Ending on a High Note: Red Bull Gives You Wings

Here comes another urinal ad, but this time, the ad IS the urinal. Har har! This latrine in Valencia, Spain is about 6 feet up in the air with a little bumper sticker reading, "Red Bull Gives You Wings" en Español. Get it? You'd have to be hopped up on 8 cases Red Bull to fly this high, or at least have enough urine pressure to aim your stream 6 feet off the ground. But honestly, who's thirsty after thinking about all that peeing?

Advertisers loooove to hit consumers in the loo. I'd like to see the piece of market research that revealed the public restroom as the most optimal place for advertising (or the state of urinary urgency as the most receptive to ad messaging). Oh wait here it is...

According to Glenn Gowen, head of marketing and public relations at UK agency Admedia:

"You have got a captive audience with little to do other than read your advert. The long dwell times—an average of 105 seconds for women and 55 seconds for men—give people plenty of time to take the information in. We have found that because of the one-to-one nature of the communication, there is high recall: up to 100% recall, and 78% prompted awareness."

Considering most people carry a paper or magazine with them to the toilet, each of which contain dozens of ads, I guess this isn't too different.

Coolspotter: Yes, I'm a Tech Groupie

I've had the same crappy LG Musiq for over 2 years. 2 years! For most of my friends, 6 months is the expiration date for any and all mobile technology. I usually don't get rid of my cell phone until a) it breaks or b) I leave it in a cab on a drunken rainy night. In my case, when situation A finally rolled around, I buckled and bought (gasp!) a BlackBerry.

Why did I willingly decide to join the legions of CrackBerry users? Well, I'm on Sprint plan, and the Apple iPhone hasn't yet crossed into inter-service-provider waters. To me, this was the next best thing. I'll tell you one thing, after 5 years of using crappy non-smartphones, I love my BlackBerry 8830. And today, that love doubled as soon as I logged onto Coolspotter.com.

Coolspotter.com is a user-gen site that logs every time a celebrity is "spotted" holding, wearing or using any number of consumer products. It even creates dedicated pages for each product. I'm happy to say that my BlackBerry 8830 has been "coolspotted" in the hands of Lass Bass, Jay-Z, and even Paris Hilton! If this phone is good enough for the queen of all excess, it's good enough for me. What's great about the site is that it actually tags photos of celebs with their products, so you don't just have take someone's word for it.

Sure there was a time when I was nearly brought to tears when I saw a pregnant Britney Spears wearing a Catharine Malandrino gown I had just bought on the cover of US Weekly, but that's so different. For one thing, she was 7 months pregnant and still with K-Fed. I doubt there's a woman alive that would be happy to find out she should be wearing maternity wear. And Jay-Z is D a powerful businessman. Who knows where my new phone will bring my career. Although there is a downside to this Coolspotter phenom. The front page shows you different rankings for products and my 8830's 11 celebrity spots pales in comparison to the BlackBerry Curve's 21. Looks like I'll be taking a trip to Sprint this week for an upgrade. I gotta keep my street cred, yo,

A Little Tease

Talk about an interesting integrated campaign. To promote an upcoming burlesque show, tassled pasties were slapped on local parking meters in St Johns, Newfoundland to generate buzz for the event. Lucky for marketers, the street meters already resembled the proper anatomy. Hidden cameras caught reactions from passersby and provided enough footage for an accompanying viral video (above). Not only did the show sell out and get tons of press coverage for the stunt, every single pasty was stolen as a souvenir. And who says Canadians don't know how to have fun?

Spitz'er Swallows?

Gotta hand it to the ad community, and New Yorkers, for their lightning-fast funny bone reflexes during this whole Spitzer-banging-whores debacle. You can't blame them--there are far too many ingredients making this ripe for a hit sitcom. Forget the GEICO cavemen.

Even Virgin Mobile in Canada jumped at the chance to exploit the Gov of Love's "Client #9" John codename (see below).

The copy goes on to read:

"When you call us, we'll treat you like a person, not a client.
Whether you're #9 pr #900, you'll get hooked up with someone who'll finally
treat you just ow you want to be treated..."

Oooooh. Good one. [Via adrants]

But New York Shitty spotted some homegrown humor at the Brooklyn bar, Teddy's. Would you rather throw back a Spitzer Spritzer or Hypocrite's Delight?

But in the end, the best humor comes from real life:

3M Privacy at the Urinal

It always amazes me how ubiquitous advertising is in other countries. The British have no qualms about text-messaging numbers off billboards and Brazillians will gladly give up lingual real estate for a free piercing and 15 minutes of internet fame. Even urinals and restrooms are are longtime stomping grounds for advertisers looking for a captive audience. Urinal cakes will proudly display your logo, back-of-door posters deliver your message to seat dwellers, and there are even interactive games you can play with your pee!

No wonder why 3M in Turkey is now jumping on the bathroom bandwagon. To advertise laptop screen filters, they're using the actual material on ads placed in front of individual urinals. In doing so they demonstrate how neighbors next you can't see what's on your screen and vice versa. The message on the ad is as follows:

"This display is protected by 3M Privacy Filters. The person standing next
to you can't see what's written on here. Use 3M Privacy Filters to protect your
information from prying eyes."

Good idea. Bad copy. They should have given each screen its own quirky, slightly perverse message. It's advertising on a urinal, for God's sakes.


[Via Adverbox]

Genius! Juice Salon Escalator Ad

A creative take on floor graphics, Juice Salon in India takes advantage of the escalator’s shuffling real estate to demonstrate the variety of haircuts they can deliver. The execution is simple: a static head at the bottom of the escalator meets a series of different hairstyles with every descending step, and each head-hair combination is a perfect match.

Advertising on escalators isn’t new by far. Heck, there’s companies dedicated to the job (http://www.escasite.com/). But for the most part, traditional escalator ads are the same graphic repeated over and over again—something consumers are used to channeling out. Juicy Salon's ad is a clever idea, conceived by Rediffusion DY&R of India, is hands down a genius one, but one that will have to undoubtedly be switched up and one-upped in later executions.

Seeing this now, I can totally see how marketers could use this existing medium for other projects. How about a cosmetic brand (same nose and mouth, different eye makeup looks), the ASPCA (same boy at bottom, different dogs and cats) or even a dating site (girl at bottom gets matched up with different guys on each step)? The possibilities are endless.

[Via Ads of the World]

Advertasting: Tongue Ring Ads in Brazil

It's one thing to say you like the taste of the new Coke Zero, it's another to brand that opinion on your tastebuds. According to Adrants, Coca-cola is pioneering the world of "advertasting," in other words, they're working with tattoo and piercing parlors in Brazil to give away free piercings to those who pose for the camera with Coke-Zero-branded tongue rings.

All the pics are then uploaded to a Google PicasaWeb gallery, directed from www.cocacolazero.com.br/linguapatrocinada. Interesting that Coke chose to upload their images to a Google gallery rather than host it off their own site, but it remains to be seen what the end purpose of these images will be. Still, I fail to see the effectiveness of this campaign apart from generating buzz. But wouldn't said buzz be built from the particpants agreeing to wear their Coke Zero piercings beyond their photo shoot?

Puma Perfume Running Around Warsaw

This was interesting. Puma launched an outdoor guerilla marketing campaign featuring a virtual runner projected on the faces of buildings in Warsaw, Poland. As the vehicle holding the projector moves, his image races towards a bottle of Puma perfume, creating the illusion that he's running across passing buildings. As neat as this seems, I can't help but feel for the poor folks living inside the windows of his "racetrack." I know I wouldn't want someone beaming a 2ft arse into my window at 3 in the morning.

Eat My Words: Ads on Spoons

I try not to make eating out a habit. Especially since the choices in Midtown aren't exactly affordable. But with my train station exiting on 32nd and Broadway, it's hard not to get sucked into the bright lights and pungent smells of Koreatown and its fishy pickled goodness.

Which brought me to Chung Moo Ro, a narrow unassuming Korean restaurant that’s relatively new to the block compared to mainstays like Gahm Mi Oak and Kum Gang San. And “new” in more ways than one. As soon as my waiter set our table, I noticed a little wax paper “shirt” wrapped around the bowl of my spoon. I thought it was a safety precaution at first. Like having the wrapping around chopsticks. But upon closer inspection, I realized the spoon was already used, and that the paper was a carefully placed advertisement for Charmsoju, a brand of soju, or Korean rice wine.

What? Spoon advertising? What has this world come to?-- were my initial thoughts. What’s next? Toilet paper and potato skins? Then I realized that this kind of invasiveness/pervasiveness is probably not a huge deal in Korean culture. The street outside the restaurant is brimming with neon and electronic signs and ads from the ground to five stories up. Brand messages are expected, and perhaps welcomed, in the densely populated metropolis of Seoul, not to mention small pockets of real estate like Koreatown. Koreans are used to having their senses assaulted from every angle—is a little logo on a soup spoon that big a deal?

I doubt I’ll return to Chung Moo Ro. But the spoon isn’t to blame. In fact, the spoon will probably be the most memorable tidbit from my meal.