It's time to get ready for the Super Bowl... Ads! Adland has freely available archives of 37 years of commercials from the big game, over 2,800 ads - from 1969, when
Winston,
Salem,
Camel,
Tareyton,
Pall Mall, and
Silva Thins smoked up the Bowl *
cough-cough*, all the way to 2008, when the best-liked ad was
Bud's dalmation inspiration (how do we know it was best liked?
SCIENCE!). Some highlights of the collection include:
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Jan 29, 2009 -
40 comments
From about 1875 to the 1940s,
cigarette cards spurred tobacco sales. Sets offer a glimpse into the popculture of the times, spanning
newsmakers,
cinema celebrities, and
sports stars; cute illustrated subjects, like
"frisky" and
children with rosy cheeks; handy info like
air raid precautions,
first aid, and
amusing tricks; and neat stuff like
famous escapes,
exotic races, and
figures of speech. Browse
more fun sets of vintage images.
posted by madamjujujive
on Dec 11, 2007 -
21 comments
The city of Sao Paulo
passed an ordinance last year banning outdoor advertising; photographer Tony de Marco has been
documenting the skeletal remains of the advertising infrastructure throughout the city; the impact looks like the aftermath of a new type of atomic weapon that targets marketing but leaves buildings & people unscathed.
posted by jonson
on Jun 19, 2007 -
84 comments
How Advertising Spoiled Me is a blog showcasing mainly magazine & billboard advertising from around the world, with pieces selected based on their inventiveness/cleverness.
If you're offended by advertising, you might want to skip this post.
posted by jonson
on Oct 20, 2006 -
34 comments
The Century Of The Self. It's a documentary, and the four parts are available at archive.org [
2][
3][
4] -- with a higher quality
bittorrent option [via
mindhacks]. The program is about the use of psychoanalytical techniques to manipulate and control the "bewildered herd", "engineering consent" in a world fraught with "irrational impulses" [more inside].
posted by gsb
on Feb 26, 2006 -
16 comments
Using fine-art images to promote movies: "But it was Mr. Kessell's "
Florilegium" (or "collection of floral images") daguerrotypes that caught Mr. Palen's eye: each image is close-up of a surgical instrument, so poetically rendered that it seems almost organic. Some of the macabre implements resemble
exotic flowers. One, from a distance, could be mistaken for the
horns of a gazelle. "We were sort of blocked, and all the pieces fell into place once I saw that image," Mr. Palen explained. A deal was made to use that daguerreotype [to promote the upcoming Tarantino-produced film "
Hostel"], which actually shows a surgical clamp. [
The poster] now appears in theaters and on widespread promotions. [Side:
direct WMV link of Tarantino spazing out while introducing "Hostel's" director Eli Roth at a festival.]
posted by JPowers
on Jan 4, 2006 -
12 comments
Won't somebody please think of the children? Oh, don't fool yourselves! Americans under the age of 12 now spend or influence the spending of $565 billion a year - up from $2.2 billion in 1968, and kid-spending has roughly doubled every ten years for the past three decades, tripling in the 1990s. Which means
someone is
always thinking of the children. The
American Association of Pediatrics (pdf) cites this bludgeoning of kidvertising as creating in children "a fever for shopping and spending, swollen expectations about material needs, decreasing immunity to the assaults of advertisers, self-concepts defined by brands of clothing, and a rash of of debt by the time they leave college". [more...]
posted by taz
on Sep 19, 2005 -
55 comments
Play the logo game. If you have any doubts left about the ubiquity of advertising, this quiz should remove them. How many can you get, and in what categories?
posted by fixedgear
on Apr 2, 2005 -
28 comments
Remember this? It has won recognition as "Best Interactive Viral" in the
Viral Awards. With all the viral
1 and stealth
2 marketing campaigns, comment spam, astroturfing
3, and other tools that marketeers are using to infiltrate the Brave New(ish) World of blog, we sometimes forget that we also have the power to do good, so "
you know, like, reclaim the streets, or re-frame the conversation, or some damn thing". Words of wisdom from our not-so-subservient chicken.
[and, a bit more...]
posted by taz
on Mar 26, 2005 -
20 comments