Activists are, of course, boring. But the ones who cleverly make us uncomfortable, even if they can't deliver their lines smoothly, are fun. Take, for example, this Mac ad spoof.
The average blog addict must ignore over a thousand ads a day, especially ads in the canned style of the Blogads network. So on the one hand, it's impressive that the Alltel phone company earned the Wall Street Journal's attention with an easily missable string of ads.
Redesigning a front page is a risky venture, especially for a general-interest site — for instance, Netscape dealt with whiny users when its front page switched from top-down news to a community format. But Yahoo pulled off its front-page reworking with aplomb. Now, we don't want to credit all of Yahoo's success to its snappy "My Yahoo is changing" commercials, but if the average Yahoo user is as shallow as we are, then spots like the one below are what won them over.
No.
Hewlett-Packard's new ad campaign proves that viral's just another word for nothing left to trust. The computer maker scored a New York Times piece about its viral site, FingerSkilz, in which an actor does soccer tricks with his fingers. What first looked like a personal video blog turned out to be a corporate project with highly computer-enhanced stunts.
"Text? Text is for your granddad! Everyone's kickin' it at BoomYEAH! We rock out in hot spots like SALT LAKE CITY! We look like Netflix! We are making WEB 3D! It's on your time! It's statistical! The revolution has begun! BOOMYEAH BABY!"
Today in unfortunate ad placement news: A CNET story on Intel employees working during the missile attacks in Israel. Below it, Intel compares its hardware and software to, well, a missile.
Hint to Microsoft: In your online ads, try not to have the stock-photo guy real MSN employee laugh nervously at all your available job options.
Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine, last told Google in an ad, "I know you don't know. I know you don't know I know. YOU DON'T KNOW." Translation proved that ad was pretty clever. So what the hell does this one mean? Free comment account to anyone who sends a translation to tips@valleywag.com.
