Ummm, what?
This is the disclaimer from the promo site for Carmelo Anthony’s new shoe.
Order to look at your site I need to fully QUIT any other applications I might be working in, not only switch which browser I’m using but also close all the other sites I might have open in tabs. THEN, I need to open my browser preferences to allow you to popup additional browser windows - which I’m not allowed to click. All this so you can….what?
Riiiiiight.
But - it is HTML5, so…that’s a thing.
“Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we’re hooked on it”
I’m not sure whether I like this site or whether it’s gimmicky. But I would put money on this getting linked to nearly infinity by agency folks. I would put further money on there being about 1 million creative brainstorming meetings over the next 6 months where “let’s do a scrolling site, like that Beetle site.”
For Kmart, a unit of Sears Holdings Corp., “First Day,” began as a four-page pitch in 2009 from “Gossip Girl” executive producer Alloy Entertainment. For the current season, the show’s second, Alloy pitched a story about a girl who wants to go to the prom with her crush.
The retailer liked the idea, but wanted to use it to hawk its line of back-to-school clothes. So it suggested changing the focus to a fall dance, rather than a prom.
In rounds of back-and-forth story development, Kmart also asked Alloy to shape each of the four main characters to reflect several clothing brands that Kmart wanted to push.
The protagonist, for instance, was written to embody the Dream Out Loud by Selena Gomez brand.
Kmart also pushed Alloy to change the protagonist’s original name, Bree, to which it thought its customers wouldn’t relate. They settled on the name Rosie instead.
So, I’m not sure it really needs to be said, but this is exactly why I think the relationship between studios, content creators, and advertisers is just fundamentally ineffective.
I look at stories like this, or products like Hulu vs. Netflix and I really can’t think of a time when funding creative content through advertising resulted in a better product, a better story, or a better experience.
The problem is: advertising used to be the only way to get content produced so it was a necessary evil. Because it was the only way to get things made, entire industries were developed to support this model. What troubles me though is that right now, when you look at things like News or T.V., there is this fight to maintain this ad based system as though that was the default way of producing content. This mistake is believing something that was necessary is based on a specific set of circumstances is fundamentally necessary. In fact though, while it may feel like the way things are now is they way they’ve always been, ad funded content is a relatively new way of working. There is no reason to act as though no other model could work
In contrast, Jesse Thorn over at Put This On just finished raising $70,000 directly from viewers to produce the a second series of his (really very terrific) web series. Obviously, 70k is a far cry from what it would cost to produce even just one episode of a typical television series, but I think the model is there now in a way it hasn’t been for maybe a century for creators to get paid for their product from the people who actually use it. The model is young, but I think it will become more and more clear which side of the divide people fall on: those looking to create great stories for people will look towards these new models that allow them to work directly for their fans. Those that are in it for the business will continue to fight for the existing model, which, pretty clearly, is NOT about the story or the experience.
(Source: murketing)
I can’t believe it took this long.
Out for drinks with friends last week, the topic of conversation turned to recalling/comparing either the dumbest things we’ve heard of getting pitched to clients, or worse, the dumbest things we’ve had to pitch to clients ourselves.
If you’ve worked in or around advertising for any length of time, you have almost certainly, at one point or another, been witness to an idea that is so mindbendingly stupid, but that also somehow survives to a pitch, it sort of forces you begin to question reality. I’m not entirely sure how or why this happens, but once you get done putting your mind back together, they usually make for great stories. And so we came up with the idea for the “Pitch Fail” blog. A blog meant to house peoples stories of terrible ideas so that they wouldn’t have stay in your head.
It was just exactly the sort of idea that I spend a few hours planning with friends, and that we’ll promise that we’re “really going to do this - not like last time”, and then we don’t do it anyway.
But what I did think it would be good for, the blog idea, was a bit in a longer piece of fiction of I’ve been working on. The problem, which I came to pretty much as soon as I started writing, was that framed as fiction, all the things that made this funny no longer seemed funny. My first assumption was that it was my own feeble skill as a writer and that my attempts to fictionalize the concepts had robbed them of some critical ingredient. But then, even just writing down actual pitches verbatim, not exaggerating them at all, when presented as fiction, they all sounded just way too bizarre to come off as credible.
I was reminded of something I once heard Sarah Vowel say about why she liked writing non-fiction: with non-fiction you could writing far more unbelievable things than you ever could in with fiction.
I can’t speak for other professions, but it’s a weird thing when you realize the work you do is sometimes so disconnected from reality that it won’t even work as a joke.
(Source: mmbrindley)
This is actually EXACTLY how advertising gets made. And literally ALL AD’s and Copywriters are named Zach or AJ.
An awesome/sad tale of Google advertising gone very wrong.
How wrong? What you need to know about this story is that solution to the problem involves the author emailing the following to herself.
“I tried again with, ‘I am going to kill myself. I love cupcakes.’”
That wrong.
