Category — Advertising Philosophy

The point of copyright law is to give the author of some work control over who copies it. The problem is, today, enforcing copyright law against individual users is virtually impossible. Anything in digital form can be copied quite easily one way or another, and there are 200 million+ consumers able to do it in this country alone. The law just doesn’t work in the here and now.

As a society, we’ve outgrown our copyright laws. They’ve become irrelevant and lost whatever previous value they had.
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Everyone knows that KFC uses a super secret blend of eleven herbs and spices to make its fried chicken ultra-delicious. KFC goes to great lengths to keep that formula secret. In fact, one company blends a formulation that represents part of the recipe while another spice company blends the remainder. And a final computer processing system is used to standardize the blending of the products to ensure neither company has the complete recipe.
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Sometimes, a good part of the time actually, marketing is just creating a need for a product where no real need exists.

A good example of this is Febreze. In 1996, Procter & Gamble launched a product called Febreze, which is basically just perfumed water. P&G developed Febreze to spray on clothes that smelled of cigarette smoke or things like that. It flopped initially.
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Twenty years ago, if you told any ad exec that there would be nationally televised advertisements selling pills that enlarge your penis, during prime time TV no less, they would have guffawed their Cuban cigars right into your coffee cup. And yet, here we are. What happened?

The success of Enzyte is due entirely to marketing. It doesn’t matter if the pills do nothing, it doesn’t matter if the founder gets serious jail time. All that matters is public perception, and that’s what marketing is all about. A catchy jingle and the go-with-it attitude wins every time. So despite all the negatives, we have to tip our hats to Smiling Bob for taking advantage of the insecurities of a entire nation’s male population.

Well done, Bob. You win the Best Marketing of a Shit Product Award.

One more reason that the EU freaks hate freedom: Some of them want to take a “zero tolerance” approach to sexist advertisements. Any time I hear the words zero tolerance, it gives me the willies, in any situation.

Anyway, various women’s rights groups and Members of European Parliament (MEPs) are suggesting guidelines and regulations which would end any type of advertising that portrayed women as sex objects or reinforced gender stereotypes.

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If you haven’t already heard of Julius von Bismarck’s Image Fulgurator, then welcome to the internet. According to his website, it’s a “device for physically manipulating photographs”.

But what does it do? How does it manipulate? And what the hell is a Fulgurator? Well, it comes from the Latin word for ‘lightning’ – fulgur. Fulguration means the act or process of flashing like lightning. And the name fits. It’s essentially a projector that senses the flash of a camera, then quickly projects an image onto the object being photographed for a split second. The whole action is invisible to the naked eye, and results in a photograph with some image or text added.
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Advertising is the business of telling stories.

TV commercials tell us a story – the latest Nike Mercurial Vapor IV ad tells us how the new Nike boots help make professional footballers faster.

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1 where were those legs? You’ve seen them– they go on for days. So, tell me… How did the producers manage to keep them off the monitor?

2 the woman was sitting down. The only time the world should be deprived of seeing such a beautiful creature standing up is if she’s on her back, or on all fours.

3 a little more action. A female as gorgeous as Adriana Lima needs to be seen in action to be fully appreciated. Crawling towards you, walking away from you…

4 girl has mad back. Here we have a specimen who possesses one of the most spectacular rear ends known to human existence, and also a few producers who somehow thought we wouldn’t feel cheated out of viewing it.

5 more cleavage, please. The girl’s profession is modeling bras and underwear for a living, so we know she can maximize what she’s got going on. Who’s idea was it to put her in non-cleavage-enhancing lingerie?

6 everything about her was understated. Considering every feature that she has is completely exaggerated, I feel that this particular portrayal of Miss Lima was just downright criminal.

7 that football she was holding obstructed the view. Not that anyone one would mind watching her play any sport… I just know that we would all rather see her stretched out across the goal line.

8 just hose her down. This is one thought that can instantly take you from mental image to full-blown day dream.

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How do you rank one ad as being better than other ads? Is rating advertising an objective act based on measurable criteria or is it subjective, based on whether you liked the model in that commercial or not?

There are 3 simple ways to rate the quality of an advertisement:

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