Spotted in India: Coke Tree

Since I was in a more Christian part of India shortly after Christmas, there was still a lot of holiday related decoration up everywhere. In one town I saw this large faux Christmas tree covered in soda cans. I was hoping it was just a nice bit of recycling, but upon closer examination the decoration was clearly an advertising ploy as it was covered in only pristine Coca-Cola cans. Coke was also advertising their classic (white skinned) Santa Claus on billboards throughout the area as well.

Spotted in India: Point Blank School Zone

A good majority of the street signs I encountered in India had accompanying advertising.

I found this one in Hampi particularly creepy since the juxtaposition of language and image made me think of school shootings (perhaps something that is not as common in India as it is here).

There were also a series of signs across bridges in Goa reminded people to wear helmets, not drink and drive, go the speed limit, and not use cell phones while driving, which appropriately enough were sponsored by a phone company.

Spotted in India: Beyond Billboards

I recently spent two weeks in India, specifically parts of Goa, Hampi, and Mumbai. The majority of the areas I stayed in though were smaller villages and towns and one of the first things I noticed was that the only places that were recently painted were buildings (often small businesses) that were entirely covered in advertising. Considering how rundown the majority of the buildings were, I could see the appeal in a free paint job, even though in most cases the ad overwhelmed any other signage for what the building contained (and was usually completely unrelated). Interestingly when the ads were no longer under contract in many cases the words and logos were just obscured enough to make them illegible, but the main components of the design remained (sorry I didn't manage to photograph any of theses, they were actually quite visually intriguing).

Spotted in Boston: Street Art?

I enjoy reading a few blogs about street art so I'm always on the look out for good examples wherever I travel. In Boston the other week I spotted this billboard that I had to give a good long look at to figure out if it was just falling apart or if someone had done this intentionally. In the end I figured it was just something that happened, but I love the idea that the rough/dirty reality is being revealed behind the pristine image reminding you that you "can't buy happiness".

International Vegetarian Union

The ad reads "Vegetables are all your body needs"

Enough to make you quit the meat?






Advertising Agency: JWT Kuwait
Creative Directors: Alessandro Antonini, Mark Makhoul
Photographer: Tommy Morris
Retoucher: Nabil Kamara
Published: August 2009




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Book Review: Ad Nauseam

Ad Nauseam is a entertaining collection of classic articles and new material from Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky, the main voices behind the brilliantly caustic Stay Free Magazine. I actually met Carrie in the mid-90's after falling in love with the magazine (emphasis on the "zine"), which turned a critical eye to consumer culture, and more specifically the corporations and advertising that promoted it. It turned out we were both in NYC at the time, so I was delighted to help out with some photography and design (including a map of the advertising saturation of Manhattan that was handed out in Times Square and is still available online).* Since this was before the internet was the source for all information, it was a rare treat to find someone else who shared an interest in presenting a critical response to advertising and the corporatization of culture, plus it was actually funny to read. The book is a terrific reminder of what made the magazine such a treat: it deals with serious topics in clever and often hilarious ways (including multiple choice tests at the end of each section!). Where Adbusters moved away from their parody ads and Buy Nothing Day activism, Stay Free retained a gritty, street cred (and sense of humor) that sometimes involved playing pranks on unsuspecting NYC residents in Carrie's neighborhood. Having read a lot of the material in its original form it's sad to realize how much of it is still completely relevant to our current world 10 or so years later. For anyone who missed Stay Free Magazine's heyday (the magazine is no longer in print, though the blog version lives on) or needs a primer on what is so messed up about the world of advertising (and why you actually are affected by it, despite what you think) Ad Nauseam is a must read. Ask for it at your local independent bookstore.

Ad Nauseam
Carrie McLaren & Jason Torchinsky
$18.00
Faber & Faber, Inc.

*Fun fact: One of the first images in the book (a parody Gap ad) is actually a photo I took for the back of the magazine (if I remember correctly we did that shoot on the roof of Matador Records!).

Selling Sex

We all know that advertisers use sex as their default tool (ahem) for selling stuff when they don't have any smarter ideas, but when 100+ recent "sexy" ads are strung together by Creative Bits it's actually shocking to be reminded how sexist and pointless so many of them really are...



The individual ads have also been compiled on their blog HERE. Definitely take a moment to scroll through, it's fairly overwhelming.

WWF : Act Now For The Planet

The Ogilvy agency created three humorous visuals for the WWF called Emergency; with some great photographs from the Romanian studio Carioca. The three themes are "Ambulance, Firemen & Boat".
The message is ’ÄúYou can’Äôt afford to be slow in an emergency’Äù



















































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Your Ad Is Gross

Dear Social Media PR Person,
Per your request I am featuring the image you sent me on my blog. However:

A. Do not send me a press release for an ad that doesn't have to do with the subject of my blog.
B. Do not send me ads that feature a girl under the age of 18 in an overtly sexual pose. I do not care whose daughter she is.
C. If you do A and/or B, expect me to point out how disgusting it is.





[UPDATE] If you want to know more about this campaign, Agency Spy does a nice job telling the rest of the story HERE.

Linkage: From Social Trading Cards to Social Stock Exchanges

I'm heading to Austin for a week, so hopefully this'll tide you over while I'm away...


The social reality trading card alternative to Pokemon.

Investing in a Social Stock Exchange.

Taxicab curator. Thanks Carlos!

Fallen Princesses (image shown) via

A classic anti-billboard screed from 1960. via

Eco-friendly alternative to motivational office posters (image shown). Thanks Marc!

Duchamp Reloaded (image shown) via

Clever Condoms

The ocean of plastic is on the East Coast as well.

Mini-Golf meets Art in Brooklyn. Thanks Mica!

Bacardi using misogyny to sell alcohol...to women?! via

And for those of you following the story from last week...
busted Barrel Monster artist gets a commision...from the company he stole from. Thanks Carlos!

A Drink To Die For

The L'Desh Fresh campaign for bottled water is not what it initially appears to be...



More info from the creators of this campaign for Water Partners can be found HERE.

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Awards Can't Feed The Hungry

Osocio, the fantastic social marketing blog, (that I very occasionally contribute to) has a new advertising campaign...sort of. Marc, the founder of the site, asked the folks at Steal Our Ideas to suggest a campaign about encouraging social marketers to check their motives. Read more here.

Stay Free!: The Book

Ad Nauseum is a brand new book about consumer culture from my friends at the Stay Free!. It's a collection of new items along with material from their fantastic and sadly defunct Stay Free! Magazine, which was a consistently smart & funny critique of marketing/advertising. Find out more HERE.

Linkage: Cloth bags are bad and corporations are local?

Go figure, the plastic industry says that cloth bags are bad! via

Speculative architecture fiction.(image shown) via

Making newpaper boxes into planters. (image shown) Thanks Carlos!

Free e-book on sustainable printing. via

The growth of the greener lunchroom.

Documenting product placement (and displacement). (image shown) Thanks Mica!

The new greenwashing: corporations go "local". Thanks Mica!

Linkage: From Green Guitars to Green Weddings

Students help Break The Jam and encourage people to Give Way in DC. (images shown)

Jobs for Change wants to help you work for nonprofits.

Patching cracks with Legos. (image shown) via

The greening of guitars.

The greening of weddings.

Free books for London commuters.

Mapping the NYC advertising takeover. via

Starbucks Twitter campaign hijacked by documentary of their anti-union practices. via

Linkage: From Dumpster Pools to Slum Tours

Turning dumpsters into public pools, gardens, skate ramps...and more! (image shown) via

Shop Well With You is a body image resource for women surviving cancer.

Helping street vendors understand their rights visually. (image shown) via

Slum tours, the future of tourism?

Anti-war ads show what goes around comes around literally. (image shown)

Once again Sappi is offering grants for design projects around social issues. via

"Now Slower with More Bugs" stickers for software or organic gardening! via

The future of insulation? Mushrooms! Thanks Carlos!

50 Cars or 1 Bus

A Swedish bus company takes the environmental math of cars vs buses literally...



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Linkage: Plastering Over Kids and Avoiding Gorilla Gazes

Freaky ads make a powerful statement about neglected children. (image shown)

A clever way to get people to see an art exhibition... pay them!

One zoo's solution to gorillas who don't like to be watched? Literal eye glasses. (image shown) via

Roughstock Studios helps you choose the right Green Certification.

New Japanese vending machines are dispensing free snacks during disasters. Thanks Carlos!

FEMA is no longer distributing their disaster coloring book (but you can still download it from the Smoking Gun).

The always dependable Onion explains how corporations are going green. via

Type is for the birds...literally. (image by swardraws shown) Thanks Juliette!

Not your average bank.

An amazingly progressive commercial about tolerance from the Argentinian Banco Provincia. It's hard to imagine a bank in the US doing anything nearly as forward thinking...



Thanks Carlos!

Mascots Strike Back

The Anti Advertising Agency provided the dialog used in this new video as a Creative Commons licensed download four years ago...


Product Placement from Matti Niinimˆ§ki on Vimeo.

Hope - Obama - Tbox

After this ad from the Turkish bank Garanti, it's now the turn of the Turkish clothing brand T-Box to copy Shepard Fairey's poster "Hope".

The ad says : "Hope Dedik". in Turkish, "hop dedik" means "we said : enough !", but with a word play it says "we said : hope". "Our only hope is T-Box".





















By the way, concerning the Garanti ad, President Obama was in Istanbul last week and he must have been surprised to see his portrait like that all over the city.

Linkage: Cooking with Blockbuster and Pimping the Homeless

Growing your own food and have too much, why not trade with fellow gardeners? Thanks Scott!

PimpThisBum.com written on homeless man's sign makes a real difference. (image shown) via Thanks Russ!

New label to look out for in the coming years: Water Stewardship. via

E-waste recycling done right, in pictures (image shown). Thanks Mim!

Improv Everywhere's April Fool's video ends fooling newscasters who don't do their research.

DIY stove made from Blockbuster drop box. (image shown)

Target Women's hilarious take on Carl's Jr. ads is not to be missed.

Turkish Obama in Garanti Bank Ads

Istanbul, Turkey : U.S. President Barack Obama is all over the city, all over the country, in the streets, on the radio and on TV. This is of course a fake. This is a commercial for the Turkish Bank Garanti, promoting a loan interest support of 1.19 %. They shot the commercial as if the real U.S. president was himself promoting this bank. This is so cheap. I'm pretty sure most of the uneducated population here, in Turkey, believe it's the real one. Note the resemblance with Shepard Fairey's Obama.

Coen Brothers on Clean Coal

Another in the Reality series of "clean" coal commercials, this time by the Academy Award winning Coen Brothers...



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Syke: Energy Drink for Smokers?

A recent article in the local free newspaper Style Weekly tipped me off to a curious underground campaign focused at young people in Virginia. It's for a new energy drink called Syke (which is not currently available in stores), but is being hyped as an extreme beverage that is "a secret blend of awesomeness and chemically engineered ingredients to help you live life faster." But all is not right in the land of Syke, and Style reveals that the campaign is actually a creation of the Rescue Change Social Group, "which develops programs to get young people involved in healthier lifestyles". Indeed over the coming months Syke, which is sponsoring actual music concerts, will get revealed as a dangerous product and eventually the "company" that makes it will be publicly shamed as part of what is a multi-phase anti-smoking campaign aimed to get under teens radars by having Syke be a metaphorical stand-in for cigarettes. Will it work? Style is skeptical. I'm intrigued to see where it goes, but the challenge of connecting the dots for their audience does seem massive. What do you think, is Syke the future of social marketing to teens?

Read the entire Style article HERE.

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The Church of Now

Obama's inclusion of "nonbelievers" in his inaugural address reminded me of a project I worked on a few years ago. My friend Andy Deemer asked me if I would help him out with My God a documentary he was making about starting a new religion. One of the two people whom he had chosen to follow in the film was Josh Boden, who had created The Church of Now (also know as Nowism), which featured such tenants as "Laughter is a MUST!" and "Everything is contextual". This punk rock styled anti-religion, which had meetings in bars, needed a graphic identity so I was hired to do some branding concepts. Playing off of the irreverance of the concept, the aesthetic of punk rock show flyers, and the language Josh was using to describe his "church" I developed a series of initial concepts (shown). They went over quite well with Josh, though sadly the church never really caught on and I don't think the designs were ever used. The film is currently in limbo as Andy works on other projects, including promoting Poultrygeist, which he produced for Troma recently, though he has plans to return to My God eventually.

Linkage

Well this week flew by thanks to MLK and Obama and so there were plenty of links I didn't get around to writing about once again...

DIY laser bike lane via

Urban Repaid Squad makes their own bike lanes (shown)

Affordable recycled paper houses thanks Carlos & Mark!

Women run co-operative housecleaning service in Brooklyn

Replace ads with art via Firefox plugin

LeVar Burton explores the Science of Peace thanks Mica!

Osocio says goodbye to W campaigns

Don't feed the lions: the street art of Posterchild (shown) via

Target Women

My sister recently turned me on to the excellent Current TV segment Target Women in which Sarah Haskins comments on advertising that focuses on women in her own special way...



Watch more episodes HERE.

New Year's Resolution & Missing Links

Well, I got woefully behind in posting here last year and ended up with a ridiculous backlog of stuff I wanted to share. To that end I've resolved to do two things in 2009:
1. Make more of an effort to immediately blog about items I want to share (rather than bookmarking for later)
2. Save most reposts for a regular roundup (I'll aim for weekly, but no promises there).

To start the year off with a clean slate, here's a jumbo post of last year's missing links...

A free report on the efficacy of nonprofit taglines from Getting Attention.

Pay what you want music directly from artists like Kristin Hersh, Xiu Xiu, Deerhoof, and more.

Animated graphic of Walmart's takeover of America.

Animated version of the hilarious Get Your War On.

Subvertr wants to be the Flickr of subversive image manipulation.

Greenwashers beware EcoLableing.org is investigating your claims.

Get prepared for summer with the Skin Deep subscreen database.

Socially conscious designers are encouraged to sign on to the Designer's Accord.

Studio 360 interviews Steven Heller on design propaganda.

Design 21's socially conscious design blog.

World maps adjusted for accuracy. (thanks Stephanie!)

The Spirit wants your old cell phones. (thanks Mica!)

Amazee want to encourage social collaboration instead of just social networking. (thanks Mica!)

Open source filmmaking.

World's oldest hamburger. (thanks Eliza!)

Twitter activism. (thanks Marc!)

Faux cardboard sheets support homeless. (thanks Mica!)

Fake roadsigns from artists. (thanks Marc!)

X-ray messages for the TSA.

The mysterious Poster Boy makes art in the NYC subway. (thanks Mica!)

Neil fights back against marketing in The Bonfire of The Brands.

Cake goes solar. (thanks Justin!)

48 Hour Film Project meets fair trade Equal Exchange. (thanks Mica!)

The Green Bible

Greenhouse Gas Stock Photography

Recycled bottle temple

Google Street View performance art. (thanks Mica!)

Drive-By Press: the mobile printmaking studio. (thanks Josh!)

Shared Culture a documentary about Creative Commons.

Gaming the possible future with Superstruct.

Free strips of paper!

Do bicycle helmets work? (thanks Coryndon!)

Buying for Equality: Human Rights Campaign shopping guide 09.

Suicide Food catalogs creepy animal mascot food logos.

Blue Man Group the school. (thanks Mica!)

The Story of Stuff goes international.


And also bunch of great articles from The Christian Science Monitor:

Why white roofs are green.

How green are those jeans?

The benefits of bicycle recycling.

DIY Green Cleaning

Local food cafeteria

Environmental consciounsess wins wars.

Products as TV plots

Carbon labeling on food products


WHEW! Hopefully I can keep my resolutions and that won't have to happen agian!

Fine Under: Not All Advertising Sucks

Even though I'm generally disgusted by the increasing intrusion of large scale commercial advertising onto every imaginable surface, I was pleasently surprised on my brief trip to Washington DC yesterday to discover some in the tunnels between the stations that was actually quite delightful. A series of lighted stills move by at just the right pace to create a short animation. The ghostly images appear with no warning and are rather eerie in their silence (perhaps not the best effect for every product), but also brought on a childlike sense of glee in seeing the classic zoetrope effect at that scale. I'd love to see what an NGO or artist could do with this medium.

I found this video of it on YouTube, though it's really much more dramatic in person...

Smells Clean

The Reality campaign continues its series of entertaining "Clean" Coal commercials...

Amnesty : You Are Powerful

Here is Amnesty International U.K.'s latest film called "you Are Powerful". It was created for the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Agency : Mother. Music : R.E.M - Until the Day is Done
From Dailymotion.


Here is another video of the Declaration of Human Rights re-interpreted in this nice motion film created by Seth Brau. A very nice mix of illustrations and typography. Produced by Amy Poncher. Music from Rumspringa.



Source : Human Rights Action Center.

Frosty The Coalman

You missed your chance to see this catchy holiday ditty on the oxymoronic American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCE) website, but thankfully YouTube has kept it alive in all its greenwashing glory...






For an alternative view on "clean" coal take a visit to Reality...

Stop Pain

Check out the campaign from the French non-governmental humanitarian organization, supported by the World Health Organization and state-approved, Douleurs Sans Frontiˆ®res (Pain Without Borders). Like Doctors Without Borders they try to help people with medical and social care in areas where suffering caused by wars, disasters or hunger never ends.
In their campaign they used the treadmill to show the endless suffering of people in places like Cambodia, Indonesia or Africa.
This campaign was made in March of 2008 by TBWA/MAP Paris and is meant for raising funds.

"To put an end to endless pain, Make a donation"
War : Cambodia


















Tsunami : Indonesia


















Fires and War : Africa


















They also have a video :


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