A Nice Little Slice of Paris.

You've got everything: the lovely flight attendants, the shaggy little dog, the perky waiter, and that one guy who just wanders around reading papers all day.

For All You Flight of the Conchords Fans Out There...

Murray is back! Harrassing Annie Leibovitz, no less, and for Chrissakes will somebody please give this man a naked baby, stat.



Murray knows a little somethin' about a Freudian couch, har har. Part and parcel of HP's latest campaign, Let's Do Amazing -- which is putting our favourite busybody New Zealander to good use. THEY DIDN'T EVEN CHANGE HIS HAIR.

AdVerve Episode 24: The Lost Edition

Aka, the make-up-for-being-late-this-week edition, not the *show* Lost. SUCKA!

We cover it all: Monkey AIDS conspiracy theories. Warren Buffet’s dance of love. Bob Garfield’s comments of... whatever they are. I break down the difference between American and French dogs. Both, it seems, need a certain degree of therapy.

We recap Parisian tech conference techness, why your privacy is an illusion—and why people still don’t care. Five Minutes With... features Aaron Strout, CMO of Powered. (On Twitter too.) We also manage to get the show in under an hour, based on our crowdsourced fan poll. (Gonna try to do a 30-minute show sometime. No promises; WE'RE GONNA TRY.)

Play the show now:

Or download the show directly here. Or subscribe via iTunes:

Topics:

00:00 – 1. French dogs
03:23 – 2. Lostcast
04:47 – 3. Annie Vuitton
07:08 – 4. Tech, crunched
10:49 – 5. Fun with AIDS conspiracies
14:53 – 6. All the Wiki that’s fit to print
18:29 – 7. Bowie vs. Gervais
20:11 – 8. Chatroulette Piano Guy
22:36 – 9. Welcome to Google World™
24:15 – 10. The *other* B.G.
30:38 – 11. Evil Nestlé and animal testing
42:13 – 12. Ben Stiller’s new shitty movie
43:34 – 13. Five Minutes With... Aaron Strout
48:35 – 13. Privacy? HA!

Linkage:

• Bowie vs. Gervais.


• AIDS conspiracy.


• Annie Vuitton.


• Chatroulette Piano Guy & Ben Folds


• The *other* B.G.


• Evil Nestlé.


• Ben Stiller’s new shitty movie.

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Talky Tits.

Hey, why not give basoomas a personality? Make 'em poetic. Give them names and a cute little Traveling-Pants history.

This is the kind of stuff I hate.*

I'm tempted to lash out with things like, "My tits are pretty apathetic to each other, and for that matter, to me." It feels inevitable though that someone will be like, "Your body loves you, and you should love it back, you awful bitch."

Naw, man. My body loves me just about as much as a virus hates you. It's a machine playing out a program, and trying to convince myself that my various extremities have autonomous emotions is kind of insane.

But maybe this works, and it's for a good cause, and kudos, I guess, to the Pink Ribbon Circle of Life for being willing to sh0w b00b in such a paranoid no-nakie culture.

Work by Grey/Amsterdam and lush femme-focused photographer Rankin ... and there's plen'y more titty where that came from:

Pink Ribbon Magazine - Two Girlfriends (English VO) - (2009) :30 (The Netherlands)

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*Another thing I discovered I hate today: the word "lolcano."

Inklust #8: The Alchemy of Advertising

Most of consumer behavior is perfectly obvious -- people like things that look nicer, taste better, work more dependably, and cost less. Then there's the mysterious part. And what we claim to understand about the mysterious part is usually speculation and ideology masquerading as knowledge.

-- Bob Hoffman, The Ad Contrarian

About the Image: Sunsets to Die For, Shepard Fairey.

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What the dickens is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

AdVerve Episode 23: Erik Proulx and Making Lemonade Out of Layoffs

The Lemonade dude.

Erik Proulx of Please Feed The Animals and Twitter fame chats with us on all things Lemonade, being fired, Michael Moore, whether documentarians are journalists, and why advertising will rip your heart out. IT JUST WILL. We also get into nitty gritty details about HR telling you to please come in... and shut the door.

(*shudder*)

IT’S 96 MINUTES OF PURE AUDIO PLEASURE.

Play the show now:

Or download the show directly here. Or subscribe via iTunes:

Topics:

00:00 – 1. Lemonade
39:52 – 2. Detroit, rocked city & journalism
1:01:55 – 3. Life after Lemonade
1:15:26 – 4. Movie minutia
1:31:14 – 5. Auto madness
1:32:53 – 6. Scott Monty - Carmaker, pizza delivery guy & just general maker of magic

Linkage:

• Louis Malle.


• Nazi Pop Twins.


• Caspian. The Kasabian that was also mentioned.


• The Smartest Guys in the Room.

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Dirty Truths

Me: I wish I had a friend brave enough to tell me--

Him: That you don't know how to put your makeup on?

Me: No! Wait ... what?

Him: Nothing, chérie, laisse tomber.

Image credit: Aihibed.

The Birth of a Great Violinist

Expect to see a lot of gratuitous hair-swishing action at climax -- after all, this is an ad for Pantene -- but this Thai piece circa 2008 about the struggles of a deaf/mute violinist still made me cry.

That's right! I cried! And boy was her hair amazing!

Un grand merci à @daedalium, the president and founder of hypios, for sending this over today.

Inklust #7: The Quality Without a Name

The more living patterns there are in a place -- a room, a building, or a town -- the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.

And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.

-- The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander

Fun fact: This book has served as inspiration for many a web developer and programmer. I'm sure it's applicable to a lot of other things too. Thanks Milan for the recommendation.

About the image: Le Café de Nuit, Place Lamartine, Arles (1888); Vincent Van Gogh.

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What the dickens is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.

Sometimes Brands Do Beautiful Things.

Profit for its sake, and capitalism for its sake, will actually become unstuck, unwind and not work.

-- Global CEO David Jones of Havas Worldwide

Witness while:

Pepsi gives grants to world-changing initiatives, chosen by you.

Humor me ››

Because This Works, Right...?

SUBMIT, I SAY! Or make your own Big Ass Message.

Worth Considering

In college I conducted a weird and probably misguided experiment in which I only spoke with a Chicagoland accent. As a result I found people warmed to me and struck up conversation in situations where they would normally avoid me or completely ignore what I had to say.

I found this telling. But one day, in a moment of emotional vulnerability, I broke down to a teacher and confessed everything.

"Why would you do that?" he asked.

"Because I don't think I'm likeable," I answered, eyes filling with long-repressed doe-eyed tears, and I explained in a shaking voice why I might seem horrifically unapproachable or downright antisocial at-a-glance.

His brow furrowed in sympathy. He put a hand on my shoulder and, with an encouraging squeeze, softly proffered the following hypothesis:

"Angela ... maybe you're just icky."

I was speechless. The Chicagoland accent went away after that, and in similar situations, where I quietly resent people who don't seem to automatically intuit my preciousness or whatever, I remember it. Maybe you're just icky. It has probably made me a nicer person.

Toulouse Girls Charge H&M Grand Opening

All for love of the Sonia Rykiel collection? They apparently destroyed everything. And here I was thinking a WalMart-caliber retail stampede was a uniquely US phenomenon.

H/T to the ever-watchful Jeremy Danté.

AdVerve Episode 22: Plagiarism in Advertising

There isn’t any. Nothing more to see here, so move on. We kid! So we finally get to an “ism” episode that we had planned ever since our first show on Racism in advertising. This topic comes up from time to time, but usually only on ad blogs and only by people in the industry. Regular consumers? They could give a shit.

Homage? Tribute? Imitation? A rip? Inspiration? Direct lift? Copycat? Whatever you call it, we discuss all the issues surrounding a touchy subject with copywriter Dan Goldgeier of Partners + Napier. (In addition to being Ad Pulp columnist and regular Talent Zoo columnist, he’s also on Twitter.)

In addition, we go over why plagiarism is different in music, film and fashion. Because there, it’s not *just* plagiarism—it’s an homage, people.

An homage.

Play the show now:

Or download the show directly here. Or subscribe via iTunes:

Linkage:

• Old Spice horse spot, Gillette’s take on the genre, and a rider that pales.*


• AT&T “Hey” spot, the Bud classic.


• Coke spot comparison.


• Duval-Guillaume AIDS spot, and Travelers Insurance.


• Wrath of Cannes.


• Toshiba Space Chair Project, and the original.


• One shot scenes: Good Fellas, Clown Posse and Speed.

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*Get it? That was an homage to a Clint Eastwood film. Homage ftw!


(Image.)

Let's Hear It for New Dorks.*

Geeks now have an anthem ... and it's not that embarrassing. Unless it pisses you off that hipsters have appropriated the public façade of the geek, in which case, hey, be glad that geek's chic and accept that the hipster invasion -- which is temporary -- is part of the price you pay for the opportunity to get atrociously, flagrantly wealthy in a public space while being associated with some of the best thinkers of our time. Before dying!

Or something to that effect.

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*I don't like it when people call me a "dork" because it actually means "whale penis." I just don't think anybody has the kind of ... vigor? girth? ... necessary to merit the comparison.

Twitter's Long-Awaited Ad Strategy.

How often is it that the thing we've all been waiting for turns out to be exactly as imaginative as all the other things we already hate have?

Fairly often, I guess.

(In response to the secondary question still only half-formed in your mind: "pertussis" is whopping cough. You can still get that? Maybe they changed the name so people wouldn't automatically think about The Consumption.)

I Swear There Are a Lot of Things on the Internet Not Nearly as Awesome as This.

Via + reference. <-- And if you haven't watched that yet, someone nearby should reach over and hit you.

Nostalgia Ravaged in Name of 'Anti-Retro'

The appearance of Citroën's DS3 at the end of each piece above is such anticlimax, especially as you feel yourself get drawn into the grit of the filming, the weight of the sounds. Icons this powerful, speech this rich, shouldn't be used for selling cars -- though to be fair, using them to sell anything is pretty much always a risk, riddled with critique. My heart breaks into a million little styrofoam pieces.

Humor me ››

The SixthSense Demo

...augment your reality for less than the cost of an iPad. =P

AdVerve Episode 21: The Death of Media

If newspapers weren’t dead, they are now that we killed them. Well, with a little help from Ben Kunz, director of strategic planning at Mediassociates, the blog Thought Gadgets, as well as a Business Week column. From natural disasters to that 52” HDTV you’re buying this weekend, he helps us deconstruct how media has changed—and the ways it won’t. Newspapers? Meh. Who needs paper with ink smudges anyway. At some point, we manage to drag Twitter into the fray, kicking and screaming.

Play the show now:



Or download directly here. Subscribe via iTunes:

Linkage:

• Pew study.

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(Image.)

Everyone Wants a Log!

Don't you?

As a kid I didn't think this Ren & Stimpy spoof ad was funny, but now that I'm old and working in The Industry™ it's taken on a special significance. I mean, the catchy theme song was one thing. But look at all the clever ways they managed to dress Log up for the discriminating youth of tomorrow:

The Many Faces of Log (sorry, no audio; you know how it is on YouTube):



International Log -- PARLEZ-VOUS FRANCAIS?!! (sigh. Visuals added by the person who uploaded the song.)



Yes sir, I like it!

Verizon Takes the Piss Out of Big Red

"You'll watch YouTube on a horse*!"

Excellent. And I love how it depicts compulsive phone-checkers as complete face-to-face contact cretins, because that's what we've become, plus it totally goes against the get-closer ideal presented in the original Big Red ad. "So kiss a little longer..." Baby, NOT WITHOUT CHATROULETTE ON.

For the .02% of you that'll undoubtedly go, "What's Verizon on about?" -- come on, you know the one!



Unless it plans to do something neat with the whole "Big Red" thing (which I don't really see happening), would be cool to see more kitschy nostalgic hat-tips from Verizon. ("Zestfully Clean" is just askin' for it!) With all the variety in mobile, won't be hard to find the one somewhat-relavant tie-in that brings it all together. (You know, like taking the name of Big Red gum and using it to refer to how the map of the US is covered in "big red!" splotches that represent Verizon's service area.) =P

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*The horse is definitely the statement-maker this year. Consider. It is almost enough to make you want one, just to have around, you know, as an uncomfortable conversation piece. Or you can actually become a serious equestrian and learn how to ride in the middle of a big urban city, which in some ways would be funnier. My dad did this a few years ago and the goddamn horse bit me. He later sold it to a girl who trains horses for rescue service. So that valiant little nipper is still out there somewhere, maybe in the Swiss Alps, putting Saint Bernards out of work.