaign. [Read more]

This promo encouraged viewers to attend the musical, but maybe not linger beneath the marquee. [Read more]

A woman figured that licking everything in sight was the best way to check a room’s cleanliness in this spot for the motel chain. [Read more]

The very insane Gary Busey offered manic, nonsensical business tips in this collection of 40 spots. [Read more]

This Web site urged you to upload photos of yourself and a special friend, so all three of you could sleaze out in the hot tub. [Read more]

Hunting for berries to make Sweden’s Jokk juices is extremely dangerous, but worth it. [Read more]

The Japanese company turned to a creepy, fake-smiling fembot to promote its sunscreen. [Read more]

New Zealand tackled the issue of drivers falling asleep at the wheel with all the subtlety of a splattered skull. [Read more]

The automaker Lotus decried the loss of individuality with ads (and street marketing) starring faceless people. [Read more]

This nightmarish Swedish commercial for McDonald’s coffee might keep you up at night. [Read more]

Misplaced mouths cried for help in this campaign for a Novartis throat lozenge. [Read more]

The too-often-marginalized man-horse hybrid got a chance to shine in this Old Spice spot. [Read more]

A human piñata recovered from a beating at the hands of a Skittles-seeking colleague in this off-kilter spot. [Read more]

This ad for an Israeli bookstore ridiculed non-readers for their shrunken, intellectually impoverished heads. [Read more]

This spot characterized the employees at rival airlines as two-faced freak-show monsters. [Read more]

The Texas shop’s intra-agency YouTube challenge featured a shocking admission from Masters of the Universe character Jitsu. [Read more]

Women with migraines literally lose their heads in this OTC pharmaceutical spot. [Read more]

This unnerving viral for a Dutch travel agency showed an airplane crash-landing into the Mediterranean. [Read more]

9 out of 10 ads feature westerners.

I just spent the weekend in Singapore. It took 31 hours to get there. Thankfully I’m taking a pit stop in London on the way back to Miami.

I can honestly say that I love Singapore and could imagine myself living there. It has all the western amenities that I’m familiar with but with a heavy dose Asia. The reason I say a heavy dose - is because the western influence was really surprising to me.

Everything is in English (with Mandarin subtitles in some places) - even the road signs have the same design style as US road signs (green with a white ring - same font). The first day I got there I walked out the front door of my hotel and I didn’t stop walking for about 3 hours. I walked all the way to Orchard Road: the primary shopping district for the city-state. Along the way I made a point of walking down all kinds of side alleys with rows of asian food stalls. The authentic local food smelled great, looked great (aside from one shop advertising “Pig Organ Soup” as the name of the place), and made me feel for a moment that I was truly abroad.

Once I got back onto any main thoroughfare things started to change. I started to notice a patern in their advertising. All the ads that featured photography typically featured westerners. This really perplexed me.

I considered all kinds of alternatives. Is it because the culture here holds western culture in high regard? Was it just because they love western celebrities or was it that brands just were not investing in local celebrities for budget reasons?

I ended up asking as many locals as I could. They varied in descent from Chinese, Malay, to Indonesian. I was surprised by their response. Some claimed they just thought westerners “looked better”, other said they loved the western celebrities, but when I pressed the issue further they agreed that they would like to see more of their own celebrities, athletes, and actors in these ads.

I think there is a missed opportunity there for marketers. Why is no one there catching on to this? Am I missing something - if anyone has any insight please post a comment.

-Freddie

Place your hand on a copy of Ad Age and repeat after me: “I am a responsible marketer. I swear I will not contribute to the death of Twitter.” OK, now that we’ve got that out of the way let’s look at five ways that we can end the Paradox of Interactive Marketing.

1. Read, Read, and Read
I consider myself to be an avid trend watcher but you don’t have to be overly fanatical about this process to be successful. There are plenty of people like me who are sharing their insights every day on their blogs or potentially within your agency. Check out alltop.com to see a brilliant aggregation of some of the web’s best blogs on specific subjects like marketing, social media or trend watching. These people have been doing all the hard work for you while you’ve been wasting time at night sleeping.

Read more here…

One of things I’m obviously passionate about is spotting new trends and potential new marketing opportunities. As marketers we’re all charged with looking for new opportunities to get our client’s brands out there, but to be successful we must be very conscious of timing. When is it too early to recommend a new medium or platform? When is it too late and you’re only adding to the clutter?

This problem is more acute in the digital and mobile space, thanks to the rapid evolution of technology. Let’s take a look at some of the more recent opportunities that I think have passed and use it as a platform to understand how to find the next big thing before it becomes just that — the next big thing.

Continue reading here…

In the words of Sir Francis Drake (and repeated countless times in pop culture since) “knowledge is power”.

As a person that is painfully enthusiastic about the marketing world, I find it very easy to get caught up in some of the more exciting and innovative work that we’re able to produce across so many mediums. It’s very easy to forget the importance of intelligently addressing your message to make sure the right people receive potentially focused and targeted messages.

All of this messaging can only be accomplished through accurate in depth details on people, businesses, places, and things. Building in depth catalogs on places and things is somewhat easy. Building intelligence on businesses is more challenging as they tend to be private by nature and trying to build in depth details of consumers has become easier and more complex at the same time.

The whole idea for this post started yesterday while chatting with a client. We had their site hooked up to Google Analytics and after giving them a tour they exclaimed, “I can’t believe this is free!”.  I explained that Google, in exchange for giving away analytics software, had received at least two valuable things in return. First, they had a foot in the door to sell you Adwords. Second, they were now collecting deep data on the details of people that visited your site, how the found your site, and how they used your site. Since Google Analytics maintains a dominance in market share of web analytics providers (in terms of the number of sites monitored) they are now collecting shocking amounts of data about the who, when, what, where and why of how people use the Internet.

At the bottom of this post you’ll notice the “ShareIt” component that has become so common all over the web. This common web component now openly posted on hundreds of millions of web pages not only tracks website traffic data, but also stores information on the content that people are most commonly sharing. This brilliant innovation starts to get into a part of analytics that is frequently overlooked: the how and why aspect of people’s online behavior.
I don’t think I need to point out that the social networks are starting to build mind blowing repositories of personal information about people. Not only are they deep into our personal details and individual tastes, but they are also developing an understanding of the friends we keep and how social groups are formed. They might not be selling this information to third parties but they are, without question, using this data to intelligently address the ads within their own network. I don’t think any social network VC firm anticipated their future users would ignore a good portion of their ads (thus devaluing their ad costs to some of the lowest in the ad game), but theoretically they have the ability to bring the most target (and valuable) ads to the table. I foresee the social networks starting to operate in the “gray” area of their privacy policies. They might start to partner with other media outlets using their data to power more intelligent ad serving but continue to keep the data secure on their own systems in accordance with their privacy policies.

Take a company like Google that owns Google Analytics, owns a social network like Orkut, and could easily develop or buy a company such as ShareIt. Now imagine the amount of data that they’re analyzing about the way we live and work.

Ultimately, all of this rich data will power the next generation of the internet, the semantic web, as it evolves over the next ten years. If the current web is the glue that weaves our modern economy together, then dominating the semantic web will be the deciding factor in establishing the most powerful companies of the next decade.

I repeat “knowledge is power”.

Akamai has access to anonymous traffic from all over the world on all type of sites, and has access to track user paths and determine behavior. For example, they can know that a user has been looking at specific cars across multiple sites and suggest a targeted ad on a totally different publisher. The best of all, is that Akamai has access to this data without requiring any integration from publishers, no pixel images, no scripts, just raw data from their content networks.

In addition to their own data, Akamai buys Acerno, who’s specialty is its analytics software which uses anonymous consumer data to find out who’s buying what, who will most probably be interested in a certain product and - most importantly - why.

Combining user traffic, clickthroughs, views, and e-commerce analytical data, Akamai can build a model to serve extremely targeted ads and provide such service to publishers, ad networks and advertisers, and charge a share of the increased revenue or return that the service helps deliver.

Akamai made a point of stating how concerned the company is with protecting consumer privacy, stating that “all of Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions, as well as Acerno’s services, rely solely on anonymous and non-personally identifiable end user information”

The day started with a keynote from Jonathan Klein, President of CNN/US. John said that CNN embraces innovation, new technologies, new techniques, new trends, and urges all their employees to try new ideas. They have been using user generated content to get faster stories, they have a political blog aggregator that became the largest in the country, they have a program where an expert follows twitter feeds and answers questions and concerns online, in real time, they have a talk show where the host podcasts during commercials, linking the tv air experience with online / web experience. Another twitter fact is that CNN took 4 minutes to cover a recent earthquake in LA, whereas someone tweet it in 30 seconds. They also started providing more data for the next gen during the elections, especially seen during the debates; under the assumption that the younger gen can multitask and consume multiple feeds of information concurrently, they added the analysts’ opinions and scores during debates on side panels, as well as real time undecided voters conversions. Another link between air and web is John King’s touch screen; after the success of the John playing with the screen, they uploaded an interactive version to their site allowing anyone to play with it, just like on tv.

Overall, really interesting to see how traditional channels such as CNN is realizing and acknowledging the need to move towards digital channels, add social elements, and leverage user generated content.

Next, Geoff Ramsey, CEO for eMarketer, took over for 15 minutes to give us his seven strategies for surviving the downturn. In summary, the entire strategy is move media dollars from traditional to digital; it’s cheaper, more measurable, and provides better returns. 70% of marketers said they will cut budget for traditional ads, 30% said they already did … at the same time digital ad spend grew 17% in 2008, and it’s expected to continue to grow with double digits in 2009 … even if it only grows 9 or 10%, it’s better than negative numbers such as traditional media spend.

There were a few boring panels that I won’t mention, so I started talking to exhibitors and companies I found interesting. I will post more details later, but great new products by VeriSign, Akamai, Izea, and IdeaLaunch.

I tried to watch the TV 3.0 panel, but I really couldn’t stand it. What is up with the 3.0 buzzwords? Does anyone even know what 3.0 represents? I bet the panelists can’t even answer what would be the difference between TV 2.0 and 3.0 …. if we can even say 3.0 is here. For our readers, TV 2.0 includes P2PTV, HDTV, IPTV, Streaming Video, and mobile TV.

So what is TV 3.0?

“The first I heard of it (TV 3.0) was when I was invited to this panel”, responded Michael Steib, the director of TV Ads at Google (I appreciate his acknowledgement of the made-up buzz word). In TV 3.0 there is a proliferation of channels, people are watching TV in different places (online, DVR, etc) and at different times. Connecting advertisers and audiences as people start to watch TV in new and different times and places.

Here is the billion dollar question: will TV networks be able to make up the ad revenue lost from the shift away from traditional TV? People will watch 400 billion hours on their TV and watch 10 million hours of online video – online is still a small segment. For networks to stay afloat, they need to either increase the # of ads 4x versus what they are showing now, or increase the effectiveness. The solution? Technology: it can be used in 2 ways to help solve this problem. The first is better targeting, and the second is by using technologies to improve the effectiveness of the interaction or ad that is served (ie. rich media).

Stay tuned for Ad:Tech NY 2008 - Day 2.

Facebook embraced what I believe builds the most successful new model businesses successes on the web. They created an open platform and let user innovation drive the direction of their business. Unfortunately, like most open platforms, it got out of control. People abused their rights in an effort to push their application to the top. The constant stream of invitations to join applications became one of the number one gripes of Facebook users as they felt they were being aggressively “spammed” (even if it was by their friends).

Facebook has been re-evaluating it’s infrastructure quite a bit these days. A new Facebook layout, for better or worse, has been released. Additionally they have been making some heavy changes to how applications were handled within the system beyond the presentation layer.

The obvious change that you would have noticed includes shifting all of your applications mini-views to a tab on your profile called “Boxes”. Really? They couldn’t name it “applications” or “apps” so it was even mildly intuitive. It’s bad enough that they’re now treating the application concept they popularized as the ugly step-child, but this is just adding insult to injury. I wish they made the tab name “don’t click here” - it would probably get more people to check it out.

Beyond the user interface changes the whole process of migrating to the new system was painful for both our team and our clients. Applications stopped functioning properly and this lead to poor experiences for our application’s users. The latest news is that once a user has opted to install an application they will have to go to a separate page to enable the mini-view for the “boxes” page and also to allow for mini-feeds that include pictures. This will effectively inhibit the experience on all new installations on existing and new applications.

This could have all been avoided with better communication and coordination.

Facebook as a company embraced working with the general public (which included bed room developers and global digital agencies like Sapient) and for this I applauded them. We all happilly contributed our time, experience, and money to create an enriched experience for Facebook’s users. Unfortunately Facebook runs their development process with complete disregard for it’s users. This was obvious in the way they handled Beacon and it became obvious again in the way they’re now handing applications.

Now Facebook application developers are having to re-design their applications to make them successful within the new rules. I’m not convinced that older applications are going to re-engineer very well, but there is almost certainly an opportunity to design a clever application that plays within the rules and focus on the incredibly mini-feed centric new layout.

Unfortunately I think this has really left a bitter taste in the application development community. As we watch diminishing returns on our applications will we be motivated to continue to develop them? I’m not concerned that irreparable damage has been done to the application platform in terms of it’s perception by users and developers. If nothing else it’s going to take sometime for it to recover and people to find a balance that allows it to return to it’s exciting beginnings.

There were so many smarter ways to handle this. Couldn’t they have taken the “like / don’t like” functionality on the mini-feed and aggregated the sentiment globally and used this information to push down all overly intrusive and annoying applications?

The first ad is titled the “V Word”. The spot introduces PC with a big red button buzzer, trying to censor Mac every time he says the name Vista. “V Word” mocks Microsoft’s decision not to market the name Vista so much in its new campaign, but use the more generic term “Windows.”

The second ad in the set is called the “Bean Counter” and presents PC sitting at an accountant’s desk. Here he divides a cash budget for Vista into two piles. One huge pile is for advertising Vista and a tiny pile is for “fixing” Vista. Mac is intrigued as to why PC is spending so little on “actually fixing” Vista. PC pauses to think and then decides that that there isn’t any point in actually spending money on fixing Vista and finally throws all the cash in the advertising pile.

Now, though I found it funny, the reality is that advertising’s purpose is to change the perception of a product and Microsoft is doing a good job. In terms of fixing Vista, there’re a few points I’d like to make.

1. Microsoft did hear the complaints and made tons of changes and fixes with service pack 1. Other than being heavy and require more robust systems (Macs do too), I haven’t heard any complaints about Vista lately.

2. Most haters haven’t even tried Vista. People heard rumors of Vista being so bad that they haven’t given it a chance. The OS works perfectly fine; I’ve been using it since day 1, and granted, I ran into some issues at the beginning, but with the service pack release and as drivers caught up, I haven’t ran into any issues.

3. Most development budget will not go to Vista, but to Windows 7. Microsoft listens to all complaints and requests, plus invests into new technology, trends, and development, but will heavily invest into a new OS that could come out making a good impression from the start… It makes sense to damage control Vista through straight up advertising.

I previously blogged about Windows 7 buzz and how it was too early, prior to any clean-up work and damage control, so I think Microsoft is doing the right thing with dropping the Vista perception, not advertise it, give Windows back some credibility, and then introduce Windows 7 as the new solution.