Saturday, February 27, 2010

hung



HBO’s show Hung needed a little bit of attention to promote the show. The series features a forty something father, with no money and decides to turn to prostitution to get the funds to win his kids back. An Auckland based marketing company, Colenso BBDO, was sought out by HBO to promote the show and to generate publicity. BBDO is currently one of New Zealand’s highest ranked ad agencies and was ranked top ad agency of the decade by Campaign Brief What they erected, for lack of a better word, is definitely creating publicity. Located on Victoria Street in central Auckland, an enormous crotch with the show’s title plastered on it rests. Despite one’s personal opinion of the show, it is impossible to deny the eye catching success of the billboard. Sex sells, and when the series’ title is ‘Hung’ might as well get right to the point. Is this overtly sexual add too much to be on a billboard? Or is it no different then any beer campaign with scandalous women in revealing clothes, or perfume advertisements alluding to sex and rape. Sex selling advertisements however are usually due to a an attractive person having little or nothing to do with the product being advertised. However, in this case, the subject matter is exactly what is being displayed, clear and concise. So is it fair to say that the advertising company is using sex to sell, because it really is just selling the product it self.Image: coolhunter.com

Friday, February 12, 2010

mobile uploads.

There has been a recent surge in social photography in the amount of ‘Mobile Uploads’ on social networking sites. Individuals use their personal mobile handhelds to capture ‘of the moment snapshots’ to immediately upload to their social network of choice. This instantaneous documentation leaves fantastic, raw, unedited footage for your network to view and comment. No touch ups, no glamorized vignette embosses, just the facts. This makes companies skeptical because of how instantaneous (bad) news can travel. I personally especially like this on Facebook, the real deal, no photo shopped images. Individuals tend to take this personal documentation and live through as a sort of “day in the life”, adding pictures of everything from the weather to what they ate to who they saw that day. All captioned with a personalized comment.
The recent popularity has been linked to the technological developments in handheld
mobile devices such as the iPhone 3G. News stations encourage viewers to submit their own 'newsworthy' uploads. In Toronto all the latest buzz has been about a mobile upload of a TTC driver asleep on the job. There is constantly battling between Toronto Transit employees regarding fare and wages, and this mobile upload fueled the debate.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

right here. right now.

This video is the most powerful combination of facts and delivery I have seen to date. The author of Socialnomics, Erik Qualman produces the video about the growing use of social networking. The video is mostly shared on social networking sites such as YouTube, which makes it very ironic. My favorite part of information is that we live in a generation of consumers that do not tend to listen to advertisements. Trust is within the testimonials of real people who have experienced the advertised services and products. It makes complete sense; consumers in this social media savvy world are very smart. We watch commercials and then ask “Yah, but does that really work?”… followed by a bit of online research before we make a purchase.

photo credit: galessa's plastics, flickr.