A recent TV ad for Cheerios depits a heartwarming family vignette: An adorable tyke asks her mother if the cereal is good for the heart, her mother says yes, and the dad wakes up from his nap to find a pile of Cheerios on his chest.
But the fact that the mother is white, the dad is black and the child mixed-race has
touched off a firestorm of criticism that one media critic described as "a progressive-looking commercial collides with the ugliness of the Internet."
Parent company General Mills says it is has no plans to stop airing the spot or to take it down from its YouTube channel.
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posted by Gelatin
on Jun 7, 2013 -
219 comments
Only for Children: [via: DIY Photography]" The ANAR Foundation is a Spanish organization which helps kids in risk. They Operate a unique phone number - 116 111 - where minors at risk can get aid and consultation.
Anar did a campaign advertizing the number, but were facing a problem where they did not want potential aggressors to see that a kid was even looking at the ad.
The solution was using
Lenticular printing [wiki] on street signs."
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posted by Fizz
on May 6, 2013 -
13 comments
Back in the day, Ken Segall
helped create Apple's Think Different campaign and
helped name the iMac. More recently he worked on JC Penney's
Yours Truly, commercial, before JCP ousted Ron Johnson as its CEO. He writes a sharp, entertaining blog called
Ken Segall's Observatory, where he offers opinions on advertising and design geekery.
His take on Ron Johnson's failure is interesting, as is
this post on what it takes for an advertisement to stand out in a crowd. He calls attention to surprisingly decent ads from
Microsoft and
Dell, critiques terrible ads (from
Microsoft and
JC Penney and even
Apple, and comments on
whether skeuomorphism has its advantages. He's also
fond of
discussing product names. Give this one a skip if advertising gives you hives, but for those of you who're interested in things like this Segall's blog is especially choice stuff.
posted by Rory Marinich
on May 3, 2013 -
26 comments
Dikembe Mutombo's 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World is the tale of the struggle of Dikembe Mutombo to prevent the end of the world due to the Mayan calendar running out of time. You have to stop people from dancing Gangnam style and persuade Ohio to vote; you have to destroy cheap Black Friday toys; you have to destroy the Powerball winning numbers to prevent a literal Hollywood fatcat from producing another Vampire romance. And the game is an ad for a product that appears once in the loading screen.
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posted by ersatz
on Dec 4, 2012 -
36 comments
So was it worth it?
Well of course not. It turns out it was just advertising. There was no higher calling. No ultimate prize. Just a lot of faded, yellowing newsprint, and old video cassettes in an obsolete format I can’t even play any more even if I was interested. Oh yes, and a lot of framed certificates and little gold statuettes. A shit-load of empty Prozac boxes, wine bottles, a lot of grey hair and a tumor of indeterminate dimensions.
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posted by 2bucksplus
on Nov 9, 2012 -
46 comments
The legendary Swiss graphic designer
Donald Brun (1909-1999) was a master of the Object Poster (where the image is paramount in selling the product), an artform that thrived in the early and mid-20th Century before cheaper paper and printing and distribution methods made it virtually obsolete. Brun's work is marked by humor and whimsy, bright bold colors and shapes, a wide variety of graphic styles (although it is often compared to classic children's book illustrations), and animals.
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posted by julen
on Nov 2, 2012 -
7 comments
