If anyone can sell Burger King Whoppers, Domino's Pizzas and a book on dieting, it's Alex Bogusky. He believes that to stay trim all you have to do is eat from a nine inch plate. So if your New Year's resolution is to lose weight, and you're a Crispin Porter fan, stock up on some nine inch plates and throw away all your foot-long hot dogs.

Alex Bogusky doesn't think bigger is better. He believes we should think small—especially if we want to stay trim. The idea that if you eat less, you weigh less is hardly a new concept, but it's one that Alex has packaged into a tidy little eating plan and book, The 9-Inch Diet, that hits stores this week.

Having a rough day at work? Want to blow a hole through your creative briefs and account exec?
Don't do it! At least, don't do it without some practice at a firing range. This website has an awesome ad agency shoot 'em up game. Just click on Range 2.0.

Hello all. And a happy 2009.

Mine isn't happy. It hasn't been happy since 2 pm on the 31st of December 2008 when the adland server - named AMMO - crashed badly for the third time and took all it's backups with it.

This is not ammo that we are running on now. I do not trust ammo anymore, despite new discs (twice) new chassi (twice) and new kernel, that Dell PE2950 twin Quad Core Xeon is without a doubt the most crash-prone machine that I have ever encountered, and there still no word as to why it crashed like that. Three times. Taking three out of six RAID5 discs into never-never-bit-land. Yes, the impossible happened to me, thrice.

So here we are running on a slow previous machine with old backups and as you can see, much is lost. While I do my best to recreate all those posts, I can not recreate users through a series of wild guesses. I can not recreate user uploaded files (but will be fetching as much as I can from various caches on the web) - and all the while, I was working to fix things before the superbowl - and yes all of that work is lost too.

Pardon me if I'm a tad too depressed to elaborate further, I'm also quite busy as we will now have to move this to another machine and that takes some doing (ever seen an Art Director do data migration before? ha!) Because, as always, I am the one that will be doing everything. We don't have a crew of clever techies working for us, just this crazy Art Director here doing her very best. You may hate that your favorite video is now offline (at the moment, but I will get everything back, I'll work day and night I promise), you may curse loudly that your account was wiped, I totally understand. Just remember, my heart is broken too.

I'll give more updates as I have time to share them.

Meanwhile, just so that people don't run into bugs, the signups are off, and the upgrades are off. Luckily I have a copy of those updates in another machines as well - so those who lost upgraded accounts please forward your latest receipt to host -at - ad-rag.com and I'll get you (and a new account) sorted as soon as I can.

Advertisers who yearn to be on during the Super Bowl but can't afford the $3 million price tag can now get in for $395,000. The catch? They'll have to share the :30 spot with seven other sponsors. As a bonus, the spot will be available for a year at SuperBowlGlory.com
A few companies have been contacted, but it's not known if anyone has committed yet.  read more »

Arlandastad and First Hotels will begin building this hotel in 2009, as you can see there's a massive portrait of Crown Princess Victoria covering the entire building. An abstract stamp-like impression, where the horizontal lines varying thickness create the portrait.
I'm not saying my usual "gee, I've seen that before". I'm saying I know from experience that it'll look ossom. ;) In fact, I might even stay there if I can book a room in her nose. I've always aspired to get up the princess' nose.

Left: The planned princess hotel - Right me and my freehand portrait of Yuri Gagarin painted straight on my wall.
P.S. I won't be posting much around Xmas break because I'm busy working. Sorry. D.S.

Remember way back in 2003? Coke still doesn't get it - Julmust rules.
Yes, it's that time of year again. And Coke is selling us christmas again. For those who can read Swedish, Kontaktmannen is also ranting about this, with a few well chosen swearwords this year "Släpp musten för i helvete". Because yes, Coke still doesn't get it and they're still trying to make Coke synonymous with Jul in Sweden. As kontaktmannen so eloquently puts his point - Coke is the most drunk soft drink for 365 days, how can you even expect that this will suddenly be synonymous to an Xmas feeling, which most people only have for two weeks a year ? (And how do you become synonymous with christmas when you're synonymous with summer fun love, friendship, cinemas and whatever else?)

That's so true, whenever I see the new ad (Thanks Coke for shutting down the re-run of that horrid christmas trucks commercial we've seen every year since 1989), I shudder for two reasons. One, there's a flippin' world war style B-52 airplane dumping boxes of Coke over small Swiss looking towns. That's just creepy. I really don't like the connotations this brings up. Is it like that bomber that flew over east Berlin and dropped chocolate for the kids, if so what is Coke saying about Europe in general here? We're stuck in commie-land and only US Coke will help us? The symbolism is likely not even spotted by an American but over here it's borderline offensive.
Then, Coke is the hero in the ad, gleeful happy people holler "It's Christmas!" when a coke vending machine turns on and they can drink that brown softdrink... that .. they can drink all other times of the year. WTF? That makes no sense in a country where I throw myself at the first bottle of Julmust available only in late November. These bottles are not in the supermarket the rest of the year, so when you see them, it really means "holy shit it's Christmas!". You can't copy that when you crud is available all year round. No matter how many jolly santas that you put on the bottle. Coke even tried for a few years to make their own Julmust, with the very Swedish looking label and name "Bjäre julmust", but Swedes didn't fall for it, last year it was only available at McDonald's and this year they didn't bother making it at all.

But then, In the UK it seems to be going well, there some fool want to save the trucks, that is see that naff trucks advert every year until forever. That's my version of hell, folks. Coca Cola Christmas Commercial 2008 "It's Christmas" is available inside folks.

Twitter update: People are twittering to #Coke that julmust rules or "Leave Julmust alone!"  read more »

Now you don't have to work at Burger King to smell flame broiled. The King was kind enough to bottle the scent and sell it online. It's $3.99, about the price of a Whopper Value Meal.

The scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat.
Burger King, in its official description of Flame, the fast food restaurant's body spray for men.

See Firemeetdesire

Ah. I often argue that the media being identical doesn't mean that the idea is identical. Here on the other hand, what differs seems to be only the art directors choice of painting the city skyline as seen from above, vs on the sides of the pool. I don't care if they're intentional copies of each other, I'm more interested in which execution do you think is better?
First up, HSBC's Swimming pool for globalwarmingsolutions.co.in

It reminded me quite a bit of DDB Malaysia "waterworld" ambient underwater poster back in 2007.

(full views inside)

This version, for HSBC was created by Ogilvy & Mather in Mumbai, Hindistan (India)
Credits - EYY/ECD: Piyush Pandey • YY/CD: Rajiv Rao • SY/AD/RY/CW: Shirin Johari  read more »

Lets start adland-Friday off a little lighter than my morning has been, shall we? The top viral videos of 2008 have been edited together by Videogum, watch out for the Obama RockRolling you've been warned. Viral in this context does not mean "advertising" but don't be surprised if a lot of viral ads do something they found in this lot next year.

The mercury down in Oz are reporting a bit of a snafu for the athetist ad campaign there.

METRO'S refusal to run >ads for the Atheist Foundation is headed for the Anti-Discrimination Commission.
The foundation wanted to runs >ads on the backs of the state-owned company's buses that said: "Atheism - celebrate reason! Sleep in on Sunday mornings."
Foundation president David Nicholls said he was told, in effect, that the slogan was "too hot to handle".

The Metro buses have run ad campaigns on hot topics before, such as anti-abortion campaigns with some rather disturbing imagary, but they claim now that they don't run political or religious advertising or "anything that damages Metro's reputation". Which could mean that they'll ban anything they don't agree with.
Meanwhile, adfreak gossips that Christians making holy war on atheism >ads as a devout christian named JoEllen Murphy, is trying to raise $14,000 to counter the currently running American Humanist Association campaign with her own campaign, featuring >ads with the line, "Why believe? Because I created you and I love you, for goodness' sake. - God."
Lets not forget London CD Simon Veksner who is putting the final touches on a personal project a campaign for "DiscoverAtheism.com".
I'm not sure what you'll achieve by "unselling" religion to anyone, of if it's even possible. I would whole heartily support and ad campaign that argued the merits of a truly secular state, in order to let people agree that it is time to finally create one with no religion tainting schools for example, but if people fancy believing in, God, G-d, Allah, little green men at home or the flying spaghetti monster, whaddyagonnado aye? I'm not really sure what it'll achieve but tick religious people off, then again maybe that is the point? Anyway, he has a cute script-idea up, where people in a book store re-sort he bibles onto the "fiction" shelf, which sounds like it would work just as well as an guerilla idea if you can find enough people to do it. It reminds me of my younger self, when I went to try and find The Poetic Edda in several academic and university bookstores and kicked up a shitstorm each time that I found it wasn't sorted on the "religion" shelf, it wasn't even on the "mythology" shelves, but hidden somewhere in the dusty corners of the history section. But it also reminded one of the commentors over at scampblog of the reshelving project, where people put Orwell's 1984 in non-fiction as a statement against laws like the Patriot act in the US. Still, a nice idea.

Oopsie, Donny Donny Donny... Not having a great month are we Donny? First, his CNBC show "The Big Idea" was put on hiatus because we all know that when the economy goes bad people save on everything advertising (which is really the opposite of what they should do, and big ideas are not expensive, just rare). Now he's apparently been caught kissing someone elses wife - what he didn't know was that her husband had a private detective shadow her. Or so gossips page Six.

The private eye shadowed the attractive blonde until he was able to take surveillance photos of her kissing Deutsch, sources say. Sandler's lawyer, Stephen Gassman, filed for divorce in Nassau County last week and the complaint is said to name Deutsch as the third party.

If you fancy, this post has a soundtrack. Feel free to tune into 21 tracks 87 minutes of girls rocking harder to set the mood.

Do check that article out, and watch how the comments immediately go straight into the usual arguing "but men are portrayed as doofuses/inept/helpless in advertising too" gender-war. It derails fast. You can practically play gender-stereotypes-in-advertising-arguing-bingo with the comments as the first thing I see is the Diet Coke women ogling men ad mentioned. BINGO! What do I win? Please let it be a red Ferrari.

Lets get one thing straight off the bat: two wrongs don't make a right - applying a negative behavior equally still does not justify the behavior. Stereotypes are bad all around - all of them. The women as object for the male gaze as well as the dad is a doofus are equally crap. Nobody wins. We clear on this?

Now, something really grates me when I see those comments rolling in - I've see them all before and filled in all my bingo-cards - every time someone writes an article about how sexist advertising can be against women, comments about how men are portrayed in ads take over the threads like Kudzu. Quelling a females complaints about the male oppression seen in ads, with "we get it too - I am also oppressed, boo HOO!" is just another way to silence women's critique of society and reinforce gender norms. You guys have problems BIGGER than mine, as usual. Ain't that grand?

You can practically set watches by this, someone writes about misogynist or sexist advertising and how it affects females, and some (presumably) men immediately jump in and complain about the dad-is-a-doofus stereotype they have to endure when watching advertising. See what you did there guys? You made it about men again. I can picture you at the breakfast table with yanking your little sisters hair yelling "But MooOOom, she started it!".  read more »

The Sony Bravia-drome, the worlds largest zoetrope introduces motion like no other to the world and I was lucky enough to get to check it out for real down in Italy on Thursday night.

Mad men Kodak carousel presentation can now eat it's heart out as the "wheel of life" Zoetrope, a.k.a the 'Daedalum' ('the wheel of the devil) has been enlarged to a whopping 15 meters in diameter for Sony Bravia's presentation of their new motionflow technology to us potential buyers of all things TV. By the way, If you fancy you can build your own wee zoetrope while you curse the fact that you're not working on the Sony account.

The Sony Bravia Drome, as it's called, is officially the world largest zoetrope as the Guinness world record men were there to check the large structure - with an old fashioned tape measure. "We called up Guinness and told them that we were going to do this and asked them to check it for a world record, they responded 'how big?' and when we said 15 meters in diameter they replied 'oh dear, we need to get a new tape measure'" explained a Sony Germany rep whose name I never managed to catch over the loud party mingling. I now know it was Christian Luecke, General Manager, TV Marketing Europe Division, Sony Europe.

We, the invited press peeps, had been dragged around the cold city of Turin all day and were now rewarded with shiny TV company, a suave DJ and fingerfoods in a much warmer tent area as we could watch the commercial being shot just outside the large windows without freezing our arses off. Bless. The extras outside were huddling around the enourmous red lighted strucure, jumping and waving when the camera pointed their way like the audience doing the wave at a football stadium.

Why Italy? Why Turin? Or to be exact, why the smaller town of Venaria outside of Turin? Ben Cyzer, head of the Sony account at Fallon, explains: "Obviously the inspiration was the oldest form of motion, which is the zoetrope, and given now that we're moving to the latest technology in motion we took that inspiration and modernized it, and brought to life The Bravia Drome. It's really no more complicated than that. Like our previous Bravia ideas it requires simplicity and I think this is a very simple idea, dramatizing motion. It's in Turin because Kaká, in the middle of the season, obviously can not travel very far but also, the juxtaposing of the old classic square to the new modern zoetrope adds to the visual idea."

(Much more inside, kids - read on.)  read more »

But not only that, Informationweek reports that the spammers in question are also banned from facebook. Facebook Wins $873 Million Judgment Against Spammer

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel handed down the award last week following four months of litigation. In addition to the monetary judgment, the ruling prohibits the defendants, Adam Guerbuez and his company, Atlantis Blue Capital, from accessing Facebook for any reason or assisting others in doing so.

AP reports that Adam Guerbuez of Montreal has been "difficult to find since Facebook sued him four months ago." I bet he has been.

Facebook isn't just breeding ground for spam, but also "Koobface" worm, all sorts of phishing tricks and more recently Facebook IM spam is gaining grounds. How easy is it to become a fake friend on facebook, and then spam you? Turns out it's silly easy: Computerworld has step-by-step instructions.

Step 1: Request to be "friends" with a dozen strangers on MySpace. Let's say half of them accept. Collect a list of all their friends.

Step 2: Go to Facebook and search for those six people. Let's say you find four of them also on Facebook. Request to be their friends on Facebook. All accept because you're already an established friend.

Step 3: Now compare the MySpace friends against the Facebook friends. Generate a list of people that are on MySpace but are not on Facebook. Grab the photos and profile data on those people from MySpace and use it to create false but convincing profiles on Facebook. Send "friend" requests to your victims on Facebook.

As a bonus, others who are friends of both your victims and your fake self will contact you to be friends and, of course, you'll accept. In fact, Facebook itself will suggest you as a friend to those people.

The irony here is the a lot of people use facebook instead of email, because email has been so polluted with spam that it's near useless these days. You can run, but you can't hide!

Previous article talking about Facebook on Adland:
People used in ads for Danish politicians on facebook without their permission, here we go again!
On Facebook, your face can be used in ads (without you knowing it) via SocialMedia
Facebook fertile grounds for adware and phishing scams
Facebook dials down the ad creepyness a tad after ruining more than Christmas  read more »

Sony Ericsson’s C905 Cyber-shot™ phone gets a starring role and stops the city in its tracks

The company commissioned professional photographer Matt Stuart to take photos, using the 8.1 megapixel C905 Cyber-shot™ camera phone, to use in the launch of its new campaign.

The Sony Ericsson C905 Cyber-Shot™ has a 8.1megapixel camera.

This social media news release contains photos of the C905 Cyber-Shot™ in action.  read more »

Create Your Own Sea Kitten at peta.org!

In a very unlike PETA campaign, nobody famous or pregnant is getting naked or comparing bizarre greyhound murders to chicken slaughter. Peta has done some market research and found that nobody likes fish. They're slimy, scaly, have eyes on either side of their pointy little heads, and are generally un-cuddly. So, in order to drum up some sympathies for these unloveable creatures they are re-branding them. Save the sea kitten, won't you?

The Orb lent their music skills to Stink for this subtly creepy Amnesty International spot. Darkfibre directed it.  read more »

A friend of mine loves being a muslim in Sweden when the Ramadam falls in the winter, because if it falls in the summer "I loose my temper and so much weight" due to our midnight fun-sun. In the winter it gets dark so fast that Ramadan is hardly noticeable, except when it's over and you need a machete to cut through all that parsley and dodge the dates the supermarket has stocked up on.
Bates141 Jakarta created this campaign which used the back-light in the billboard to explain the concept of Ramadhan fasting to those who don't know. In the day, empty plates and bowls, at night - plenty of food. Gee, here I thought most people in the country with the largest muslim population in the world would already know this.

P?R Water Filtration Systems makes tapwater taste gooder cuz' it's cleaner, selling point "removes unwanted contaminants". Like odor and reducing some of the chlorine (which is the bad taste by the way). It won't remove that US government added flouride you guys have in your tap water which counts as an "unwanted contaminant" in my book. Nor will it remove bacteria and viruses. To remove Cryptosporidium, try just boiling the water instead. Ooops, did I just unsell this thing? Sorry. TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles might hate me now. I think I'll have a tall glass of pure fresh nice tasting Swedish no flouride tap water right now.

Opportunity makes the thief they say, thus Lowe Bangkok offers you the reason for CCTV, mission impossible mask-revealing style.  read more »