“M.J. was introduced as the greatest player ever and he’s still standing there trying to settle scores,” one Hall of Famer said privately

In the lead-up to and in the wake of Michael Jordan’s big Hall of Fame induction weekend and the (disturbingly petty) speech he gave during it, Nike has been pushing these “Leroy Smith” viral videos. Question is, Who is Leroy Smith?
Check it, Savvyites:

Harvest Leroy Smith is the reason Michael Jordan had to play JV throughout his sophomore year of high school. He’s the man who beat out MJ for the last spot on the Laney High School varsity basketball team, and now he’s an internet meme with Charlie Murphy’s face.

Jordan says getting cut from the varsity high school team was a major turning point in his life, so much so, he even invited the man who got his spot, Leroy Smith, to his Hall of Fame induction. Looks like MJ’s obsessed.

During his speech (which, like I said, is doused with petty whines and weird ramblings) he makes Smith out to be just some goon who played high school ball and only made the team over MJ because some cosmic architect was trying to shape his competitive nature. What he doesn’t mention is that Smith was at least good enough to play ball at UNC-Charlotte, and then overseas in various minor leagues before he decided to quit and settle in with a sales job, get married, and have kids like a regular human being.

However, when Jordan mentioned his version of the Smith story to Nike executives, they created an ad campaign based around a washed up “man who claims to have motivated Michael Jordan”. Granted, it really screws with the image of the real Leroy Smith, but it is effing hilarious. Strangely, I don’t see any plugs for Nike anywhere in these videos. Maybe this is part of Nike’s anti-advertising thang. Whatever it is, they’re really pushing it, there are 15+ videos on the Youtube.com account and there’s even an NBA.com interview with the fake Smith.

So check it, here’s the complete collection:

Leroy Smiths Hall of Fame Petition

News Stories: Leroy Smith Exposed (1/4)

News Stories: In the Recording Studio with Leroy Smith (2/4)

News Stories: Motivation in Action with Leroy Smith (3/4)

News Stories: Behind the Scenes with Leroy Smith (4/4)

Leroy Smith’s ‘My Gift to the Game’ music video

Leroy Smith message for Peter R Casey

Leroy Smith’s 2-on-2 Hall of Fame Challenge

GetYourBasketballOn: Shuffle & Sweat

GetYourBasketballOn: The Mind Maze

GetYourBasketballOn: The Blind Mantis

GetYourBasketballOn: Giant Target Drill

Dragon Attack Drill

ABC Focus Drill

Welcome to Leroy Smith’s Website

via GetYourBasketballOn.com

I love speculation about the future, mostly because it usually goes so wrong. For instance, in 1985, Ebony Magazine published an article called “Portraits of the Stars: What They May Look Like in the Year 2000“. In it, they commissioned an artist named Nathan Wright to depict what he thinks “today’s” (1985’s) artists would look like in the year 2000. The best part… Michael Jackson. Read on for the pictures:

Check out the entire page from the Ebony article:

Michael Jackson in the year 2000, via the lens of 1985

Nathan Wright said of MJ: “At 40, he will have aged gracefully and will have a handsome, more mature look.” So basically, he’ll look like Lando Calrissian…

In The Year 2000…

The irony is, none of the words Nathan Wright used to describe Michael Jackson are appropriate for his actual year 2000 self.
See:

“…graceful… handsome… mature…?”

Let this be a lesson for you amateur futurists out there. Clouded, the future is; Impossible to see.

TAG Heuer recently ran an ad campaign for their Monaco brand watch. It was a contest to guess the winner of the above “Duel” between two important figures in the history of the Monaco series, Steve McQueen and Lewis Hamilton. The contest officially closed on June 10th, 2009. Apparently, it’s been one of TAG Heuer’s most popular online contests ever.

According to TAG Heuer, Lewis Hamilton won the Duel… but I don’t think anyone wins with this ad. They sliced up the original footage from the Steve McQueen 1971 film Le Mans to shoehorn his image into the ad, and then used a poor quality voice actor that sounds nothing like him to dub over his lines. Ironically though, McQueen’s shoehorn/voiced over performance is better than Lewis Hamilton’s actual performance. And McQueen’s been dead for almost 30 years. Overall, the ad is fairly lame on that level. Still, it has racing footage, so I can’t call it all bad. Check out the full version:

TAG Heuer’s reasoning for using Steve McQueen in this ad is because the company is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2009, and McQueen helped bring the Monaco brand into prominence by wearing one on his wrist in the film Le Mans.

Complete Ad

The newest of Intel’s “Sponsors of Tomorrow” ad campaign, “Intel Star”, captures the concept of geek chic well. USB co-inventor Ajay Bhatt hits the cafeteria and is welcomed as the rock star that he is. This ad should hit Intel’s target audience directly in their giant brains.

Rock that cafe with your bad self, Ajay, rock it.

Check out the first in the “Sponsors of Tomorrow” campaign:

Star Wars Weekends is basically the Star Wars fanboy activity of the year. It’s an annual event held at Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park with tons of Star Wars themed shows and games and membrobilia and everything possible you can think of in any way related to the series. Picture a Star Wars convention financed by Disney and designed by Disney Imagineers.

This year, Disney had some really clever print ads made up for the event, mostly having to do with all the Star Wars characters making their way to the event. Anyway, here they are, all 13 of the new print ads from Disney’s Star Wars Weekends advertising campaign. Enjoy:

Event dates:
May 22, 2009 – May 24, 2009
May 29, 2009 – May 31, 2009
June 5, 2009 – June 7, 2009
June 12, 2009 – June 14, 2009

Tokyo resident and blogger on all things Japanese, Danny Choo, caught this image of Spiderman in a suit, selling apartments in the classy Bloom tower project. Japanese people can’t get enough of masked uperheros.

I’d love to know how much the Bloom tower folks had to pay Marvel for that one image.

Danny Choo’s 7pm in Tokyo

It looks like Kellogg will be ending its endorsement deal with giant torso and Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps after a picture of him smoking a bong have surfaced in the UK tabloid News of the World. Phelps admitted to smoking weed and apologized for his “regrettable” behavior and “bad judgment”, and blamed it on youthful indiscretion. This really won’t put a dent in his income though, since he still on board with a load of major sponsors like Visa and Speedo.

Still, Kellogg said Phelps’s actions are “not consistent with the image of Kellogg.” So they’re not renewing his contract when it expires at the end of February. The thing is, I’m happy about it. Now, don’t take that the wrong way, I’m 100% for the legalization of marijuana. The “war on drugs” is the reason the United States has the highest population of prison inmates in the entire world. The US has 5% of the world’s population, and nearly 25% of it’s prisoners. It’s not just per capita either; the US actually has 2.3 million criminals in it’s prisons, more than any other country; all because of the “war on drugs”. So I don’t care that Phelps smoked some weed, that means nothing to me. I’m happy he’s off Kellogg cereal boxes because he’s a freaking douche. Read on for my rationale:

Really, come on. He wears popped collars and crooked hats. He’s known for being the notoriously annoying douchebag at parties. I don’t care how fast he swims or how disproportionately long his freak-torso is compared to a non-aquatic human’s. He’s a DB, and I don’t want to look at his creepy, hairless dolphinbody in the morning when I’m eating my Corn Flakes. I mean, really, look at this:

Have you ever seen anything so annoying? I don’t care if the Sports Illustrated people made him pose like that, I don’t care about the Mark Spitz comparison. He looks like a retarded person with a bunch of foil-wrapped chocolates around his neck. Just say no to the silly picture, Mike. It’s the most ridiculous and garish display of douchebaggery I’ve seen in a long time.

Stay off my cereal, oddball.

“I think Che had perseverance and morality. Being the underdog and fighting against injustice and standing up for the forgotten moved him so hard. Kind of like Jesus, in a way…”
“I think anyone who buys a T-shirt of Che has gotta be cool. If I see someone with a Che T-shirt, I think, ‘He’s got good taste.’”
-Benicio Del Toro

“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail … This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.”
“If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba), we would have fired them against the heart of the US, including New York City. The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”
-Che “Kind of like Jesus…” Guevara

The irony is thick, as it always is. His face is on suburban t-shirts all around the country, and Hollywood is making a hero out of Che Guevara, aka the butcher of La Cabaña, the man who killed journalists, businessmen and merchants, presided over mass executions, prison labor camps, and caused economic ruin to millions.

Admittedly, there’s a certain romance around him. He was trained as a physician and traveled the world as a revolutionary, fought in jungles and all that fun movie stuff. The thing is, he killed actual people and had a real ideology of oppression. Che’s socialist plan was about oppression at its core, as socialism always is. It was about forcing the personal will of a few powerful men on the rest of society. While the capitalism he hated so much is about the combined will of all citizens. Capitalism is an amazing computer which calculates the desires of every person with every choice they make. The free market is a reflection of the wants and needs of each participant. The best example is this: in a socialist “paradise”, a group of people cannot create a capitalist commune if they want to; yet, in a capitalist paradise, anyone can create any type of commune based on any type of system they want. Socialism can exist in a capitalist society, but not the other way around. In the end, capitalism is about freedom, and socialism… isn’t.

So why do so many people wear Che’s image? Because human beings have an innate drive toward cultism. We need to belong to some group, while at the same time we need to rebel against tradition. And Che symbolizes a certain hard edged secular religion, and a vague rebellion against everything. His brand allows you to be a rebel and still fit in. His real ideology is meaningless at this point, and his face is simply a design element, like the Nike swoosh or the golden arches or the silhouette of Michael Jordan dunking. So you can’t fault the wealthy suburban teenagers for wearing it, it’s fashion, and they don’t know any better.

In the US, we’re comfortable, away from all the pain and suffering of the third world, so we can fantasize about anything we want. We can rail against genetically modified crops, while in Africa they save millions of lives by allowing more nutritious food to be grown in less fertile land, with less space. We can complain about third world “sweatshops”, while in those countries, the workers have the choice of working either in those factories, or as subsistence farmers making less than half what the factory pays. We can talk about the horrors of capitalism, but capitalism has given us the freedom to be so wrong. Without the years of free market capitalism giving us the wealth we have, we wouldn’t have the free time to complain today or the social freedom to express our poorly thought out views in t-shirt form.

Ironically, the Che face of today symbolizes that more than anything else, the triumph of capitalism over socialism. He’s been fully assimilated by the free market, with t-shirt companies and Hollywood studios making money from his image and consumers using it as a fashion statement. Freedom has won, Viva la Revolucion.

We’re big fans of Agent Provocateur here at AdSavvy. They’re hip, they have quality collections, and their advertising is top notch. Plus they always have the hottest models. We can’t get enough, and neither can consumers apparently. Even in economic tough times, AD is doing well.

The company is poised for some rapid expansion following last years’s $120 million dollar acquisition by the private equity firm, 3i Group. There are already 40 boutiques worldwide, including 8 in the US, and their planning on building even more: Boston, Chicago, Bahrain, Geneva, Puerto Barres, Madrid, St. Petersburg, and Germany to name a few. AD also had a fragrance launch party in London recently where Daisy Lowe showed off the goods on the catwalk.
Check out Daisy Lowe’s near-naked hotness; plus more recent sexy adverts:

AD recently launched a new fragrance called DD. At the launch party at the Dolce nightclub in London, recent post girl Daisy Lowe hit the catwalk in only a thong and nipple tassels. Good times.
Runway audience included: Kate Moss, Kelly Osborne and Sadie Frost. How do I get in to these parties?

Also, check out some of the recent ads for AD’s planned expansion:

Agent Provocateur constantly pushes the envelope when it comes to sexy advertising. This Kylie Minogue ad came out in December of 2001 and caused a huge hullabaloo. It was banned by UK TV networks (all 1 of them, the BBC), and it ended up only able to be shown in movie theaters.

Luckily it made it’s way to the internet and became one of the most viewed videos ever. Some estimates say this particular video has been viewed over 360 million times. Sex sells.

Finished watching? Ok, stand up…