The Media Blog

On reflection... Nokia made a mistake

Oh Nokia, what have you done? If you're going to release a video claiming to show how good the camera on your new phone is make sure the people demonstrating it don't cycle past any windows which clearly show the reflection of a professional cameraman doing the filming out of a van on a video camera. Major hat tip to The Verge on this one:

 

Specsavers wins the Olympics...

You can spend as much as you like on being an official Olympic sponsor but there is no substitute for a creative idea and Specsavers has stolen the show with this lightning quick response to the Olympic flag mix up. The ad has already appeared in this morning's papers:

Oddbins takes on Olympic brand police

Bottle shop Oddbins has added its name to the list of businesses findings creative ways to cash-in on not being able to cash-in on the Olympics. 

The company has announced a cheeky 30% discount scheme for Pepsi-drinking, Nike-wearing, KFC-eating, iPhone-using, Mastercard-toting, Vauxhall-driving, British Gas-buying drinkers (which may not be that many people... but let's not worry about that).

The company has deliberately picked the closest competitors of all the major Olympic sponsors to highlight what it is calling LOCOG's iniquitous "cabal".

You can read more about this story here.

This has nothing to do with the London Olympics...

One enterprising website called ThatBigEventInLondon.co.uk seems to think it has found a way around the strict commercial guidelines of an unnamed Big Event in London and is offering a range of 'reality check souvenir bags'...

If you buy all three it will set you back £45, which is just £5 more than a London 2012 £5 coin. Go figure.

The most offensive advert ever...?

To mark its 50th anniversary, The Advertising Standards Authority has released a list of the most complained about adverts of all time. The list speaks volumes about gentle British sensibilities - not least because the most offensive advert of all time, based on number of complaints received, was guilty of nothing more than depicting people singing with their mouths full. Shocking stuff, I'm sure you'll agree:    

See also:
From Ryan Giggs to Ryanair... Censorship, bans and 'money can't buy' publicity
ASA to investigate Snickers celebrity Twitter ads
Oh Yoda! Not you as well...
Nandos doesn't chicken out of controversial TV ad
Childish newspaper ad of the week

 

High Street posters get added honesty

Add this to the list of adverts vandalised in a creative, pointed fashion: a street artist in Hamburg has taken it upon themselves to start adding Photoshop toolboxes to adverts which carry obviously manipulated images:

[Source: Uncharted Maps.]

Creepy magazine ad of the day

"What's that in your jewellery box?"

"It's my collection of severed baby hands and feet."

Ad placement of the day...

If you look carefully you might just spot a little bit of advertising from Sky (39 per cent owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp) around The Guardian's double page spread on Murdoch's entry in the Leveson fray this week (hat tip Scott Bryan):

Is this a defensive measure by Sky - an undaunted attempt to capitalise on one of the week's big media stories or a cheeky attempt to drown out potentially negative coverage? Or is it simply unfortunate sheduling? 

From Ryan Giggs to Ryanair... Censorship, bans and 'money can't buy' publicity

It seems it has always been the case that attempts to stop the public seeing something only ever increases the publicity generated. Just ask Ryan Giggs - named this week as the fooballer behind a high court injunction, to the surprise of absolutely nobody. 

Channel 4 Dispatches also received a welcome boost to its likely viewing figures this week after ticket resale site Viagogo failed in its attempts to stop the channel airing the investigation into its business practices. Cue a great piece of publicity on the Guardian's website, teeing the programme up nicely just hours before it aired.

But it works both ways and there are also those businesses and individuals who appear to court the publicity which can result from regulatory or public criticism.

Bookmaker Paddy Power is no stranger to having adverts banned or blacklisted. It also knows how much publicity results when its adverts find themselves in the firing line.

This week the company is back on the censor's spike after it revealed an advert based around a rather laboured and unoriginal joke about transgender people.

The company no doubt planned for a scenario where the advert got the all clear but Paddy Power also knows from experience that the closer it gets to the fine line between what's allowed and what isn't there will be benefits whatever happens.

Get banned and the company gets the kind of coverage that money literally cannot buy - while having to write off an advert that looked a fairly inexpensive affair. Don't get banned and it just gets the ad slots it's paid for while stirring controversy with every airing.

Paddy Power may not lose much sleep about the people his advert has angered. Adverts based on jokes about blind men mistaking a cat for a football or punters getting confused about transgender people are almost certainly not meant to appeal to all.

Gambling is one of the most competitive industries in the UK and in the run up to horse racing's big festivals of Cheltenham and Aintree, there will be plenty who think a bookmaker who is famous for making injudicious decisions sounds like a bookmaker worth knowing.

Another fiercely competitive industry is the airline business and that too has given rise to a company who knows the value of marketing controversy. 

Ryanair this month earned saturation media coverage when adverts featuring stewardesses in their underwear were banned and branded sexist.

From news bulletins on BBC Radio to a big splash (featuring the pictures of course) in the Daily Mail, this controversy reached an audience that Ryanair's own advertising budget could only dream of, because such tactics achieve what brands have always wanted to do - climb out of the ad space around the story and become the story themselves.

And the engineered 'ban' as a PR stunt certainly appears to be spreading by the day.

Hollywood and the showbiz media are abuzz with news that Sacha Baron Cohen (remember him?) may or may not have been banned from the Oscars over fears he'll turn up in character as The Dictator - a character in his latest movie.

I confess I didn't even know he had a new film out until I read about this apparent ban. I wonder who tipped everybody off.

Such modesty from the Daily Mail...

This week saw the Daily Mail's website claim top spot among the world's newspapers. Critics may call it a victory for quantity over quality, but top spot is top spot. And what does the Mail attribute this success to?

Drawing upon the strengths of the Daily Mail newspaper...MailOnline has re-invented popular journalism for the digital era.

Now this is where the Mail is being far too modest. The runaway success of the website owes very little to piggy-backing on "the strengths of the newspaper".

The newspaper's success is based on targeting a very specific audience. It writes for the predominantly white, middle-aged, middle class of middle England, pushing a news agenda intended to create, then exploit fears about health scares, hoodies, liberals and the impact of multiculturalism. The paper's parochialism is the reason it is successful. It is also the reason it is so loathed.

At the last count, the Daily Mail's parish was around 1.9 million strong.That's a lot of readers but it goes no way towards explaining the current success of the Mail's website. Not least because the MailOnline has taken a completely different approach to finding readers.

It set about attracting readers by following the agenda of others, rather than trying to set its own. It is dedicated to serving content people were already searching for online. As such, much of the success of the Daily Mail website is the result of a focus on US reality TV, celebrity, pop music and naked flesh. Lots and lots of naked flesh: 

Of course the newspaper content does make it onto the website but clearly the focus for growth is not on the paper's traditional constituency or content. After all, how many readers of the Daily Mail newspaper know or care who Kim Kardashian is? Yet alongside Lady Gaga and Rihanna, Kardashian is an ever-present on the Daily Mail website.

And who is Snooki? I doubt she is the talk of the town among the Chipping Norton Rotarians yet she is a subject of some fascination for the Daily Mail's website team. 

Bikini photos

The real engine room of the Mail's online success is the picture desk. If somebody famous is spotted in public wearing a revealing dress or a bikini the pictures will be on the Daily Mail's website the next day.

If a model takes part in a shoot for a new line of lingerie or poses for a glossy magazine, the Mail will run the pics. If a celebrity falls out of a dress or reveals a little too much when stepping out of a car, a full upskirt or down cleavage record of the event will be available in the right hand column of the Mail's website:

How did we cope before the Daily Mail website began aggregating
every bikini photo ever taken of Kim Kardashian?

The Daily Mail's modesty no doubt prevents it from saying it has become the go-to online destination for pictures of famous ladies in tight dresses, bikinis and underwear, but it has aggressively and successfully cornered that market by flooding its website with content promising Google users that is exactly what they'll find. 

There is no denying the Mail's orchestrated success in courting pure online numbers and although it is a model which advertisers are less excited about now than they were in the dot-com boom of the late nineties, the Mail is clearly confident this remains a recipe for success.

Much of the web-only content is base commodity, aimed at drawing in any traffic it can, though the focus is clearly on the US. The majority of the photos are bought from picture agencies and the lion's share of the web-only copy is cut and pasted from US wire services. In fact, the prolific 'Daily Mail Reporter' is now cutting and pasting so much US wire copy - irrespective of how trite the news appears -they no longer bother trying to keep pace with changing US words such as 'sidewalk' or 'cell phone' to the English equivalents.

This may seem a small point, but for a newspaper to disregard its style guide - as crucial a part of its identity as the masthead - in pursuit of traffic is clear evidence its website and paper are being run as very different properties:

"This news story is about this interesting..."

None of these observations are intended as a criticism of the Daily Mail. It has set out to sell cheap commodity content based on titillation and US celebrities in various states of undress and it does it to great success. But the Mail really is being unnecessarily modest - or deliberately disingenuous - when it claims the runaway success of its website is an extension of its success in print. The two could hardly be more different and whatever it says, the Mail clearly wouldn't have it any other way.

See also:
Rihanna or the Queen: Who does the Daily Mail prefer?
Daily Mail criticises BBC nudity
Daily Mail exposes own readers to C-word tirade...

ASA to investigate Snickers celebrity Twitter ads

Snickers is being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) following complaints about the brand's use of four celebrity Twitter accounts, The Telegraph reports.

Footballer Rio Ferdinand, boxer Amir Khan, reality TV star Jordan, X Factor contestant Cher Lloyd and cricketing legend Sir Ian Botham all took payment in return for letting Snickers advertise to their followers. But the ASA and the Office of Fair Trading appear to have taken issue with the fact the series of Tweets weren't immediately flagged as adverts.

Et tu Beefy? Knight of the realm Botham (bottom left) added his
name to the list of celebrities tweeting for Snickers.

Whatever action the ASA sees fit to take, if any, the stunt may well go down as one of the crassest attempts to date to exploit the popularity of those celebrities willing to hawk their Twitter followers to big brands.

Out of the four, Cher Lloyd can probably be forgiven for trying to make hay while the fleeting sun of X Factor celebrity shines but as one follower asked of Ferdinand:

Rio and Cher Lloyd join 'will tweet for chocolate' ranks

Former X Factor contestant Cher Lloyd and Premiership footballer Rio Ferdinand are the latest people to take part in Snickers' Twitter advertising campaign. If you missed Jordan, Ian Botham and Amir Khan over the weekend, the idea is they send tweets about something Snickers thinks would be out of character. Then an hour later they reveal they weren't feeling themselves because they hadn't eaten a Snickers recently. 

That tweet is accompanied by a picture of them holding a Snickers - at which point a little bit of the internet's soul dies.

For example, Ian Botham claimed to be taking up the cello, Amir Khan claimed to be a stamp collector and reality TV star Jordan claimed to be intelligent. Cher Lloyd's tweets were about reading some books.

I have no idea whether Cher Lloyd reads books but I do know that Snickers thinks it unlikely. And the women in this campaign seem to be coming off a lot worse. After all, 'the public would be surprised to hear you play the cello' seems far less insulting than 'the public would be surprised to hear you're intelligent' or 'the public would be surprised to hear you read books'.

Rio Ferdinand meanwhile claimed he had taken up knitting: 

Who knows how many more celebrities Snickers has paid to take part, but hopefully the budget runs out soon. 

Sir Ian Botham also 'tweeted' for Snickers

It looks like reality TV star Jordan (aka Katie Price) wasn't the only person to rent out her Twitter account to Snickers this weekend. Boxer Amir Khan also joined in the 'fun' of sharing some unusual messages with his followers before the big reveal...

As did cricketing legend Sir Ian Botham who generated just two retweets with his product shot...

Daily Mail falls for Jordan's sponsored tweets

The Daily Mail has reported on reality TV star Jordan's string of unusual tweets about the economy. Strangely, the Mail reported on it more than an hour and a half after the unusual tweets were revealed to be part of an online advertising campaign by Snickers, without mentioning that detail:

Instead, the Mail questions whether Jordan's Twitter account was hacked (as many people had guessed before the truth emerged), even questioning her denial in their caption (below):

But given the Mail clearly saw Jordan's tweet denying she had been hacked, and her one about quantitative easing, it seems odd they missed the one in between:

Update, 21:45: The Daily Mail has now deleted its story from the website

See also:
Jordan flashes her Snickers

Jordan flashes her Snickers

Reality TV star Jordan (aka Katie Price) raised a few eyebrows this afternoon when her Twitter stream started offering economic insight to her 1.5 million followers:

Instantly people started suggesting her account had been hacked, or that a friend was just having a laugh at her expense. Certainly nobody thought it was her. And it almost certainly wasn't. It appears it was an ad campaign for Snickers, as a subsequent tweet and accompanying photo revealed. The idea being that she hadn't been herself with those previous tweets because she was hungry:

In fairness, it certainly got people tweeting and got people watching the account for further updates. But this rather clumsy stunt is not without its considerable flaws.

Putting aside the fact Jordan is willing to rent out her Twitter account in this way, or let a chocolate company craft a joke about the public's apparently widespread perception of her as a dunce, it also appears Snickers was claiming that hunger made Jordan briefly more intelligent, but one sugary snack would return her to normal. This is a point picked up by a number of people on Twitter:

Oh Yoda! Not you as well...

Mobile phone operator Vodafone has become the latest company take advantage of George Lucas's willingness to sell out his iconic characters from the Star Wars films to appear in TV adverts.

The latest features Jedi master Yoda evesdropping on a couple in a restaurant whose relationship appears to be grinding to a loveless halt. She makes a passive aggressive commment about his lack of emotional maturity, suggesting he'd rather play with his new phone than hold down an adult relationship. Meanwhile he is staring into the bottomless void of the mobile internet rather than engage in conversation. Cue Yoda:

This of course follows Darth Vader selling Volkswagen cars:

And C3-PO and R2-D2 advertising electrical retailer Currys...

So what next for this auction of childhood memories...? Jabba the Hutt advertising weight loss programmes? Or maybe Chewbacca and Han Solo could be roped in for some light-hearted pet insurance commercials.

Maybe she's born with it...? Maybe it's Fotoshop...

A brilliant skewering here of a million different cosmetics ads and whole swathes of the lifestyle magazine industry, by US film maker Jesse Rosten (it's also not a bad advert for the industry's favourite photo editing software - though I'm sure that wasn't the point):

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Fear of Facebook? Fret no more...

If you've ever worried about being tagged on Facebook when you're not looking your best or caught in a compromising position, beer band Norte may have just the answer, as this commercial demonstrates...

 

Nandos doesn't chicken out of controversial TV ad

High Street restaurant chain Nandos has launched an advert in South Africa - likely to reach a far wider audience worldwide - featuring some of the African continent's most murderous dictators as well as Saddam Hussein.

Controversial? Just a bit. But the scene featuring Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe recreating Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio's famous Titanic scene on the back of a tank certainly shows more than a little creativity...  

Childish newspaper ad of the week

Well done to Sofa King for its prominent ad on the front page of the Northampton Herald & Post. I can only imagine how Sofa King pleased with themselves they are:

(Hat tip Dave Lee)