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One Day You’re In, and the Next Day You’ve Sold Out: Part III
Cue this Thursday's episode of Project Runway.
Calvin Klein Billboard “Suggestive of Rape” Gets Axed
The Australian Herald Sun reported this Tuesday that a Calvin Klein billboard ad (shown below) would be pulled by the Advertising Standards Bureau, due to protests by sexual assault workers and women’s advocacy groups that the ad was “highly sexualised and clearly suggestive of sexual behaviour.” Reportedly, “the Board considered that whilst the act depicted...
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Google Goggles
Consumer Watchdog’s Inside Google website aims to “educate the public and opinion leaders about Google’s dangerous dominance over the Internet, computing and our online lives.” For the past month or so, the site has featured this video, which has gotten (along with the final version) over 367,000 views in the past six weeks: Ham-handed...
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NYT Embeds Stealth Ad in Blog
New York Times Public Editor Arthur S. Brisbane spends his current column tsk-tsking the paper for this: READERS of The Choice, a blog by reporter Jacques Steinberg, encountered something unusual — and for some of them, something very disturbing — when they clicked on a link in the second paragraph of his Sept. 29 blog post. It was...
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Conservative Website Passes Off Corporate Shill As Columnist
The Daily Caller, which fancies itself a conservative counterpoint to The Huffington Post but isn’t, just published this piece: FoodPolitik: Controlling Your Food, the Trojan Horse of ‘public health’ With the election barely two weeks away, the nation is focused on what will happen if (when?) control of Congress swings rightward. While some far-reaching elements of...
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Eleven Herbs and Sell Outs
Last week’s episode of NBC’s sophomore comedy “Community” jumped wholeheartedly onto the product placement bandwagon, with a plotline that trapped the gang in a runaway flight simulator built and branded by Kentucky Fried Chicken. Yet, while the placement was undoubtedly heavy-handed, and reinforced by at least one traditional KFC commercial that aired during the program’s...
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NBC Goes Old School with Product Integration
Headline of a Friday New York Times piece: Sponsors Also Star in School Makeover Reality Show NBCs new reality program “School Pride” (Friday nights at 8, a.k.a. Death Valley), which showcases rehabs of rundown schools, is, according to the Times, “a microcosm of both the good side (authentic, if totally random, charity) and the bad...
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Boston Globe Gives A Kick About Skechers Advertainment
Boston Globe editorial: Give advertainment the boot Text: [A]dvocates of protecting children from excessive advertising have blown the whistle on a new Nicktoons animated children’s program that features [characters] used in TV ads and comic strips to promote Skechers shoes. The Federal Communications Commission should give the series the boot. The Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial Free...
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FTC=Forget That Cheerleading
Chicago Tribune headline (via mediapost.com): FTC cracks down on fake online endorsements Agency attempts to punish fake reviews, force disclosure Nut graf: Last October, the Federal Trade Commission updated its truth-in-advertising guidelines, which were last revised in 1980, to address the commercialism of the Web. The regulations require anyone paid in cash or in-kind to...
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One Day You’re In, the Next Day You’ve Sold Out: Part II
Unfortunately, last week’s post on product placement in Project Runway jumped the gun, pre-empting this week’s shill-a-thon for Heidi’s New Balance activewear line. The challenge was this: the designers were asked to develop three outfits that could be incorporated into Heidi’s line, with the winning looks being sold with Heidi’s other garments “exclusively on Amazon.com.”...
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Forget Fox News. This Is Faux News.
Sneak ADtack charter member Steve Stein sent this helpful comment yesterday: Ah, I forgot, but at 4 past the hour and half hour WBZ radio reminds me that I *hate* this kind of commercial – “Tomorrow’s Technology Today”: a Toyota ad produced to sound like a news story. For another view, see Boston writer Joanne...
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One Day You’re In, the Next Day You’ve Sold Out
While Project Runway’s “pattern-making” challenge, now a tradition of two seasons, is certainly interesting, the sledgehammer promotion of HP technology on the show is anything but. Perhaps I’m a little overly sensitive, but after having suffered through eight seasons of L’Oreal, Banana Republic, Tresseme, Blue Fly, Piperlime, Elle, and Marie Claire endorsements, one more is...
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