Tag Archive for 'brilliant advertising'

Plug into Now

julius published on November 18, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Personally I really like well-put advertising campaigns. I was really fond of what The Economist did with pizza boxes last week but yesterday I came across an ama-zing internet commercial.


This is Plug into Now by the American carrier Sprint. They are advertising for their wireless network that is available to you everywhere with a special device for your computer. But that doesn’t really matter here.
The advertisement does, though. It’s a big pane stocked full of widgets, it’s comparable to what you see when you click dashboard on a Mac or when you have the widgets function enabled in Windows Vista. But the widgets used in Plug into Now don’t tell you what tomorrows weather will be like, neither they’re concerned with calendar functions. No, they’re all about now.

How many babies are being born? How many 911 calls are being made? How many houses are being built? How many eggs are being produced? What does the Statue Of Liberty look like at this moment? They even go as far showing how many habitable planets there are, the answer is one by the way. The underlying message is of course that you can get all of that information (and maybe even a little more) when you sign up. But if you translate it you can say something about what internet brings us. Tons of information (tons can be taken literally if you talk about egg production). There’s also a small red button, I wonder what it does.

Check it out, Plug into Now.

Pizza Stats

julius published on November 11, 2008 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .


This is what you get when you order a pizza at one of the twenty pizzerias that The Economist picked for their new advertisement campaign. It is, as a matter of fact, a genuine pizza. The only thing that got pimped for a bit is the box.

Economic magazine The Economist bought some space on pizza boxes (honestly, I didn’t knew that was for sale) and they filled it with some ads like the one above. It shows a pie chart that contains data on where the US gets their mushrooms. For the people that are having a hard time reading the tiny text in the chart, 96.8% of the US mushrooms comes from Canada.

Besides this mushroom-chart they have got some others. For example about arable land by country. All the ads are pizza-related though. Quite an original way of advertising, and oh so clever. (If you think about it, it’s also good for the environment because paper that would have been used otherwise to print the ad on is now replaced by a pizza box that would have been consumed anyway!)

-jdh

IKEA Gets It!

jackson published on April 25, 2008 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Holy Guacamole!

Something insane just happened!
I was on the instructables.com site learning how to build my own LED bike helmet, when out of the corner of my eye, something interesting went down.

On the corner of the page, where ads go, (i.e. where my eyes don’t go,) IKEA had placed an ad of a woman using a chainsaw to get a bunch of pasta to fit in a drawer.

So, get this: I actually clicked on the ad.

Whoah. An advertisement that I didn’t automatically tune out? An ad where something interesting happened? I had to know more.

Some further clicking brought me to the IKEA page at youtube, where they’ve got a ton of cool videos, all featuring the same chainsaw swinging Momma that first caught my eye.

These ads are brilliant. They are likable, watchable, and inform one about a product in a way that doesn’t pander, doesn’t ram anything down your throat, just gently showcases.

In short, these ads are everything that most ads aren’t.

Who is this woman? She’s a treasure.

Brilliantly done, IKEA.

I just realized how insane it is that every company hasn’t done this yet.