Billboards that display a personal message for you...that was sort of cute, and voluntary. Billboards with speakers that focused sound on a spot...voices in your head are not so cute, and not voluntary. Billboards that photograph you, and him, and her, process the imagery, perform a statistical analysis, and return a targeted ad based on your demographic profile...maybe plan a different route home....
posted on May 31, 2008 - View this thread

Blacklisted! The bankruptcy of the liberal Air America Radio Network is old news. What's new is a leaked ABC memo to affiliates (.pdf original) listing 90 corporations and major advertisers that stipulated that their ads not be aired during the broadcast of Air America content. Is there any hope that radio or television news in the United States can report stories that do not uniformly support the goals and viewpoints of the S&P 500? There are of course, alternative models. Is it time for a PBS Newschanel?
posted on Nov 4, 2006 - View this thread

Remember that really shocking circa-2003 PUMA advertisement that no one would take responsibility for? Its mystery has finally unraveled.
posted on Feb 10, 2006 - View this thread

Alternate Reality Advertising? I noticed this peculiar advert on this morning's commute. Seems it's part of an immersive ad campaign. Since when do gamers have enough money to buy luxury rides?
posted on Apr 21, 2005 - View this thread

Breaking News: Pop-up ads suck. Wired has a little op-ed piece about the netizens' extreme dislike of pop-up and pop-under ads. Using such choice quotes as, "A study conducted last year by Dynamic Logic found that almost 80 percent of those surveyed had a 'very negative' opinion of pop-up ads," the author goes on to chastise mainstream sites that still make use of them. Of course, his advice would be taken a great deal more seriously if his column didn't sport a massive pop-up ad for Blockbuster Online.
posted on Mar 3, 2005 - View this thread

The Indiana Supreme Court scolded personal injury law firm Keller & Keller for their television ads that "create an impression that the claims they handle are settled, not because of the specific facts or legal circumstances of the claims, but merely by the mention of the name of the respondents' firm to insurance companies." Interestingly a search for this turned up Network Affiliates Incorporated, a company that sells advertising to lawyers. Television ads are evidently not the best way to find competent legal council and are considered to be unethical in parts of Australia. (Just to provide four different points of view on this issue.)
posted on Aug 9, 2003 - View this thread

Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without Borders), an international organization advocating free press worldwide, has seen great success with a recent ad campaign featuring photos of famous French journalists murdered in a variety of methods (NSFW). It's been so successful they're now contemplating taking the campaign global, including the U.S.
posted on Apr 1, 2003 - View this thread

Sony writes 'article' for Salon. In an effort to find new revenue streams, Salon has published an ad/article written by Sony Corp. National Geographic and Parent Soup have also published ad/articles, though the New York Times said no. While the articles do not directly reference Sony products, the feature people who do fascinating things with technology... technology which, it just so happens, is advertised conveniently right next to the technology featuring passage. Is this sort of thing ever ethical? If so, what sort of disclosures are necessary. Clearly the ad/articles are intended to appear to be regular content.
posted on Dec 2, 2002 - View this thread

Popup ads on your TV So, the media moguls have decided that they're tired of you ignoring their advertising...and thus, they will now insert popup ads into the live feeds. And you thought product placement was annoying. From Slashdot
posted on Jul 16, 2002 - View this thread

"Happiness has not gone up even, as a society, we've gotten richer and have more access to more things. Advertising is the illusion that stops us from recognizing that." Sut Jhally is a communications professor at the University of Massachusetts, founder of the Media Education Foundation, and an excellent teacher of media literacy.
posted on Feb 23, 2002 - View this thread

MSNBC taking advantage of high site traffic; FORCING ads. Personally I'm speechless. I think every other major site out there (no doubt the crippled Yahoo also) is doing this oor will be in the upcoming hours.
posted on Sep 13, 2001 - View this thread

Serendipitous convergence of current events and "underground" marketing efforts — coincidence? Or maybe this is a better question: which will still be around in six months, the worm or the sickeningly-sweet, caffeine-laden beverage?
posted on Aug 3, 2001 - View this thread

'Is media bias real?', part two: Left-leaning media criticism folks FAIR have produced a report detailing some examples of of publishers, advertisers, and government officials killing stories they don't like and placing stories they do. What about the Chinese Wall between the business of news and the actual newsgathering? To quote a CBS news producer on the distinction between entertainment and news, "That line was over a long, long time ago....That line is long gone."
posted on Feb 25, 2001 - View this thread

USA Network complies with Tylenol's request to halt production of a drug-tampering movie.
posted on Dec 6, 2000 - View this thread

Is this annoying to anyone else? I usually get most of my news from either ABCnews.com or CNN.com, then this morning I noticed that every time I load ABCnews, an annoying ad banner pops up for AT&T over the browser toolbar. I know that big sites have used popups before (usually as announcements or something else), but an ad popup on such a major site seems like an even further blurring of that line between media and advertising. I guess I'm switching news sources.
posted on Nov 28, 2000 - View this thread

I approached this review expecting it to be of the "major media providers are the problem, not the solution" sort, but discovered something somewhat different: "It’s not that the medium of the modern political campaign–television advertising–failed to do justice to men of substance, but that men of substance failed to adapt to television advertising..."
posted on Aug 7, 2000 - View this thread

Advertising on Your GPS Reciever It looks like advertisers are already dreaming up new uses for the higher quality GPS signals.

"You're walking down the block, your phone goes off as you pass every store and tells you that there's a 50-percent-off sale." Someone remind me why it was a good idea to deregulate the GPS?
posted on May 27, 2000 - View this thread