From Corporate Social Responsibility to Charity: Doing Well By Doing Good. Let Us Know About Your Good Deeds and Cause-Based Efforts. Also: Find out more about the GoodWorks Effie.
Ad for FITC Design & Technology Festival Sums Up Chaos Scenario in Far Less Than 90,000 Words
"The Last Advertising Agency on Earth" is a two-minute video about a fictional agency called MPS&C, which held a death grip on the status quo until one day it simply ceased being.
LoveYourVagina.com Sells This Feminine Device Without Pussyfooting the Issue
How are you feeling about your vagina these days? We ask not without reason. LoveYourVagina.com is the website of a British product called Mooncup, which is a silicone receptacle designed to replace tampons and sanitary pad. These folks don't want you to be vaginally satisfied. They want amor.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Next month, after 25 years as the ad industry's preeminent critic, Bob Garfield will retire his weekly ad reviews in Advertising Age to take on two new enterprises.
In New Spot for TV With Extra Color, McGarryBowen Comes Close to Admitting Paradox of Advertising a TV on a TV
The new Quattron commercial from Sharp not only makes little attempt to demonstrate the product difference, it comes within a whisker of self-consciously pointing up the absurdity of attempting to demonstrate the product difference.
Pharma Marketing Is a Less-Than-Noble Art, but This Infertility Drug Ad Is Amusing and Sympathetic
This is about a funny, knowing and smart direct-to-consumer drug campaign now being tested in Baltimore. But first, just a quick reminder that pharma marketing is a cesspool.
Art Band Is Either Rethinking Its Identity or Ridiculing Crowdsourcing. Or Both
Is it even advertising? Who the hell knows? But it is so cool and funny and wicked and surprising and surprisingly restrained and postmodern in the best sense. In short: so Devo.
Nationwide Executives Persuade the World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World to Return
Advertising is permitted to mate a donkey with a horse and sell the client a mule. The "World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World" is a nice enough mule. It's not mule-tastic. It's not "mule die laughing." But it is an amusing, benefit-laden, altogether satisfactory mule.
Sergey and Co. Scrounge Up Some Change for a Charm Offensive
Apparently Sergey Brin and friends came up with two or three million dollars and used the Super Bowl to mount a charm offensive. Naturally, like everything else Google does, it was perfect.
The Big Game's Best and Worst Ads ... and the Mostly Meh in Between
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Advertising Age's ad critic, Bob Garfield, found this year's Super Bowl spots to be a whole lot of meh. Garfield gives us his take on Anheuser-Busch's lack of laughs in its lineup, takes Doritos -- and its consumers -- to task for its user-generated spots and heaps praise on his three favorite spots.
Walmart Ditches Schmaltz for the Hilarious Indignities of Real Life
Walmart, hitherto often a purveyor of treacle and dubiously Walmart-centric vignettes, has found real life -- in equal measures excruciating and hilarious.
Despite the Presence of Alan Cox and a Near-Universal Conundrum, These Offbeat Ads Fall Flat
New Target ads featuring Alan Cox are a sterling example of how colorful, witty, unusual, cheeky, intelligent advertising featuring a talented actor can be terrible at selling stuff to the people with the money.
We Love Christopher Guest, but the Upper West Side Isn't Exactly a Cross-Section of America
Having seen much of the ad and PSA campaign for the 2010 U.S. Census, the AdReview team has so many disconnected misgivings that the best we can do is blurt them out ad hoc, like someone coming out of anesthesia, or talk radio.
We Like Apologies and Honesty, but There Are Limits. Just Ask Ford
To begin the new year, Domino's bought millions of dollars of advertising to announce to the world -- are you ready for this? -- how horrible its product has been for the past 40 years
Garfield Hands Out the 2009 Honors for Actors and Actresses in Commercials
Regrettably, in another down year for advertising creative worldwide, 2009 didn't yield exactly a bumper crop of nominees, but those actors and actresses who have been recognized for their performances are worthy, every single one.
What campaigns did our resident ad critic bash for 2009? From Teleflora's ugly Super Bowl ad to AT&T's embarrassing response to Verizon, here's the worst of 2009.
From the Expense-a-Steak online expense-report generator from Maloney & Porcelli to Post cereal's inspired move for good old Shredded Wheat, here are the campaigns our ad critic loved in 2009.
A Lesson in How Advertising Is About the Entire Audience
In an editorial elsewhere in the issue this week, Ad Age rolls its eyes at Method's decision to pull its online-video ad "Shiny Suds" -- or at least the culture of grievance that spawned it. AdReview respectfully disagrees
